Another Victoria Cross could be sold

Another World War 2 Victoria Cross won by a New Zealand soldier could go on the market as the debate intensifies over the future of the only double award given to a combat soldier.

Anita Hulme said she had been considering selling the Victoria Cross her father Sergeant Clive Hulme won on Crete in 1941.

Ms Hulme said today she would not hand over the VC to the Queen Elizabeth II Army Museum in Waiouru in perpetuity as other families had done and was considering selling it the way the daughters of Charles Upham were considered selling his VC and Bar.

Captain Upham was the only combat soldier from any Commonwealth army to have won the VC twice and his family believes it could be worth $9 million.

Prime Minister Helen Clark said the Government had offered $1m for the medal and bar but had received no response by the time the offer lapsed on March 31.

"I think a lot of people share my view that it's appalling to sell the medals," she said on TV One's Breakfast programme this morning.

Ms Hulme said today she had been so upset by the controversy which surrounded her father since a book launch on the Victoria Cross, she was seriously thinking of selling his medal.

Military historians Glyn Harper and Colin Richardson said in their book just launched on the history of the Victoria Cross and New Zealand winners, that Hulme went against the rules of war when he dressed in a captured German paratrooper's uniform and killed the enemy.

Ms Hulme said the Upham family owned Captain Upham's medal and bar and it was "theirs to do what they wanted with it."

She said she was seriously thinking about selling her father's Victoria Cross because she was so upset by the controversy.

She had not had an offer and had no idea of what it was worth.

"I am just so angry about the story that has broken over my Dad that I just feel, well, if it can benefit my family, why shouldn't it?

"I feel I will do what I like with that VC, the same as the Upham girls. They can do what they like."

Doug Elliott, the son of VC winner Keith Elliott, said his father would have been horrified if he knew the family considered selling his medal.

Sergeant Elliott won his VC at Ruweisat in Egypt's Western Desert in 1942 when he led his men up a hill to knock out German machine-gun posts and captured 130 prisoners.

Doug Elliott said he and his brothers, Graeme and Peter, and sisters, Mary Higham and Elizabeth Green, had had no offers for his father's medal.

"They would be turned down flat. Dad would turn in his grave if we sold Dad's Victoria Cross."

About eight years ago the last VC awarded to a New Zealander was sold for $421,000 and is now in the hands of a British collector.

- NZPA