Found in chicken coop, war medal returned to family

The story of a First World War medal that wound up in a chicken coop in Chatham, Ont., came to an end when the 91-year-old medal was returned to the soldier's family.

"I just want to touch it and feel it," said Dorothy McNaughton, the niece of Lance Cpl. William Evlyn Skinner, the man whose name is engraved on the edge of the copper Victory Medal.

McNaughton never met her uncle because just as she was entering the world 91 years ago, Skinner was dying in the fields of France.

When he was killed at the Battle of Amiens on Aug. 8, 1918, the English-born Skinner was 21, unmarried and childless. He was later awarded a Victory Medal, as were all soldiers who saw action in the First World War, and it was eventually sent to his mother.

But figuring out how it got into the hands of a boy playing in a chicken run in Canada four decades later took some detective work by a few curious Chatham residents, including the one who found it.

Show-and-tell attraction

Andy VanDerMolen was a curious 12-year-old in the 1960s playing in the yard of his family's farmhouse in Chatham when he spotted something glinting in the chicken coop.

It was an old medal, and after polishing it and taking it to school, the youngster put it in a tin box with some other trinkets, where it stayed another 40 years, until the grown man grew curious again, and in November decided to find the medal's rightful owner.

VanDerMolen enlisted the help of Dave Benson, the director of the Chatham-Kent Museum, who brought in the media to get the story of the medal out to the public.

Laurel Van Dommelen saw the story from her home in England, and began sleuthing, along with the people who currently own the Chatham home where VanDerMolen found the medal. They were unable to figure out how the medal wound up in the chicken coop.

Eventually a census revealed William Skinner and his siblings had come to Canada in the early 1900s as part of the British Home Children program, which sent more than 100,000 destitute children to Canada from Great Britain between 1869 and the early 1930s to work on farms and as servants. Their mother followed, living first in Detroit, then moving to Chatham with her daughter, Florence.

Dorothy McNaughton is Florence's daughter, and therefore William Skinner's niece.

On Friday, she made the one-hour drive from London to Chatham to touch a piece of her family's history. 

'To die at such a young age, it really makes you think, not only of him but the other people that did the same thing for us.' —Lee McNaughton, great-nephew of solder

"It's wonderful to be able to feel that," said McNaughton, as she turned the copper medal over and over in her hands, studying the winged mythical figure of Victory on one side, and the words "The Great War For Civilisation 1914-1919" engraved on the other.

"I had four uncles in First World War...and two brothers in Second World War, and they all came back, but William Skinner."

Dorothy McNaughton plans to keep the medal in the family, eventually leaving it to her son, Lee McNaughton.

"It is indeed an honour and has meant so much to me and my family," said Lee McNaughton, who has children of his own.

"To die at such a young age, it really makes you think, not only of him but the other people that did the same thing for us," he said.

There are no pictures of William Skinner, but VanDerMolen said Friday's emotional ceremony brought him closer to the young man whose medal and story he unearthed, but who now lies buried in Villiers, France.

"It makes me really, really happy," said VanDerMolen.

"I'm not seeing the face of the soldier of course, but a family member, who deserves this medal."