War museum, great-granddaughter purchase soldier’s Victoria Cross
OTTAWA — A rare medal awarded to a Canadian soldier for extreme bravery at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 will be staying in Canada thanks to the Canadian War Museum — and the soldier’s great-granddaughter.
Cpl. Colin Barron’s Victoria Cross was sold Tuesday by an auction house for $420,000, almost a century after Barron’s heroics at Passchendaele.
Some feared the medal — sold by Barron’s grandson in Toronto about 30 years ago to support himself and his only daughter, Lesley Barron Kerr — would be bought by a foreign collector.
But the museum said it had purchased the medal with help from Kerr, who donated an undisclosed amount of money to make sure it stayed in Canada.
“It was a huge sense of relief,” Kerr said Tuesday.
“My first choice, of course, was for me to have it, though I would still display it at the war museum. But it’s a very close second, so I’m happy.”
Barron was one of nine Canadians to receive a Victoria Cross for actions at Passchendaele, which has gone down in history as one of the bloodiest and most controversial battles of the First World War.
On Nov. 6, 1917, the 24-yearold, who was born in Scotland but moved to Canada in 1910, crept behind German lines and took out machine-guns that had been holding up a Canadian attack.
The citation for Barron’s Victoria Cross would later credit his actions with having “produced far-reaching results and enabled the advance to be continued.”
He died at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto in 1958.
The Canadian War Museum now owns 37 Victoria Crosses, including five of the nine awarded for actions at Passchendaele.