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The man wore a beige SAS beret and 21 military medals and badges, including the Military Cross, as he walked alongside 600 genuine war heroes.

He had medals from campaigns including the Second World War, Korea, the Falklands, awards for both officers and privates and even a foreign medal.

Military experts have confirmed it would be impossible for one man to have been awarded all the decorations.

The man was confronted by Jim Nicholson, who helped organise the march in Bedworth, Warickshire, on November 11 and admitted being a fake before disappearing.

Members of the Bedworth Armistice Day Parade committee and servicemen have now launched an appeal to name and shame the man they call a ”cowardly Walter Mitty”.

”We have had idiots like this try to join in a few times and we tell them to get lost.

The Bedworth Parade is the biggest in the country outside London and follows a three quarter of a mile route from All Saints Church in the centre to the Cenotaph.

This year the families of four Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers killed in Afghanistan attended to lay wreaths in memory of their loved ones.

Mr Owen, who has a UN medal and Korean Veterans medal, said: ”There are men and women on that parade that went through hell.

The man wore the winged dagger of the SAS on his beret, poppy and tie-pin, as well as a veteran’s badge on his lapel.

On his left breast he wore a rack of 17 medals starting with the Military Cross (MC), and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).

On the MC he has a bar signifying the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service, while on the DSO there is a bar for Mentioned In Dispatches. Neither bar is ever worn with those medals.

Next comes a foreign cross, thought to be Polish, which should only be worn after all the British medals.

Then is the Queen’s Commendation Medal, the Military Medal, the rank version of the Military Cross for privates, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Meritous Service Medal and the Campaign Service Medal.

On the row underneath he has a South Atlantic Medal for the Falklands, a Gulf Medal for the first Gulf War, and an Accumulated Service Medal – worn back to front.

Then comes the Saudi Arabian Medal for the liberation of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal and four more unknown foreign medals.

”To start with you never wear two rows of medal, you wear one long row overlapping,” he said. ”The real outrage is over the gallantry awards – if anyone was awarded this many they would have got the Victoria Cross.

”The Queen never gave permission for the Gulf war medals to be worn on uniform and the entire order is wrong.

The man, who probably bought his collection online or from antique shops, is technically committing a criminal offence and in theory could be prosecuted.


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Otto Frank preferred the annex empty.

“Everything was hauled away during the war and I prefer it stays that way.”


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Today we found a freedom pass on the train table. It belonged to Mr R.A. Gillies of Kensington and Chelsea. In our excitement my beloved left his bag on the train. It had two executive 1970s pens in one silver and one solid gold. I coveted the last. The pens belonged to his accountant father and had signed a cheque for 50 million dollars. They were nestled in a red leather pencil case I had bought for him-because it reminded me of the inner silk lining of dracula’s cloak and he likes vampires.


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Queen Victoria and later Freud asked their staff to make an inventory of their belongings; Freud had his maid reposition his objects exactly on his arrival from Vienna, to Hampstead. Queen Victoria had her objects photographed from every angle, and these photographs were put into albums for her to look at. She would no doubt be pleased to know that on the carpet at Osborne House, a plaque marks the place where she fell to her death. Originally I started out with the thought that I would make a visual inventory of the objects of the garden individually on a white background, suggesting the diagrams of the pacific voyage of Captain Cook that Nicholas Thomas has evaluated recently in the book: The Culture of collecting. This method will no doubt change as I hear more of the stories associated with the objects.
Susan Stewart writes on this signifying use of fragment for whole:

The set of objects a museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a representational universe.”


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