With the exception of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and its long ‘afterlife’ following the relocation at Sydenham of the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace which housed it, perhaps no other event during the Victorian era engendered such an extensive and varied material culture as the Crimean War (1854-6).[1] Medallists, ceramists, artists, and others commemorated the age-defining conflict fought by the allies – Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia – against Russia in a cornucopia of objects, many of which survive in museum collections. In the impressive collection of the National Army Museum in London, one object in particular stands out for its suggestive symbolism: a medal (fig. 1). It is made of white metal and measures 51mm (diameter), commemorating the fall of the Crimean naval city of Sebastopol in 1855 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1856 which ended the war.[2] This medal also features in the book A Most Desperate Undertaking: The British Army in the Crimea, 1854-56, edited by Alastair Massie, which was published in 2003 as a companion to the museum’s Special Exhibition held in October of the same year.[3] Apart from a very generic description of the medal and a note on the names of donors, Massie and the museum’s website provide no information about the medal’s creator. The name of the medallist thus remains unknown. The aim of this article is to establish the provenance of the medal, and reveal when and where it was made. At the same time, the article contextualises the medal’s symbolism by drawing on documentary evidence and other contemporary sources, thereby illuminating its cultural life and significance as an object commemorating the most important war fought by Britain almost four decades after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
A key reference guide for the identification of commemorative medals is Spink’s Catalogue of British Commemorative Medals. Though the Crimean commemorative medal is listed in Spink’s Catalogue, no information is provided about the medallist.[4] This information can be found in Christopher Eimer’s British Commemorative Medals and their Values. Eimer identifies the medallist as ‘Messrs. J. Pinches’.[5] In 1852, the company known as T.R. Pinches & Co. was ‘listed as adhesive envelope manufacturers and wholesale stationers’ based at 27 Oxendon Street, Haymarket. By 1856, when the medal was created, the company which became known as ‘John Pinches’ was described as “the well-known medallists of Oxendon-street.”[6] We can thus safely assume that this is the company that created the medal.
However, this tells us nothing about why the medal was produced, where was it unveiled, and who received it. The answers to these questions are found in an article entitled ‘The Peace Fete at the Crystal Palace’, published in the Illustrated London News of 17 May 1856. According to the article, on 9 May, a few days after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, a fête took place at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. This was for the inauguration of the Peace Trophy and Scutari Monument – designed by the Italian-born sculptor, Baron Carlo Marochetti – in the presence of Queen Victoria and around twelve thousand visitors.[7] The full-page illustration which accompanied the article gives a sense of the scale and grandeur of this peace fête (fig. 2).
The article gives a detailed description of the arrangements made in the Crystal Palace and the proceedings of the ceremony, including the arrival of detachments of Crimean soldiers and their presentation with medals, the playing of the national anthem, the singing of hymns, and the unveiling of the Peace Trophy. The article also notes that inside the grand edifice a machine was installed which struck a medal – a different medal to the one awarded to the soldiers. The brief description of this medal matches exactly the medal in the collections of the National Army Museum: ‘bearing on one side the trophies of the Allies, with the circumscription, “Fall of Sebastopol, September 8th, 1855;” and on the other the inscription, “The Allies give Peace to Europe, March 30th, 1856.” ’[8] However, no information is provided about how many copies of this commemorative medal were struck, or who received it. Other metropolitan and provincial newspapers which reported on the peace fête also lack this information.
Reports on an earlier grand military fête which took place in late October 1854 in the Crystal Palace offer important clues. This fête was held ‘in aid of the several funds for the relief of the sick and wounded and widows and orphans of her Majesty’s forces engaged in the Russian war’.[9] One of the most popular exhibits in the fête was ‘the medal-striking establishment of Messrs. Pinches and Co.’[10] According to a newspaper article, this firm’s ‘ordinary function’ was ‘to cut, stamp, and finish before the eyes of admiring spectators cheap medals impressed with a likeness of the Crystal Palace.’ But on this occasion ‘the die was changed, so that the medals bore a trophy composed of the flags of the three allied nations’ – three, because this was prior to Piedmont-Sardinia joining the war. These medals, the article continues, ‘were largely purchased throughout the day.’[11] Evidently, J. Pinches returned to the Crystal Palace two years later, after the end of the war, to strike the commemorative medal now found in the collections of the National Army Museum. Pinches’ machine must have produced a large number of copies of this medal, available for visitors to purchase, with the money raised probably going to veterans or widows and families of servicemen.
Victorian authors, artists, and their audiences operated in a shared intellectual and cultural context, thereby allowing the latter group to understand and appreciate the imagery, themes, and ideas of artistic works.[12] The same applies to objects. It is reasonable to argue, therefore, that those visitors who purchased this commemorative medal in the Crystal Palace during the peace fête, would have recognised its distinctive symbolism. The medal’s obverse bears a laurel wreath with the names of the four allies, together with an inscription commemorating their victory and the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 30 March 1856. Its reverse is laden with symbols which, by the time of the medal’s creation, had already become stock images in the war’s cultural discourse. Circumscribed ‘Fall of Sebastopol, Sep. 8th 1855’, the reverse depicts the four flags of the allies, foregrounded by an image of the bombardment of Sebastopol. Above the trophy of flags, a laurel wreath encircles a pair of scales. At the bottom, there is a snake severed in two, and underneath it appear the names of ‘Sinope’ and ‘Hango’ – naval battles of the war.
