Noonans hammers home £36,000 for medals of one of the highest scoring British aces of the Great War
An outstanding group of 11 medals that were awarded to Air Commodore P. F. Fullard of the Royal Air Force and Royal Flying Corps sold for an impressive £36,000 at Noonans’ sale of Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria.
Noonans - An outstanding group of 11 medals that were awarded to Air Commodore P. F. Fullard of the Royal Air Force and Royal Flying Corps, who at only 20-years-old, had 40 confirmed aerial victories in just eight months during 1917 and is likely to have had many more if he hadn’t broken his leg in a football match sold for a hammer price of £36,000 at Noonans in a sale of Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria (Wednesday, March 15, 2023). They were being sold by a collector and were bought by a private collector of Early Flying Pioneers &WW1 Flying groups.
As Christopher Mellor-Hill, Head of Client Liaison at Noonans commented:
“We were very pleased to sell the prestigious medals of Philip Fletcher Fullard, who by the end of the Great War was the seventh highest scoring British Ace and the second highest living.”
He continued: “Fullard’s war was cut short, not by a German bullet but by a fracture of his leg sustained during an off-duty football match in November 1917! What could have been, had he not broken his leg, can only be guessed, but Fullard’s ratio for front line flying time to the number of aerial victories obtained would be unsurpassed by any of the British Aces who had more victories during the Great War. Had Fullard carried on flying, it is quite possible he could have surpassed the victory score of any Ace of any nation.”
In later life Fullard reflected on his career and said:
“Far too much has been made about “knights of the air” and chivalry... you couldn’t have operated like that... I just felt that I wanted to survive... and my best way of doing it was to kill the other fellow. I had no qualms about going down again and shooting him to pieces, I mean, I wasn’t going to be insulted in that way... But if you met 12 or 24 of them, as you did sometimes, well then discretion is the better part of valour. It’s no use just fighting and killing one and then being killed... You want to fight another day.”
He also featured on the front cover of Tatler in January 1918. He participated in the Second World War and lived to the age of 86 years.
FORTHCOMING AUCTIONS
- 25 MARCH THE FRANK GOON COLLECTION – PART ONE
- 4 & 5 APRIL COINS AND HISTORIC MEDALS
- 19 APRIL ORDERS, DECORATIONS, MEDALS AND MILITARIA
- 26 MARCH BRITISH 17TH CENTURY TRADE TOKENS
NOONANS — In 1991, its first year of trading, the company held three medal auctions and sold 1,200 lots for a total hammer price of £553,000, however 30 years later, Noonans is established as the premier medal auctioneer worldwide. Two years later, in 1993, it opened a coin department which also auctions commemorative medals and tokens. In 2015 Noonans (then Dix Noonan Webb) added jewelry to its sales calendar as well as setting up a stand alone banknotes department and expanding into premises next door. In 2022, they achieved a total hammer price of £16,437,725 and the total number of lots sold across all departments was 24,044. To date the company has sold in excess of 400,000 lots totaling over £235 million.
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