World War 1 Forget Me Not Token - To Kitty From Fred

Australian Coin Collecting Blog - Above you can see a crudely made Love Token of a type that seem to have mostly originated from Adelaide in South Australia during World War 1. We have written about this peculiar type of World War 1 Forget-Me-Not pennies previously. This example is a silvered George V Australian penny with attached loop with the reverse skimmed off and a message stamped into it.

The reverse of this Love Token reads:
FORGET ME NOT
FROM
FRED
WITH FOND LOVE
TO
KITTY
2815



This token was crudely manufactured for a new recruit, probably in a military camp around the Adelaide metropolitan area and was then given to a loved one before the soldier shipped out to the Middle East or Europe. Some of the forget-me-not pennies we've seen are not attributable to an individual but in the case of this one we can certainly do so as the number of the bottom line, 2815 is (presumably) Fred's regimental number. As each Australian unit in WW1 kept it's own regimental number series it was common for two different men to have the same number allocated to them as they would be serving in different units. This makes identifying our Fred a little more tricky but quite possible using the National Archives of Australia website. We simply did a basic search for "2815 frederick" in the date range 1914 to 1918. This returned three possibilities for our man.

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