Orders, Decorations and Medals

Pair: Able Seaman A. R. Johnson, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, attached Anson Battalion, Royal Naval Division

British War and Victory Medals (R. 1591 A.B., R.N.V.R.), edge bruise to first, good very fine (2) £60-80

Arthur Robert Johnson, a native of Maidenhead who was born in September 1891, transferred from the Army Reserve to the “Wavy Navy” in June 1917 and was posted to the Anson Battalion, Royal Naval Division. Arriving in France that October, he participated in the fighting at Passchendaele and “Welsh Ridge”, but was admitted to No. 6 General Hospital, Rouen in mid-January 1918, suffering from severe trench foot. He was, of course, one of many victims of the appalling conditions at Passchendaele, where, according to Jerrold’s history of the R.N.D., ‘To turn aside by so much as a yard was to plunge waist deep in a sea of mud, where the bodies of the dead were rotting unburied as in primeval slime.’ Johnson was subsequently invalided out of the service at the R.N. Hospital, Plymouth and received the King’s Discharge Certificate in October 1918.