Card of the Day - 2022-05-30

This card says it shows Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Medal, and that “Two medals were struck, one to commemorate the 50th year of Queen Victoria’s reign and the other for the Diamond Jubilee of 1897.” These medals were pretty much the same, except for two parts of the text, which reads IN COMMEMORATION OF THE 50TH (or 60TH) YEAR OF THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA · 21 JUNE 1887 (or 20 JUNE 1897). The back is not shown, so we must take our own guess as to which this was.

The bust of Queen Victoria had been designed by the sculptor and medallist Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, a baronet of Austrian birth, whose “Jubilee Head” appeared on coins and medals and whose statue of the Duke of Wellington graced Hyde Park Corner; the wreath was by Clemens Emptmayer, who Boehm had recommended. 

The Royal Family had medals of gold, the officers had silver and the selected other ranks bronze. The card also tells us that “Those who received the 1887 decoration were awarded a bar dated 1897”. This may have been to save the recipient wearing two medals, or to save the expense of making two. The bar is just as it says, a thin strip of metal, with a crown on the top, which was to be fixed across the ribbon from edge to edge. Sadly the medals were not named to a specific recipient. 

This set was issued with two back printings. One says “Issued by R. & J. Hill…” at the base and the other “Issued with Gold Flake Cigarettes…”. The Gold Flake version is by far the rarer. 

The really interesting thing about this set was that it was the last set issued by Hill before the Second World War, in fact it was in circulation when the order came to withdraw all cards from packets and it might well have been re-issued after the end of the War, but for the fact that, as our original Hill Reference Book RB.2 tells us “all stock was destroyed by fire”. In fact the inside front cover of this volume also admits that “Their historic premises and all records were bombed out of existence in May 1941. Our reference book luckily contains some of these, as it was being researched at the time, and its publication, in April 1942, allowed that at least some of its story survived, importantly, as the firm of R. and J. Hill had been established in the Hackney district of London on Shoreditch High Street since the eighteenth century, with the founding date quoted as 1775.

The area still turns up the odd unexploded device and in February 2017 Shoreditch High Street was evacuated over ‘a possible WW2 bomb’.