Rare Oswestry football medal sells for £950
One of Shropshire's oldest and rarest football medals sold for more than double its expected price at auction.
The twelve carat gold Welsh Cup winner's medal as awarded to Edward Hodnett after he helped Oswestry United win the Welsh Cup on April 8, 1901, just a few weeks after the death of Queen Victoria on January 22, 1901.
It fetched £950 when it sold at Graham Budd Auctions in London, where it had been expected to attract bids of between £300 and £500.
The medal was part of an extraordinary £50,000 collection of Wales football memorabilia – including international jerseys,caps and other rare mementoes – put up for sale by Ceri Stennett, a leading authority on Welsh football and son of the late entertainer, Stan Stennett, who played Hilda Ogden's younger brother Norman Crabtree - who ran a chip shop – in Coronation Street in the 1970s.
Oswestry United, who won the Welsh Cup in 1901, were one of Britain's first football clubs, founded in 1860, 26 years before Shrewsbury Town and 28 years before the Football League was founded in 1888.
Oswestry United won the Welsh Cup in 1901 by beating Ruabon-based Druids FC 1-0 in the final, watched by seven thousand people, at the Racecourse Ground, Wrexham.
Edward Hodnett, the owner of the medal is thought to have lived at Ellesmere.
Mr Hodnett was 90 when he died in 1966, the year England won the World Cup.
