Local family’s historic war medals languish on eBay

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This article was published 07/11/2014 (4165 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The war medals of a Brandon family of soldiers who fought in both world wars are up for auction online, and an Ontario man hopes a local purchaser will bring them back to the city.

“If the community rallies together and manages to secure these, not only do they bring them home … their valour is no longer for sale,” said Dave Thomson of St. George, Ont., nicknamed the “Medal Detector,” who spends much of his free time scouring eBay and the like for war medals for sale.

“You may hear from family, you may not. Sometimes you hear from local residents that are absolutely disgusted that their heroes’ medals are being for sale and sometimes you just get people who rally together and pledge money and end up buying them. Once in a while you get nothing.”

The opening bid is US$345 for the collection of medals from the Brandon “family with three generations of military service who has showed great courage, patriotism and sacrifice,” as the seller states in the eBay description. There were no bidders as of Thursday night and it closes on Sunday.

Included in the sale is the The British War Medal of Ernest Victor Whillier and the Victory Medal given to his brother Walter Clifford Whillier for their service during the First World War.

Joseph Charles Whillier, the son of Ernest Victor, served and died during the Second World War and his family was given the Memorial Cross — that too is included in the sale of eight medals total.

Walter Clifford Whillier went on to serve in the Second World War and died in 1942 in Hong Kong, where he was buried.

Brothers Ernest and Walter were sons of Lt.-Col. Charles J. Whillier, who was part of the first group of Brandonites to set forth for war in 1914. The one-term alderman was the namesake of Whillier Drive in the city’s west end, according to the detailed historical book “Brandon: A City 1881-1961” by G.F. Barker.

While Thomson hopes someone in Brandon will come forward to buy the medals, it won’t likely be the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum in Shilo, which isn’t in the habit of buying war artifacts.

“We don’t normally buy medals,” said Kathleen Christensen, the RCA Museum’s acting director. “People donate them to us if they think it’s important for our museum to have them.

“Often these things come to a museum in terms of a donor who buys them on behalf of the museum and then donates them for the tax receipt.”

Christensen said war medal sales are rife around Remembrance Day.

And many of those medals are originally given up at garage sales by family members unaware of the hardware’s importance, said former long-time museum director Marc George.

“Medal collectors swoop in and check these places out, sensing that they can make money,” George said, adding there’s a very large black market for stolen medals and held by private collectors.

Unless the eBay seller — who doesn’t give a specific location in his profile other than Canada — was donating the cash to veterans charities, George said he can’t think of anything more disrespectful than selling these items.

“Medals are given to an individual by the sovereign, they should be returned to the sovereign if the individual dies, if they’re not kept by the family,” he said.

“There are lots of places these medals could be donated to … it strikes me as being extremely crass of people trying to make a profit off of the service and valour of these men and women whose medals they’re selling.”

In the eight years George was the museum’s director, he said it was approached about seven times per year by people trying to sell war artifacts.

The market is also filled with fake medals since many aren’t difficult to replicate, he pointed out.

“It’s really sad to think that his Memorial Cross, that was given to (Joseph Charles Whillier’s) mother to mark the sacrifice that family had made for Canada, is now being sold on a site that sells clothes and board games.

“It’s been reduced to that status.”

» gbruce@brandonsun.com, with files from Lindsey Enns