Description
Campaign Service Medal, bar Northern Ireland, Rhodesia Medal, 1980, Operation Agila, both officially impressed, Gunner and Bombardier J. Guthrie, Royal Artillery.
CSM officially impressed: “24315776 Gnr J. Guthrie. R.A.”
Rhodesia officially impressed: “24315776 Bdr J Guthrie RA”
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 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.
