Victoria Cross

A single company of jewellers, Hancocks of London, has been responsible for the production of every VC awarded since its inception.
It has long been widely believed that all the VCs were cast from the cascabels of two cannons that were captured from the Russians at the siege of Sevastopol. However, in 1990 Creagh and Ashton conducted a metallurgical examination of the VCs in the custody of the Australian War Memorial, and later the historian John Glanfield wrote that, through the use of X-ray studies of older Victoria Crosses, it was determined that the metal used for almost all VCs since December 1914 is taken from antique Chinese guns, replacing an earlier gun. Creagh noted the existence of Chinese inscriptions on the cannons, which are now barely legible due to corrosion. A likely explanation is that the cannons were taken as trophies during the First Opium War and held in the Woolwich repository.
It was also thought that some medals made during the First World War were composed of metal captured from different Chinese guns during the Boxer Rebellion. This is not so, however. The VCs examined by Creagh and Ashton both in Australia (58) and at the National Army Museum in New Zealand (14) spanned the entire time during which VCs have been issued and no compositional inconsistencies were found. It was also believed that another source of metal was used between 1942 and 1945 to create five Second World War VCs when the Sevastopol metal "went missing". Creagh accessed the Army records at MoD Donnington in 1991 and did not find any gaps in the custodial record. The composition found in the WW2 VCs, amongst them those for Edwards (Australia) and Upham (New Zealand), is similar to that for the early WW1 medals. This is likely to be due to the reuse of material from earlier pourings, casting sprues, defective medals, etc.
The barrels of the Chinese cannon are on display in the Artillery Hall of The Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson, Hampshire. The remaining portion of the only remaining cascabel, weighing 358 oz (10 kg), is stored in a vault maintained by 15 Regiment Royal Logistic Corps at MoD Donnington and can only be removed under armed guard. It is estimated that approximately 80 to 85 more VCs could be cast from this source.