A Great War Royal Naval Division M.M. awarded to Able Seaman J. P. Moran, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, who was twice wounded in action

Military Medal, G.V.R. (TZ-6814 A.B. J. P. Moran, Hawke Bn. R.N.V.R.) lightly engraved pawnbroker’s marks between 9 and 12 o’clock, initials officially corrected, good very fine £600-800

M.M. London Gazette 20 August 1919.

Joseph Patrick Moran, a native of South Shields, was born in August 1897 and entered the Tyneside Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in August 1915, one day after his eighteenth birthday. Posted to Hawke Battalion as a “bomber” (or grenade thrower) in the Dardanelles in February 1916, he was embarked at Mudros for Marseilles, for service on the Western Front, in May of the same year. That November, having recently endured 7 days Field Punishment No. 2 for being ‘asleep on water guard in the trenches’, Moran was posted missing in action, but was subsequently identified in a St. John’s Ambulance Brigade hospital at Etaples - with a gunshot wound in his right thigh. He was evacuated to the County of Middlesex War Hospital at Napsbury, St. Albans, where he remained hospitalised for nearly two months.

On being discharged, however - and as evidenced by his service record - he proved reluctant to return to normal duty, collecting 28 days detention for being ‘absent over draft leave’ for three days in March 1917, a sentence that he cut-short by his escape from the Guard Detention Room at Blandford 48 hours later - apprehended by the civil authorities at South Shields after a fortnight, and with the unexpired portion of his original sentence remitted, he was immediately embarked for France. That July, however, he was evacuated home again, this time with a severe injury to his thumb, and did not return to active duty with Hawke Battalion until October. Moreover, two months later, he was admitted to hospital at Le Treport, suffering from trachycardia (an unusually rapid heart beat), which symptoms resulted in his return to the U.K. for treatment at Wharmcliffe War Hospital, Sheffield.

Returning to active service with Hawke Battalion in August 1918, he collected a gunshot wound to his head in the fighting that followed the crossing of the Canal du Nord, and was hospitalised for a month at Le Treport before returning to his unit two days prior to the Armistice. Moran was demobbed at Ripon in January 1919, Divisional Orders having earlier announced that he had been awarded the M.M. - most probably for the Canal du Nord operations. Interestingly, his records reveal that his M.M. was returned to the Medal Branch for alteration in September 1919, when, no doubt, the initials inscribed thereon were corrected.