What a Victoria Cross is worth

Six figures for a famous action, £46,000 for a quiet one

A Victoria Cross with a famous action behind it sells in six figures at public auction. One without sells for a fraction of that: Spink offered the Great War group of six to Sergeant J. Readitt of the South Lancashire Regiment on 27 April 2000, for gallantry in Mesopotamia, and it took the bottom of its estimate at £46,000 with premium, which Spink put down to collectors preferring the Western Front.

The highest figure a British house has announced as a world record is the Indian Mutiny cross awarded for the Siege of Lucknow to Thomas Henry Kavanagh of the Bengal Civil Service, which Noonans sold in September 2022 for £750,000 at hammer and £930,000 with fees.

That price applies to nothing in a drawer, because almost nothing described as a Victoria Cross in a drawer is one. The National Army Museum records that 1,358 have been awarded since 1856, a total including three bars to men who had already won the cross and the cross given to the American Unknown Soldier at Arlington. Published totals differ by what each one counts, and either way nearly every cross is accounted for.

Supply is the rest of the story. Spink’s history of the market, published in 2011, records that over 260 Victoria Crosses had been offered at auction by the year 2000, many more than once, and that the first eleven years of this century added exactly 50 more, 40 in this country and ten overseas. Four or five a year, bid for by collectors and museums, is the supply that sets these prices.

The cross is bronze, and the bronze is worth nothing

The cross was instituted by royal warrant on 29 January 1856, and the first 85 awards were gazetted on 24 February 1857 and backdated to the Crimean campaign of autumn 1854. It is a cross pattée 1.375 inches wide, bearing a crown surmounted by a lion and the words “For Valour”, which Queen Victoria chose in place of “For Bravery”. A letter V connects it to a bronze bar decorated with laurel leaves, and the ribbon is crimson.

The prototype was made by Hancocks and Co, which still makes the crosses. The National Army Museum sets out two accounts of the metal: the legend that the prototype and the first 111 crosses were cast from Russian guns captured in the Crimea, and the alternative of a Chinese cannon taken in the First China War and stored at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. Neither puts value in the metal. A few ounces of gunmetal is worth nothing, and every pound of the price is the man, the action and the citation behind it.

The question has another sense, and one figure answers it: the Ministry of Defence confirmed in 2021 that it pays an annuity of £10,000 a year to every living holder of the Victoria Cross or the George Cross.

A tenfold rise every twenty years

Spink’s own account of the Victoria Cross at auction carries the most useful figures on this page, because they show a market moving one way for well over a century.

Spink’s account of the two decades before that counts 60 crosses offered at auction through the 1980s at an average of just over £20,000, and 86 through the 1990s at an average of nearly £44,000. The direction holds for a single object: the Zulu War cross to Private Thomas Flawn sold at Spink in December 1983 for £19,000 and again at Sotheby’s on 26 November 1999 for £70,000, a fourfold rise in sixteen years for the same pair of medals.

The record price, cross by cross

Every figure below is a hammer price, with the premium-inclusive total in brackets where the selling house gives one. Spink’s progression of the world record runs from 1983 to the Shout cross of 2006, which it wrote in 2011 still held the record, and the Kavanagh cross is the highest a British house has announced since.

The Shout cross went to Gallipoli money: eight of the nine crosses won by Australians at Gallipoli were already in the Australian War Memorial, and this was the ninth, bought by a private benefactor who wanted it kept in the country.

The highest British price Spink reports sits outside that progression. The Bomber Command cross awarded to Flight Lieutenant William Reid sold on 19 November 2009 for £290,000 at hammer and £348,000 with premium, which took the record for a Royal Air Force award, a Second World War award and a British recipient, without passing the Shout figure.

What moves one cross above another

Service is the first factor, and it works through scarcity. Spink counts 51 airmen among all the crosses ever awarded, and by 1991 the three highest prices on record had all been paid for men of the Royal Flying Corps or the Royal Air Force, which is why the table above is almost entirely flying awards.

The action is the second. Rorke’s Drift produced 11 crosses and the Zeebrugge Raid produced eight, the most for any naval action, and a cross from either carries the engagement’s name into the room. Three crosses have been awarded for actions inside the United Kingdom and two have been sold; after the second, the airship cross to William Leefe Robinson at £92,000 at Christie’s in 1988, Spink records that the two were then the highest-selling crosses on record, Robinson’s having fallen just short of the record.

Whether the campaign medals came with the cross narrows the field further. A cross offered on its own is a different object from a complete group with its citation, log book and research, and the ceiling is lower: the most Spink reports for a cross with no group around it is the £135,000 paid on 19 April 2007 for the oldest surviving cross by date of action, still the record for a cross alone when Spink wrote in 2011. Where to sell medals sets out the commission the specialist houses take for cataloguing and researching a group.

Who is bidding decides how far above all of that a cross goes, because institutions compete with collectors. The Gordon Highlanders Museum bought Field Marshal Sir George White’s group at Sotheby’s in 1986, the Professional Footballers’ Association bought the cross of Second Lieutenant Donald Bell, the only professional footballer to win it, and Spink’s medals department records that the Battle of Malaya cross awarded posthumously to Squadron Leader Arthur Scarf sold for £550,000 and is now on display at the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon.

One private buyer changed the level outright. Spink records that Michael Ashcroft, later Lord Ashcroft, bought the midget submarine cross awarded to Leading Seaman James Magennis at Sotheby’s on 3 July 1986 for £29,000, intending it as a single purchase, and that the collection which followed became the largest ever assembled. He later bought Lieutenant Commander Ian Fraser’s cross for the same action for £30,000, reuniting the pair. A thin market with one determined buyer in it prices differently.

What is not a Victoria Cross

The ribbon is the quickest of those checks, and how to identify a medal by its ribbon sets the crimson ones side by side. The price records put the difference plainly: they carry a Distinguished Conduct Medal group of five at £2,900 at hammer and a Waterloo Medal of 1815 at £4,100, both illustrative figures, against a cross that runs from the high five figures into the six.

What to do with a cross, or with something that looks like one

Every Victoria Cross is a gazetted award with a name attached, so the first step costs nothing. Find the recipient in the London Gazette and then in the rolls, which the research guide explains, and compare what you hold against the record of what he was given. A cross whose history does not match that record is a copy, an official replacement or a misattribution, and only a specialist will say which.

If it matches, the question stops being what the cross is worth and becomes whether to sell it. Three of the buyers named above were museums or a players’ union, and an institution approached directly will sometimes raise the money rather than bid against a collector. What war medals are worth values the campaign medals around it; the cross itself is worth a conversation before a consignment form.