Unsolved puzzle of the missing Victoria Cross

SIR – As the youngest great-grandsons of Gen Sir Harry Prendergast, we wish to add our personal recollections and observations to the article (October 29) on his missing Victoria Cross.

In the mid-Sixties our late father, Col Evelyn Prendergast, took us to the National Army Museum (NAM), then housed at Sandhurst, to see the general’s VC stitched to a bar beside his four campaign medals, on public display in the Indian Army Memorial Room. His VC had first been publicly displayed in the 1956 VC Centenary Exhibition at Marlborough House, then specially sought out by NAM’s director, Col Appleby, for inclusion in an exhibition of 80 Indian Army VCs at the museum in May 1962, and curated by the foremost VC expert Canon WH Lummis MC.

Seven months later our grandmother, Mrs Theo Prendergast, entrusted this treasured part of our family’s history into the care of NAM, receiving from Appleby a detailed signed receipt and his thanks “for your very great kindness and public spiritedness”.

We are astonished and distressed that NAM continues to claim that the item apparently discovered 21 years later by David Callaghan of Hancocks & Co is the same item as the original loaned in 1962. It is so obviously a crude forgery struck from a mould of the now vanished original that it could never have been mistaken by Appleby, who acquired 22 VCs during his 10 years at Sandhurst.

We are therefore now calling for an independent inquiry into the Prendergast VC at NAM.

Andrew Prendergast

Huntly, Aberdeenshire

Dr Hew Prendergast

Forest Row, East Sussex

SIR – Any dispute over whether Sir Harry Prendergast’s VC is a replica can be resolved by analysis of its metal. Research by the Royal Armouries in the Nineties revealed that all VCs were cast in bronze, a copper/tin/zinc alloy from a single source until it ran out in 1914/15.

No forger could replicate the VC’s gunmetal “DNA”, taken from a captured Crimean War cannon. A harmless X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy of its surface composition is the key to the mystery.

John Glanfield

Guildford, Surrey