The Canadian Press
Lee Berthiaume
OTTAWA–Lesley Barron Kerr doesn’t remember the last time she saw the Victoria Cross that her great-grandfather, Colin Barron, received for heroism at the Battle of Passchendaele.
But she’s hoping to hold it again soon.
It has been 30 years since Kerr’s father sold the military medal–the British Empire’s highest award for bravery and courage on the battlefield–for $25,000 to help support himself and his only daughter.
“My grandmother may have been alive at the time when she gave it to him,” Kerr noted.
“And then because my father was a single father raising me, he had to sell it to pay the mortgage to pay the house.”
Kerr, who runs a large karate-school business in Toronto, still has the citation and box given to her great-grandfather nearly a century ago.
Since her father died in 2005, she has been trying to find the medal, as well.
Now it has resurfaced–and Kerr is hoping to bring it back into the family. But it won’t be easy.
Barron’s Victoria Cross will go up for auction next month, with the bidding expected to start around $250,000.
Barron was one of nine Canadians to receive a Victoria Cross for his actions at Passchendaele, which has gone down in history as one of the bloodiest and most controversial battles of the First World War.
On Nov. 6, 1917, the 24-year-old, who was born in Scotland but moved to Canada in 1910, managed to sneak behind the German lines and take out several machine guns that had been holding up the Canadian attack.
The citation for Barron’s Victoria Cross later would credit his actions with having “produced far-reaching results, and enabled the advance to be continued.”
He died at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto in 1958.
Kerr, who was born after Barron died, said her family sometimes would talk about her great-grandfather, and that her father kept the Victoria Cross on a shelf in his library.
Now a successful businesswoman, Kerr said she and her husband talked about buying the medal back for years.
But they didn’t know where it was until The Canadian Press reported that it would go on auction on Dec. 5.
Kerr said she hopes to bid on the award when it is put up by London-based auction house Spink, but she fears she won’t be the only one.
Ninety-six Victoria Crosses have been awarded to Canadians since 1856 and the last to come up at auction, which was presented to Maj. David Currie during the Second World War, sold in August for $550,000.
“If it went to $500,000, no, absolutely not,” Kerr said of her great-grandfather’s Victoria Cross.
“I would just go visit it, if possible.”
As for what she will do with it if she manages to actually purchase her great-grandfather’s Victoria Cross?
“It’s something very historical and something that should be looked at in a museum,” Kerr said.
“If I were to acquire it, I’d like to perhaps donate it for a partial period of time to a museum in order to tell his story.”
