Awards
Photo couresy of David Gauld.
David Gauld provides the following anecdote by way of a caption: "After Vaughan became famous the New Zealand Government decided to create a special medal to celebrate scientific achievement. At the time it was called the New Zealand Science and Technology Gold Medal but since [then] it has been named the Rutherford Medal after New Zealand’s Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Vaughan was awarded this medal by the Prime Minister but at that stage they hadn’t settled on a design let alone struck a medal, so Vaughan had to be satisfied with a piece of cardboard masquerading as the real thing. Two or three years later, Vaughan mentioned to me casually that he had not seen the real medal so I wrote to the Prime Minister saying how proud I was that New Zealand had chosen to recognise such merit but regretting that the real medal had not been presented so long after the cardboard one. After a while I got a letter back saying that they were still working on the design and eventually when Vaughan was back in New Zealand, he was presented with the medal at a ceremony. We think that the presenter in the photo is the Deputy Prime Minister of the time, Don McKinnon. Gaven Martin astutely noticed that Vaughan was wearing the St. Peter's School tie; he attended St. Peter's School for a few years around the age of 10."