Two things stand out: the scales and the snake. Why did J. Pinches choose to include these symbols in the commemorative medal? The scales signify the idea of justice. From the outset, many Victorians conceptualised the war against Russia as ‘just’.[13] The royal proclamation for a day of solemn fast, humiliation and prayer on 26 April 1854 declared: ‘We, taking into our most serious consideration the just and necessary war in which we are engaged […] hereby command that a public day of solemn fast, humiliation, and prayer be observed [.][14] In her private correspondence, Charlotte Brontë echoed the views of many contemporaries when she wrote that her own sympathies and those of her father were ‘all with Justice and Europe against Tyranny and Russia’.[15] Writing to his friend Charles E. Norton a few weeks prior to Britain’s declaration of war, A.H. Clough noted that ‘people after their long and dreary commercial period seem quite glad: the feeling of the war being just is of course a great thing.’[16] A year after the end of the war, historian J.A. Froude wrote that amongst the war’s advocates ‘there were the philosophers who were weary of peace, who believed that the ancient English virtues were stagnating, who saw in war (so that it was just, or could be imagined to be just) a grand spirit of moral regeneration’.[17] Victorians thus interpreted the war through a moral paradigm, with the idea that Britain was fighting for justice at the heart of home-front responses to it.
In the war’s visual culture, Russia was often represented as a bear, or by using the image of the imperial Russian double-headed eagle. This was the case with many of the cartoons in Punch, or the London Charivari.[18] What scholars have entirely failed to acknowledge, however, is that another animal used to represent Russia was the snake – a reference to evil and slyness. An editorial of 15 October 1855 in the Tory John Bull was unequivocal in its statement that ‘[t]he snake must not be scotched, it must be killed, before the Allied Powers can, consistently with honour and justice, sheathe the sword.’[19] In commenting on the aggressive expansionism of Russia and her encroachments in Europe, the essayist W.R. Greg described her as ‘a vast boa-constrictor, first lubricating [her neighbours] with diplomatic slime, then crushing them in the close embrace of her “protection,” then swallowing them by a slow process of absorption’.[20] In Birmingham’s town-hall in December 1854, the Orchestral Committee of the city’s Musical Festival gave concerts for the benefit of the Patriotic Fund. The event’s main feature was a grand Military Trophy (fig. 3), designed by the sculptor Peter Hollins and the headmaster of Birmingham’s Government School of Art, George Wallis. The trophy showed the French Imperial Eagle and the English lion destroying Russian ‘Despotism’, represented as a snake.[21]
The severed snake on the reverse side of J. Pinches’s medal, in combination with the scales of justice, thus represented the triumph of the allied just cause over evil, wrong, and despotic aggression. It also echoed John Bull’s demand for the killing of the snake with the sword. J. Pinches thus deliberately chose images and symbols that the visitors to the peace fête in the Crystal Palace would have instantly recognised. Steeped in wartime cultural discourse and imagery, the commemorative medal not only exemplified the culmination of the war effort, but also physically manifested some of those ideas which dominated home-front responses to the war, fossilising them in the nation’s historical record and memory.
Petros Spanou (@petros_spanou) is an historian of modern Britain, with a particular interest in the intellectual, religious, and cultural history of the Victorian era. He completed his DPhil in History at Balliol College, Oxford, where the focus of his research was on intellectual, religious, political, and cultural debates during the Crimean War. He is also interested in Victorian women of letters, such as Harriet Martineau, and their writings on war and peace.
Notes & references
[1] A. Briggs, Victorian Things (London, 1988), 160.
[2] National Army Museum, Medal Commemorating the Fall of Sebastopol and the Treaty of Paris, 1856 <https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1963-07-37-1> [last accessed; 30 Apr. 2024].
[3] A. Massie, ed., A Most Desperate Undertaking: The British Army in the Crimea, 1854-56 (London, 2003), 361.
[4] D. Fearon, Spink’s Catalogue of British Commemorative Medals 1558 to the Present Day with Valuations (Exeter, 1984), 72, 166.
[5] C. Eimer, British Commemorative Medals and their Values (London, 1987), 179.
[6] J. Culme, The Directory of Gold & Silversmiths, Jewellers & Allied Traders 1838-1914. From the London Assay Office Registers. Volume I: The Biographies (Woodbridge, 1987), 367.
[7] ‘The Peace Fete at the Crystal Palace’, Illustrated London News 28/800 (17 May 1856), 525-6.
[8] Ibid., p. 525. The Times reported on this seven days earlier: ‘Peace Fete at the Crystal Palace’, The Times, 22364 (10 May 1856), 9.
[9] ‘The Crystal Palace Fete’, Derby Mercury, 123/3290 (1 Nov. 1854), 2.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870 (Oxford, 2000), 32.
[13] O. Anderson, ‘The Reactions of Church and Dissent towards the Crimean War’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 16/2 (1965), 211; J. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843-1945 (London and New York, NY, 1994), 119-20.
[14] ‘The Day of Humiliation’, Daily News, 2474 (25 Apr. 1854), 4.
[15] Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, ed. M. Smith (Oxford, 2004), III, 233.
[16] A.H. Clough, Letters and Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford (London, 1865), 269.
[17] [J.A. Froude], ‘The Four Empires’, Westminster Review, 68/134 (Oct. 1857), 417.
[18] See A. Cross, ‘The Crimean War and the Caricature War’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 84/3 (July 2006), 460-80.
[19] ‘The War with Russia in no Party Question’, John Bull, XXXV/1818 (15 Oct. 1855), 648.
[20] [W.R. Greg], ‘The Significance of the Struggle’, North British Review, 24/47 (Nov. 1855), 269.
[21] ‘The Birmingham Grand Military Trophy, and Concerts of Sacred Music, for the Benefit of the Patriotic Fund’, Illustrated London News, 25/179-20 (23 Dec. 1854), 649.