About the product

Rhodesia 1980 Named Kings Regt

Rhodesia 1980, Operation Agila, Zimbabwe Independence, Officially impressed naming to 24262377 Lance Corporal R. C. White, King’s Regiment.

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SKU: J6958 Category:
Origin: United Kingdom
Nearly Extremely Fine

Description

Rhodesia 1980, Operation Agila, Commonwealth Monitoring Force, Officially impressed naming to 24262377 Lance Corporal R. C. White, King’s Regiment.

 

Officially impressed: “2426377 LCPL R C WHITE KINGS”

 

The King’s Regiment was formed in 1958 as an amalgamation of the Manchester and Liverpool Regiment. Around 1980 the regiment had seen numerous deployments to Belfast during the “Troubles.”

 

 

An unusual and rather unique medal, as at the time the Royal Mint were experimenting with untarnishable medals and attempting to cut costs from all the years of making solid silver medals.
The idea was now to make medals from Cupro-Nickel, in a similar manner as they had been producing Coins and WW2 Medals since 1947, but these medals were to be plated with Rhodium, to create a medal which would never tone or require polishing. However it was not so practical and naming the medals was another obstacle as it had to be done after the plating, also some examples had the plating peel off. 2 years later when they produced the South Atlantic Medal for the Falklands War, they continued to produce medals in Cupro-Nickel but abandoned the Rhodium plating method.

 

The medal was awarded for participation in “Operation Agila”, to the “Commonwealth Monitoring Force in Rhodesia from 1979-80”, only the medals to serving Military were officially named, the large amount of civilians and policemen present, received unnamed medals, only approximately 2500 medals were issued in total.

 

They would earn the final medal for “Rhodesia” as it became the independent Zimbabwe that same year, also earning the first medal for Zimbabwe, an award from Mugabe, however they were not given official permission to wear the Zimbabwe Independence Medal.