Great-granddaughter hopes to bring Passchendaele hero’s Victoria Cross home
OTTAWA — Lesley Barron Kerr doesn’t remember the last time she saw the Victoria Cross that her great-grandfather, Colin Barron, received for heroism at the Battle of Passchendaele. But she’s hoping to hold it again soon.
It has been 30 years since Kerr’s father sold the military medal — the British Empire’s highest award for bravery and courage on the battlefield — for $25,000 to help support himself and his only daughter.
“My grandmother may have been alive at the time when she gave it to him,” Kerr says. “And then because my father was a single father raising me, he had to sell it to pay the mortgage to pay the house.”
Kerr, who runs a large karate-school business in Toronto, still has the citation and box given to her great-grandfather nearly a century ago. Since her father died in 2005, she has been trying to find the medal as well.