Stolen World War II medals reunited with Melbourne family after 50 years

A Melbourne woman has been reunited with her late brother’s WWII medals more than 50 years after they were stolen from his home.

Service medals belonging to a World War II veteran have been reunited with his family more than 50 years after they were stolen.

An eagle-eyed police officer from Melbourne’s outer east helped track down the sister of Private Douglas Downs, whose service medals were stolen during a burglary at his West Footscray home in 1969.

Rosemary Bowling, 81, of Yarra Glen, said she ”found it so overwhelming” when Lilydale Sergeant Vaughan Atherton called to tell her they had found her brother’s medals.

“It just means so much to have them back and to see them back in the right hands,” she said.

“When I got them I was very emotional because to everybody else they’re just medals, but to our family they’re part of our history and it was a history that was lost.

“It reconnects us to one another. I was only nine months old when he went to war, so I didn’t know him until after the war, and my sister tells me he was a very different man when he came back.”

Rosemary Bowling reunited with her brother Douglas Downs' World War II service medals more than 50 years after they were stolen.

Sergeant Atherton, who himself served as an Army Reservist for nine years, was chatting to the police station’s property officer when a conversation about war medals “piqued his interest”.

Police had not been able to identify the owner of the medals, which had been found during a search warrant at a Lilydale property in 2017, and they were about to be donated to the Returned Services League.

Sergeant Atherton asked to take a closer look, and after about two days of intense searching, he was able to track down Ms Bowling.

One of the only remaining photos of Douglas Downs, a World War II veteran whose service medals were stolen from his Melbourne home in 1969.

He noticed a name on the rim of the medals and contacted the National Archives of Australia without success before his daughter suggested he search the Department of Veteran Affairs nominal rolls, which provide a snapshot of a person’s service history.

That document named Private Downs’s next of kin as his father Egbert Downs – also a navy serviceman in World War I – so Sergeant Atherton went back to the National Archives records to search for Egbert Downs.

That search identified Egbert Downs as the next of kin for Robert Griffith Preston Downs, also a WWII serviceman and Douglas’s brother.

Sergeant Vaughan Atherton hands the stolen medals over to Douglas Downs’s sister Rosemary Bowling after 50 years.

That led him to the granddaughter of Egbert Downs, Maureen, a Victoria Police employee, who helped put Sergeant Atherton in touch with her aunt, Ms Bowling.

She told Sergeant Atherton the medals were stolen during a burglary in 1969.

She said Douglas was married and had two sons and a daughter, all of whom had since passed away, so she was his only living relative.

“He was most upset when the medals were stolen, but I am beyond excited to have them returned after more than 50 years, and Douglas would be absolutely thrilled,” she said.

She said her brother was 21 years old when he served in the Middle East in WWII and managed to escape and fight with the partisans after the Germans invaded Crete before returning home.

Ms Bowling said he passed away aged 53 in December 1971, two years after the medals were stolen.

The medals that were lost for 50 years.

She said Sergeant Atherton went “way beyond” what she would have expected to track her down.

“Vaughan went to so much effort to get them to us and to trace them because that was not easy,” Ms Bowling said.

Sergeant Atherton said police hadn’t been able to identify the offenders who stole the medals in 1969, but it was “never too late”.

He said the people found with the stolen medals in 2017 weren’t born when the burglary occurred, so it was one they “might have to work on a bit longer” to crack the case.

“Having family who have served in the forces, I know how important these medals are to the people who they are awarded to, and it was important to me to see that they were returned to Douglas’s family,” he said.

“I’m just so happy for her and the family that they’ve managed to get them back. Hopefully, they’ll be passed on to younger generations, and maybe we’ll see those kids marching in Anzac Day with them.”

Ms Bowling said she hoped to be able to proudly wear the medals to march at Anzac Day next year if coronavirus restrictions allowed commemorations to take place.

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