About 9 years ago my wife and I were sliding through a North Bay antique mall when I spotted a badge with a swastika on it. Being the war obsessed fool that I was I decided to buy it even though I had no idea what it was. When I got home I googled it an found out it was a Wound Badge in Silver.
After that I kept my eyes open when we would skid through second hand stores and the like. It was surprising how frequently we would see Nazi stuff, badges, medals, helmets etc. Most of it was priced pretty well so I began to accumulate quite an assortment of items. The key word here is accumulate, not collect.
By the end of year two I had a large range of mostly German proficiency badges and medals. The downside of this is that my back room looked a bit like a neo-nazi’s bedroom. Tradesmen who came to work in our house would stare at them and then stare at me like I earned them instead of just buying them.
It was at that point that I decided to divest myself of a lot of the swastikas. I kept most of the military stuff and pitched the politicals onto the internet. As the years went on I began to be much more of a collector than a vacuum cleaner. I decided to focus on collecting WW2 commemorative and campaign-service medals. I chose these because they are cheap (mostly) and they have such a wide range of iconography coming from so many different countries.
As a side line I would pick up other commonwealth and British military medals that caught my eye or were priced well. Now I am focused even more narrowly, searching for medals impressed to my family surname, Birchall. Surprisingly that line has proved quite rewarding, I have Birchall groups ranging from the Crimean War, the Boer War and WW1 & 2. It is disappointing that the service medals from WW2 are not impressed so the name tends to die out after then except for the odd GSM.
This site is just a way for me to maintain my type-A behaviours and catalogue my collection. However if one of my orphans interests you because you wish to complete a broken set then ping me and I will be happy to trade for a similar medal.
