В 2018 году на Woolley & Wallis продали Крымскую медаль этого дедушки(Private Michael Brophey ,62nd Regiment of Foot) . На фото он в форме сержанта Irish Regiment of Canada.
Michael Brophy of the 62nd Wiltshire Regiment had only one clasp, for Sebastopol, but served with such distinction that he received both the French Médaille Militaire and Turkish Crimean medal. Because of his outgoing manner Brophy became the city’s best known Crimean veteran. He had come to Canada with his regiment, later joined the Royal Canada Rifles and settled in Toronto after his discharge about 1870. After working for two decades as a labourer he took a job about 1890 as a gardener at Loretto Abbey, a girls’ school and convent near Victoria Square. This led some years later to the extraordinary coincidence of a reunion withhis sister who was a member of the Loretto community. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since she left their home in Kilkenny, Ireland, some 53 years before. The story was reported in the Toronto Star and picked up by newspapers as distant as Chicago and Galveston. With the outbreak of war in 1914 Brophy came into his own as a recruiter. His Crimean medal was like catnip to high-ranking dignitaries visiting Toronto. “Ah, I know where you have been,” said the Duke of Connaught, the governor general, inspecting soldiers at Exhibition Camp, Toronto, in 1915. This was the third time Brophy and the Duke had met. A year later the Duke of Devonshire, also conducting a review, shook Brophy’s hand “while the movie men hastily cranked their machines.” That film does not seem to have survived, but in one made when the Prince of Wales visited Toronto in 1919 Brophy appears briefly at the 10:50 mark. At a banquet for returning soldiers in 1919 one of them remarked to Brophy whose khaki tunic was ablaze with medals: “And you’re still a soldier!” The aged veteran replied in his warm brogue “I’ll be a soldier till the wor-r-rums get me.” The worms had only a little more than a year to wait. Michael Brophy died, aged 88, in June 1920 and was buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery.