Description
Rhodesia Medal, 1980, original, unnamed as issued. Medal awarded for Operation Agila, during the Independence of Zimbabwe.
This medal was awarded for participation in “Operation Agila”, to the “Commonwealth Monitoring Force in Rhodesia from 1979-80”, only approximately 2500 medals were issued in total.
This unusual “Campaign” Medal was only awarded to about 996 members of the British Army, 132 Officers and 864 men, whose medals would be officially impressed for issue, whereas the remainder to Civilians and Police were issued unnamed.
The Rhodesia 1980 Medal is 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 now to be plated with Rhodium, to create a medal which would never tone or require polishing but keep the look of a shiny silver medal.
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 in testing. 2 years later when they produced the South Atlantic Medal for the Falklands War, they continued to produce medals in the new Cupro-Nickel but abandoned the Rhodium plating method entirely.
