Orders, Decorations and Medals

A well-documented Zeebrugge raid veteran’s group of seven awarded to Marine H. E. Bulmer, who was disembarked from H.M.S. Vindictive as a member of the 4th Battalion, Royal Marines: wounded in the right hand and chest, he subsequently participated in the V.C. ballot

British War and Victory Medals (CH. 21120 Pte., R.M.L.I.); 1939-45 Star; Atlantic Star; Africa Star; Defence and War Medals, the first two somewhat polished, thus nearly very fine, the remainder rather better (7) £500-600

Harold Edward Bulmer was born at Barrow-in-Furness in March 1899 and enlisted in the Royal Marines in January 1917. Posted to the Chatham Division that August, he afterwards joined the specially formed 4th Battalion, R.M., and was subsequently present in the famous Zeebrugge raid in April 1918, when he was among those who managed to get ashore to engage the enemy on the Mole. According to his sister, he was not actually wounded until he returned to H.M.S. Vindictive, his Certificate for Wounds and Hurts stating that he was hit in his right hand and right breast by shrapnel from a bursting shell. Moreover, his Certificate of Service further confirms that he participated in the subsequent V.C. ballot held by the Battalion’s survivors at Deal on 26 April 1918, on which occasion they voted for one of their Company Commanders, Captain Edward Bamford - the award to Sergeant Norman Finch was actually the decision of the Battalion’s C.O. and Adjutant.

According to his sister, Bulmer went on to witness further action in Russia in the ‘first Bolshevik rising’, prior to being discharged in March 1922 on completion of his period of engagement. But in May 1925, he decided to re-enlist and enjoyed numerous seagoing appointments between then and his final discharge at the end of hostilities in September 1945, among them extended commissions in the Far East, in the cruisers Kent and Cumberland in the mid-to-late 1930s (by coincidence, it was aboard the latter ship off Shanghai that his fellow Zeebrugge raider, Edward Bamford, V.C., had died of illness several years earlier). And it was on Cumberland’s return to the U.K. for a refit in 1935 that he was awarded the L.S. & G.C. Medal, a distinction that he subsequently forfeited in April 1938 (his Certificate of Service refers).

Following time ashore, Bulmer also served in the Cumberland from the renewal of hostilities until March 1942, a period that witnessed her operating in the South Atlantic and participating in the River Plate operations - she arrived there after a quick passage from the Falklands on 14 December 1939, and was immediately ordered by Admiral Harwood to steam up and down outside the estuary in daylight, in order that the damaged Graf Spee be made aware of her arrival. She thus witnessed - 48 hours later - what Admiral Harwood described as the ‘magnificent and most cheeering sight’ of the scuttled enemy pocket-battleship, ‘blazing from end to end’.

Bulmer, who served ashore in the Chatham Division 1942-45, died in January 1964.

Sold with a quantity of original documentation, including the recipient’s assorted Certificates of Service, in addition to his Wounds and Hurts Certificate, dated 26 April 1918 and R.M. Certificate of Qualification for Corporal, dated 3 August 1932 (and which rank he relinquished at the same time as forfeiting his L.S. & G.C. Medal in April 1938); together with an excellent photograph album covering his tours in the Far East in the 1930s, with approximately 130 captioned images, subject matter varying from scenes aboard ship to those taken ashore in such places as Wei-Hai-Wei, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, including Nagasaki; a copy of the recipient’s orders for mounting guard on the R.F.A. Pearleaf in June 1937 (‘Care is to be taken at all times to impress the Chinese’); a newspaper cutting from the Barrow News, in which appears a feature on the recipient which was written by his sister; his R.M. Barracks, Chatham, letter of release, dated 21 July 1945, and Release from Naval Service document, this dated for 15 September 1945; and two R.M. Association membership booklets, 1946-47.