General, Royal College of Art, a silver award medal, unsigned (by W. Gardner), crowned cyphe...

General, Royal College of Art, a silver award medal, unsigned (by W. Gardner), crowned cypher, rev. named (Awarded to Peter Arthur Bucknell for Special Distinction in the School of Design 1946), 50mm, 78.20g. Extremely fine and very rare £100-£120 --- The following excerpt from the Royal Mint Annual Report for 1939 was kindly sourced by Dr. Kevin Clancy, Director of the Royal Mint Museum. “The Royal College of Art instituted a medal for award to a few students distinguished in the Diploma examination each year. The medal was designed and modelled by Mr William M. Gardner, a student of the college from whose plaster-casts the dies were produced and the medal struck by the Mint. The obverse of the medal consists of the initials R.C.A. upon a knot, surmounted by a crown and encircled by the inscription Royal College of Art. On the reverse is engraved an inscription embodying the name of the recipient, the subject in which distinction had been gained and the date. The first five medals were presented to the selected students by Mr. Kenneth Lindsay M.P., Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, on the 14th of July 1939”. William Gardner went on to do design work for the Royal Mint over the next three decades. His work included the reverses of the 1953 brass Threepence and of the 1982 Twenty Pence. Peter Arthur Bucknell was an expert on fashion and author of the standard reference book ‘Evolution of Fashion’. His co-author and illustrator was Margot Hamilton Hill (Daniels), a contemporary at the RCA, who, as well as an illustrator was also a theatre designer and lecturer on the history of fashion and theatre.