THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN OBJECTS
Claimed as a victory by both sides, the Battle of Jutland was the largest naval battle, and the only full-scale clash of battleships, during the First World War. Understandably, the scale of casualties, over 6,000 men on the British side alone, created a very real demand for remembrance and commemoration.
Following a tradition stretching back to Elizabethan times, when ‘commemorative medals for naval achievements were [first] struck in England’, a number of commemorative medals were subsequently produced.
The release of the first of these was announced in The Times on 1 August 1916: ‘Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg has designed a medal to commemorate the recent battle off the Jutland Bank. It will be the first of a series connected with naval events in the present war which Prince Louis intends to bring out at short intervals, and the entire profits of the sale of the medals will go to the naval orphanages …
‘There are two sizes in which these medals are being struck, one having a diameter of 1¾ in., in white metal at 1s., in bronze at 5s., in solid silver at 15s., and in 18-carat gold at £11 l0s. The smaller size is 7/8ths of an inch in diameter, and this is made with…
