The president of France has given renewed hope to an Oxford man bidding to secure the return of his father’s war medals. Tony Berridge, 64, of Horspath, claims that he was fooled into handing over his father’s medals to a French woman who promised to put them into a war museum.

With his appeals for help to the police and French authorities unsuccessful, Mr Berridge decided to go right to the top by writing to French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr Berridge set out in his letter how he had handed over the medals in the belief that they would be put on display in the Pegasus Memorial Museum, close to where his father had taken part in the famous Second World War action at Pegasus Bridge, now one of the most revered military sites in Normandy.

Mr Berridge travelled to France to hand over his father’s six medals to a woman who claimed to be the founder of the museum, which opened in 2000. But the medals have never been put on display and he discovered that the woman to whom he handed the medals was not employed by the museum.

Mr Berridge was delighted last week to have received a reply from President Sarkozy’s chief of staff, who wrote: “The president has asked me to reply on his behalf. I assure you that he considered your request carefully before passing it to the minister for defence and veterans. I have also sent a copy to the prefect of Basse Normandie, so that he too is aware of your concerns.”

Mr Berridge said he was pleased with the speedy response to his request for help.

He said: “It is encouraging and I hope that the president’s involvement may help move things forward.

“I’ve previously contacted the Ministry of Defence in France, without success.”

Lieutenant Colonel Alan Edwards, the chairman of the Airborne Assault Normandy Trust, who has been helping Mr Berridge in his bid to regain his late father’s medals said: “When important people like these get a memo from the president, they act.

“The prefect is the top civil servant, the president’s representative, in the region of Basse Normandy. I think Mr Berridge has done well. Now we just have to see what happens.”

Mr Berridge, a retired RAC patrolman, has spent three years trying to persuade Francoise Gondree-Anquetil to hand back his father’s medals. He now fears he has been caught up in a family feud between Ms Gondree-Anquetil and her sisters. It emerged that she is the youngest sister of Arlette Gondree who runs a cafe in a building that was the first in France to be liberated by Allied troops in 1944.

Mr Berridge told The Oxford Times: “I’m never going to give up. I’m never going to stop trying to get my dad’s medals back.”

Mr Berridge’s father, Sgt Wilfred Berridge, was part of a second wave of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry glider troops who landed near the bridge on the morning of June 6. He died in 1969.