WHY I COLLECT Medals

Oliver Miller, managing director of Bishop & Miller Auctioneers and Valuers, is fascinated by medals - for him it's all about the preservation of stories for future generations...

So that's why I've been collecting medals for 25 years. I haven't counted how many I have now, but they fill an entire box. To help keep me focused, I have two rules. First, the person has to have survived their escapade, not died, so they've held the medal in their hand, and you have that tangible connection. Second, and most importantly, there has to be a good story.

To me, a medal is like the world in miniature. That little piece of metal brings together politics, geography and history, with one person's story. He might have been quite an ordinary bloke, with an ordinary job, who joined up, maybe because he was patriotic, or maybe he wanted a square meal and regular pay, and then found himself in Madagascar or Abyssinia [Ethiopia]-imagine the shock and excitement.

When I was a teenager, my dad gave me some Second World War medals.

I found them quite interesting, but I didn't completely fall in love with medal-collecting at that stage. I think that's partly because, unlike earlier medals, none of the Second World War medals are engraved with the recipient's name. That means that unless you have other provenance, you don't know whose they were, where they went and what they did.