Mystery of 140-year-old football medal
Longridge GoldsmithsThe owner of a jewellery shop in Lancashire has said he would be "over the moon" to get a 140-year-old football medal, which was brought in by a customer, back to where it belongs.
John Birtles, director of Longridge Goldsmiths, said a man came in to sell the sterling silver medal but left no clue about its origins.
The medal is engraved with the letters TMC and then states "won by C. Rhodes, Longridge FC, season 1885 -86."
Birtles told the BBC he wanted it to go to the right home and said: "It's from before the Football Association was even founded, so I'd say as a piece of football history it definitely deserves its rightful place."
He said the customer who brought it in did not leave a contact number and did not provide any further information.
"We deal with all sorts of jewellery items, we go from everything to diamond rings to alarm clocks," he said.
"Recently, gold's been quite high and silver's been quite high, so we had a gentleman come in and he wanted to sell some silver, but he had quite a large silver spoon and a little medal."
John BirtlesBirtles said the medal had generated a flurry of interest after he posted a picture of it on his business's social media pages.
Some have suggested it could be from a cup competition played between workers in local factories.
Another suggested a potential link to Charles Rhodes, a goalkeeper from the Longridge area who played for Preston North End in 1885.
Birtles, 34, who took over running the business from his father David Birtles about six years ago, said: "You can get all sorts of jewellery items that you can date back a long, long time due to the style and the design of them everything like that, but it's very rare that you find something that has got a form of ID on it to a certain period of time."
He described it as a piece of "Longridge community history".
"I'd be over at Moon to put it into somewhere it should be really," he added.
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