A short series of articles providing additional FBA background information

Many of the items displayed on this website once belonged to my family. My father comes from English, my mother from Irish stock.

My mother’s Irish family had a long association with the British Empire, an ancestor’s engraved sword once belonging to Lord Mayo, is one of FBA’s offerings. Again, on the Irish side you will find many artefacts from the Northwest Frontier, an area encompassing the Khyber Pass and the road into Afghanistan. Likewise, from British Imperial History, you find a Zula shield & spears taken from Rourke’s Drift along with a Mahdi shield and swords taken from the Battle of Omdurman. Not the best advert for the British is the many Chinese and Indian artefacts found upon this site largely being acquired by my mother’s family tours of duty there: most notable are Qianlong, Ming, and Qing Dynasty vases acquired during the Second Opium War of 1860.

Note: in a recent auction, the Chinese Qianlong vase set a new record as the most expensive porcelain item ever sold in an auction, when it sold for an astounding $53 million. This 18th century vase is approximately 16 inches tall and elaborately decorated with images of fishes. It is believed that it belonged to a royal family but was taken from them during the 2nd Opium War. At FBA you will find similar offerings.

A mother’s uncle served in the First World War, at FBA you will find his ‘trench knife’ an early example of a fighting knife developed from a cut down bayonet and used during the Battle of Messines 1917. FBA has a large selection of Second World War fighting knives, although not the most picturesque is my father’s commando dagger – ‘a Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife’ infamously prompting the German’s to issue the ’Commando Order’ (After World War II, at the Nuremberg Trials, the Commando Order was found to be a direct breach of the laws of war, and German officers who carried out illegal executions under the Commando Order were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death, or, in two cases, extended incarceration). Thanks again to my father is a large selection of original Nazi fighting knifes.  Similarly at FBA you discover a large selection of fighting knives right up to modern times, each carrying its unique history right up to the last Afghanistan wars.