25 years during the Cold War and no gongs of any description. I now see some under 20 with a chest full - and don’t begrudge them at all as they earned every one of them. I just got out in time to watch my contemporaries being plucked out of our bunkers and sent to the sandpit.
I seem to recall a tale that, in the same era, there was an engineer VSO when was quite proud of the fact he had a bare chest, so to speak - then the bar stewards deliberately gave him a Jubilee medal....