Collecting British military medals for fun and profit might sound strange to some people, but it is a real collector’s life and hobby. Many people love to collect stamps, photographs, coins, rocks, and many other things. These people love to collect British military medals. British medal collecting is huge all over the world.
Collectors World Wide –
There are collectors all over the world including in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spore, United Kingdom, just to name a few. You can contact other collectors to see what they are doing with their collections and what British medals are out there. Connecting with other collectors can help you a lot in finding what you want. You can get some great tips from other enthusiasts and even make some life long friends medals ribbon.
You Have Other Options Than Buying the Real Medals –
If you do not want to spend thousands of dollars collecting British medals you can opt to collect British medal replica sets. They are much more affordable and can be just as fun. For example a real Victoria Cross Group will run you about three hundred thousand dollars, where a replica set of the Victoria Cross Group will cost you anywhere from fifty to ninety dollars.
It all depends on what you want to do with this hobby. Do you want to just have fun with it and collect British medal replicas, or do you want to invest in the real thing and try to make a good profit out of it? You can get a good profit but you must hang onto the medals for a length of time. Just like other investments.
You can find genuine and replica sets of British medals on EBay. Personally I’d say be careful buying originals from eBay. Certainly buy replicas. One of the best ones for this is swallows91. There are lots of others but this I know as a good one.
How to Begin Collecting British Medals –
One very successful collector suggests to begin by focusing on one specific time period to start researching the British medals and collecting them. On certain British medals you will find the soldier’s name, rank, regiment, and service number. With this information you can research the individual to see if he had earned any other British medals in his lifetime and try to collect those as well. If you go the replica route you can go for anything you want and with careful buying can have one of every medal. A good start would be go for all the crosses. Victoria Cross, Military Cross, George Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross and so on.
You can get help on collecting from the National Archives, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Public Libraries, Regimental Museums and my website.
You can also start searching for British medals in antique stores, antique sales, antique fairs, medal collector’s fairs, and online with various auction places.