Aust. Historical Medals

Lot 709    Session 3 (2.30pm Tuesday)    Aust. Historical Medals

Estimate $400
Bid at live.noble.com.au
SOLD $300

CATRINE PUBLIC SCHOOL, award medal, Donor The Late W.G.Murray Esq, Sydney, New South Wales, undated (1914-15), in silver (45mm), hallmarked for Birmingham 1914 by maker J.C & S (Joseph Cook & Son Ltd), with suspension ball and ring, reverse inscribed, 'Awarded To/Master Willie Gibb/For/Religious Knowledge/Session 1914-15/John Monie, F.E.I.S./Headmaster'. Nearly uncirculated and scarce.

Catrine is a village in East Ayrshire, Scotland. John Monie was appointed a teacher at the school and in the local directory of 1903 he was listed as Headmaster and a member of the School Board. He died at Catrine on 1 June 1928 and is buried at the Catrine Cemetery.

It seems that the origin of the medal offered here arises from the return in 1894 to Catrine of Mrs Haldane Colquhoun Murray (nee Turriff), the widow of William Gilmour Murray and it seems that she has made an endowment to the school to award this medal in honour of her late husband. William Murray had arrived in Melbourne in 1853 and was the first honorary auditor of the Alfred Hospital. In 1875 he opened the Sydney office of the shipping firm of Gibbs, Bright & Co. A widower, Murray married Haldane Turriff on 6 March 1880. In 1886 Murray was also appointed to the board of the Australian Mutual Provident Society.

Haldane Turriff had been born at Paisley, Renfrewshire in Scotland on 12 January 1834. In August 1866 she entered the Nightingale Training School attached to St Thomas's Hospital, London, and was selected as one of the five nurses to accompany Lucy Osburn to the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary in December 1867. A week after her arrival in Sydney on 5 March 1868 on the Dunbar Castle there was an attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh and she was one of the two nurses who cared for him. Her nursing career makes for interesting reading and it is probably no coincidence that she was the first matron of Melbourne's Alfred Hospital (1870-80) where William Murray was the honorary auditor. Full details of Haldane Turriff's career are available in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

William Murray died on 6 May 1888 and in 1894 his financially secure widow returned to her country of birth, Scotland, dying at Catrine on 5 February 1922.