Gallery snaps up photog’s medals
Pair from UK attic those of NZ’s official WWI lensman
The medals of New Zealand’s official World War I photographer will be displayed in Waiouru, after a Kiwi museum bought them at a British auction.
The National Army Museum snapped up the service medals of Captain Henry Armytage “Movie” Sanders after they were found in an attic.
Spink auction house put the medals — the 1914-20 British War Medal and the 1914-19 Victory Medal — up for sale for a couple from Devon, England.
The woman’s late father had collected World War I medals and the woman found them in a trunk in his attic.
The Army Museum paid about £1400 ($2649) for the medals, £100 less than it was willing to pay, according to the museum’s director, Windsor Jones. The cost including auction fees and commission was $3364.
A charitable trust pays the costs of the museum’s collections; its infrastructure costs are financed mainly by the Army and Defence Force.
Jones said Sanders’ medals would be put on display before Anzac Day — April 25 — at the museum’s medal repository.
The Army Museum displays a collection of about 10,000 individual medals, including the Victoria Cross. Many were donated or are on loan from descendants of the original recipients.
Jones described the Sanders medals as “extraordinarily significant”, because of the extensive collection in New Zealand — more than 1000 — of his Western Front images of Kiwi soldiers.
“Sanders also took movie footage. A lot hasn’t survived. It may turn up in an archive in the UK or Pathe.”
Sanders’ photos range from action at the front — men with artillery or on the march and groups of enemy prisoners — to many behind-the-lines images such as of nurses, patients, boxing matches and troop inspections by VIPs.
A Briton working for French firm Pathe Freres, Sanders was hired on behalf of the New Zealand Government as official photographer and cinematographer in early 1917.
When he set to work as an honorary officer among the diggers of the New Zealand Division his background earned him some disdain.
“He is a regular cockney ‘tout’,” wrote Captain G. Cory, “not even a New Zealander . . . and here he is appointed to the softest job in the whole division . . . given a motor car and driver all to himself . . .”
“I have had no time to show him round,” Cory wrote in a letter to his father, cited by historian Christopher Pugsley.
“I sent my batman with him one day . . . Poor old ‘Movie’ as we call him, was up close to the line soon after our last big fight to take [photos] and got caught in a . . . barrage. He had his wits nearly scared away and instead of taking pictures he sat in a shell hole all day.”