Glittering Prizes: Schools And Their Medals

Enjoy a top class display of medals, awarded to children for their achievements in English and Scottish schools. These medals provide many fascinating insights into the history of our schools, from the grandest Public Schools to Charity Schools for the most deprived children. The medals rewarding the achievements of pupils named on them are particularly precious pieces of social history, and others show how much the education of our children has changed over the centuries.

Highlights of the display include a silver quill pen given as a prize for calligraphy at Christ’s Hospital, gold and silver-gilt prize medals of Bury St Edmunds Grammar School and Edinburgh High School, and a magnificent silver medal commemorating the five-hundredth anniversary of Winchester College in 1893 (pictured above).

Most of the medals are from the collection of the late Margaret Grimshaw, lecturer in Mathematics of Cambridge University and for many years the Bursar of Newham College, who had the greatest private collection of such medals ever assembled.