Legacy of sailor’s incredible bravery
MEDALS were in high demand in Tennants Auctioneers’ recent militaria and ethnographic sale, with good results seen for rare medals, and those lots with strong provenance. The top lot of the sale was a Second World War George Medal group of four, selling for £3,600 (plus buyer’s premium), which was awarded to AB Charles A Halls and comprised the George Medal (George VI), 1939-45 Star, Atlantic Star and War Medal. Charles “Charlie” Halls was recognised for his great bravery, having volunteered to work on mine disposal while serving in the Royal Navy in 1942.
Born in 1922, Charlie joined the Royal Navy aged just 15, and was serving in Aden when war was declared. Following a training course, he was posted to the Admiralty and spent the next 18 months defusing mines on land. Sea mines, which were also used by the Germans as land mines, were dropped with a parachute from enemy planes.
These mines, which were 8ft long and weighed one ton, hit the ground at 40mph, acting like a bomb. They were often booby trapped in case they did not explode on impact - it was a very skilful and dangerous job to deactivate them. Charlie deactivated 15 mines and was awarded the George Medal for deactivating two very difficult examples, one being at Charing Cross Station.
Elsewhere in the sale, a scrap of red and yellow striped silk thought to have come from a bed in which Napoleon Bonaparte slept, sold for £1,100 against an estimate of £100-£150. An accompanying card, which belonged to Achille Souquet, Vice-consul of Denmark and the Netherlands, stated that Napoleon slept in the bed from which the silk was taken between June 1803 and June 1804 outside the camp established at Boulogne and Etaples for the embarkation of the armed fleet on the banks of the River Liane and Canache, prior to the planned invasion of England.