Cold War Veterans Blog

A Dead Man's Penny Returned after 90 Year Journey

Medal heading back to soldier's family in U. K.

A memorial for a fallen Hamilton soldier is going back to his family after 90 years
January 03, 2009
Jackson Hayes
The Hamilton Spectator

More than 92 years after he was killed in action, the memorial plaque commemorating the service and sacrifice of Hamilton's Walter Thomas Baker is finally on its way home.

And it has been a long journey for this dead man's penny, which went from his widow's hands on King Street in 1916 to a $5 raffle bag in the 1970s before winding up in a desk drawer in a suburban Ottawa home.

Now it will return to the shores of England, where it was forged nearly a century earlier, to his surprised and grateful great-great-grandniece Vanessa Rider, who was unaware of this stranger in her family tree and his remarkable story.

"I was absolutely stunned," she said from her home in Lowestoft along Britain's eastern coast. "It's tangible. It's something you can hold onto that belonged to someone."

The story started in November after The Spectator ran an article about an Ottawa woman named Della Hill who was looking to return another family's heirloom.

Hill's mother, Ella Boyd, had found the First World War medal in a $5 grab bag at a bazaar at her Hamilton seniors' home in the 1970s.

She inquired about the medal but because no one knew what it was, it was stored away and neglected.

It surfaced again in the late '80s after Boyd moved to Hill's Ottawa home, but the mystery continued.

The thick disk roughly the size of a teacup saucer sat in a cluttered desk until this year, when a newspaper article featuring a dead man's penny answered her questions.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were relatives of this person who could have this medal back?'" she said at the time.

The memorial plaque was a product of the British government, which felt a gesture of appreciation was needed to recognize the sacrifice of men and women who perished in the First World War.

Commonly called a dead man's penny, the medal is cast in bronze gunmetal.

Each included the deceased's name and came with a scroll.

Because the medal came from Hamilton, Hill thought the relatives might still be around here. But after weeks of searching and help from amateur genealogists, the trail ran cold.

Until, that is, representatives from the genealogical website Ancestry.ca read the story and delved into their archives to help fill history's gaps.

According to Ancestry.ca representative Karen Peterson, a research team searched the roughly eight million family trees and 780 million names in its database for any trace of Baker.

"Once you have a number of records, you can start to confirm things," she said.

The global network pulled Baker's military service file, marriage certificate and attestation papers and his story was slowly revealed.

It started with a summer wedding in 1915.

Baker, an immigrant from Middlesex, wed Jane Finlayson on June 23 in Canada. But the honeymoon was short-lived, as Baker enlisted just over a month later.

He sailed to Liverpool in April 1916 and was sent to fight at one of the bloodiest battles in modern warfare, the Battle of the Somme.

Somme, a five-month siege of a 19-kilometre-long German line near the Somme River in northern France, was nearing its end when Baker and his unit arrived.

Two Canadian divisions and nine from the British 4th Army were the attacking forces on one of the last allied assaults, the battle of Flers-Courcelette.

It was Baker's first major action. And it would be his last.

It was dawn on Sept. 15 when Baker and his fellow troops went over the top into hell on earth.

Summer rains and months of artillery barrages had turned no-man's land into a quagmire of death.

The troops, creeping behind one of a few dozen tanks -- used by the Allies for the first time -- inched through knee-deep mud toward the fury of the German line.

Baker was killed in action five days later -- one of 24,029 Canadians and more than 1.4 million soldiers to die at Somme.

At 114 1/2 King St. W. in Hamilton a few weeks later, Jane Baker opened a package and saw her husband's name etched in the dense bronze.

Where it went from there is a mystery, until it turned up in Boyd's $5 grab bag around 60 years later.

Now, thanks to Ancestry.ca, Baker's penny will return to his family's bloodline in Suffolk, closing the chapter on his memory.

"It's amazing how it finds its way through all this time all the way back," his niece Rider said.

The 53-year-old works for a local charity in Britain's easternmost town and is an avid amateur genealogist who had come across Baker's name while delving into her family roots.

Rider expects to have the penny in a few weeks.

Though neither she nor Hill has seen the scroll that accompanied every memorial plaque, Baker could be proud that both women will honour its final creed:

"Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten."

jahayes@thespec.com

905-526-3283