The King George V Coronation Medal was a commemorative medal made in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V and distributed as a personal souvenir. This was the first coronation medal that might be awarded to those not actually present at the ceremony itself and one single type of medal, in silver took the place of the different types in gold, silver and bronze awarded by Queen Victoria and King Edward.
Description:
Materials: The majority of the British medals and clasps are made of solid silver, though some were issue in bronze versions, mainly to Indian non-combatants. The majority of the British campaign awards are circular, usually 36mm in diameter.
Ribbons: Medals are worn suspended from their own specific ribbons. These were first made of silk but cotton was increasingly used as the nineteenth century developed. Their own colours often have a symbolic significance: the equal stripes of the ‘1939 to 1945 Star,’ for example, are dark blue to represent the service of the Royal and Merchant Navies, red, to represent that of the Armies and light blue to represent that of Air Forces.
Ribbon width can vary slightly though it is generally 32mm wide.
Ribbon – Dark blue with two thin red stripes in the centre (Civil & Military)
Type – Commemoration medal
Suspender - Ring
Eligibility – Commonwealth citizens
Awarded for – Participation in coronation, or community service
Established – 1911
Designer – Sir Bertram McKennal
Naming – Issued unnamed but sometimes found with unofficial engraving
Total Awarded – 15,901
Clasps – One
Description – Silver medal 32mm in diameter. The reverse shows conjoined left-facing busts of King George V and Queen Mary in their coronation robes within a floral wreath. The reverse has the Royal Cypher GVR above the wording “22 June 1911”
Clasps are usually referred to as ‘bars’. They are single-faced metal bars carried on a ribbon attached to the medal, indicating the recipient’s service in a particular campaign or battle. The clasps carry side flanges to enable them to be attached to the medal and riveted to each other, so that new ones can be attached as earned. Usually the first earned Clasp is closest to the medal, so that the latest earned should be at the top, although they can be found in the wrong order.
‘DELHI’
Those entitled to the Delhi Darbar Medal received a crowned clasp inscribed DELHI if they had been previously awarded the coronation medal.
Sources:
Major L L Gordon ‘British Battles and Medals’
Medal Year Book 2006
< gov.uk/medals-campaigns-descriptions-and-eligibility>
Some of the material on this page was also partially derived from
<en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ King_George_V_Coronation_Medal >
Which are released under the terms of
Creativecommons.org/licenses/by-s/3.0/.
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