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To the thieves who stole it, Major George Dutton Walker's First World War Victory Medal was a worthless hunk of brass that no scrap metal dealer or pawn shop would even think about buying.

But to 39-year-old Michael Dutton Walker, it was a rare and precious keepsake linking him to a great-grandfather he never knew and a family with a distant but proud military past.

“It's very precious. It has the family name on it and everything. It's part of our history,” Mr. Walker said. “I never thought I'd see it again.”

This week, the medal will be returned to the Walker family in a brief ceremony at Victoria City Hall, thanks to a diligent city worker who retrieved it from a box of curbside junk 18 months ago and made a pledge to track down its rightful owners. The Victory Medal had been stolen, along with three other family war medals and an assortment of sports memorabilia, from a storage area in Mr. Walker's apartment building almost two years ago.

Mr. Walker's father, Roger Dutton Walker, said the family is “absolutely delighted” to be getting the medal back. “I'm happy for my son because he'd like to have some memory about his great-grandfather,” Mr. Walker said. “We're just sorry the other medals haven't been found.”

Thieves also stole Major G.D. Walker's British War Medal, given to all Commonwealth soldiers who fought in the First World War, and two Second World War medals belonging to Roger Walker's great-uncle Frank Dutton Walker.

Rick Brown, the city worker who found Major Walker's Victory Medal, asked his boss, an army reservist, to check with the military archives in Ottawa.

The search turned up no record of a Major G.D. Walker having served in the Canadian military during the First World War.

And since Mr. Walker decided against filing a formal complaint, police had no record of the medals having been stolen.Last month, with the search for information about Major Walker's military career at an impasse, the City of Victoria issued a public plea for information. In-laws who saw the resulting media coverage passed the news on to Mr. Walker and his father.

Roger Walker said most of what he knows about his grandfather's military service is contained in an obituary that appeared in a newspaper in Manchester, England, in 1943.

“I was sent away to boarding school during the [Second World] war and he died before the war ended, so I never really knew him,” he said.

The son of Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Dutton Walker of Nottingham, G.D. Walker enlisted in the Robin Hood Rifles, a volunteer reserve unit of the British Army, in 1894. He achieved the rank of captain in 1899 and likely saw action in the Boer War at the turn of the century.

By 1914, the Robin Hood Rifles were a fully integrated battalion of the Sherwood Foresters, a regiment made up of men from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire that suffered heavily during the First World War.

Captain G.D Walker joined the 7th Battalion of the Robin Hood Rifles in Ypres, Belgium, in February of 1916 and was promoted to major two months later, according to his obituary. In July of that year he was “seriously wounded at Fricourt” on the Somme and “eventually had to have his leg amputated.”

“I also remember my father telling me grandpa had been gassed at Ypres,” Roger Walker said. “That's probably why he died at such an early age. He was only 68.”

Major Walker left the British Army in 1918 and went to work as a civil engineer in Manchester, retiring in 1940 after a career as the city's chief surveyor.

The 1943 obituary mentions that Major Walker had two sons serving in “the current conflict,” Captain Herbert Dutton Walker, also a member of the Sherwood Foresters, and Lieutenant Frank Dutton Walker of the 79th Battalion Royal Scots.

“Unfortunately, my great-uncle Frank was shot and killed in Belgium just before the end of the war,” Roger Walker said.

The youngest of five generations of Walker men with the middle name Dutton, Michael Walker said he'll feel an added sense of pride when he reflects on his family's military legacy this Remembrance Day.

“I'm very proud of them and what they've done,” he said. “It's important to remember this stuff because … if you look at the world right now, I don't think we've really learned a lot from these wars.

“Sometimes it's too easy to forget.”

Special to The Globe and Mail