Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Army L.S. & G.C., V.R., 1st issue, large letter reverse (Robert Smart, Serjeant 13th Regiment Foot. 1847) fitted with steel clip and rectangular steel bar suspension, nearly extremely fine £600-700

Ex Alan Wolfe Collection 2005.

Robert Smart was born in Barony, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, on 10 March 1805, and enlisted into the 13th Light Infantry on 30 January 1826, a weaver by trade. Although the regiment was then fighting in Burma, he did not join it in the East Indies until 1828. He had been promoted Corporal in July 1826, a very rapid rise after only six months as Private, followed by promotion to Sergeant in May 1829. He returned to England early in 1833 and served the remainder of his career at the regimental depot.

In the summer of that year he sat for the French artist, Alexandre-Jean Dubois Drahonet, who had been commissioned by King William IV to paint the ‘New Costumes of the British Army’. In 1847 Smart was given a medical discharge from the Army while stationed at Dublin. On 27 March 1848, he received his L.S. & G.C. medal from the Staff Officer of Pensions at Taunton, where he lived until his sudden death from a brain tumour in 1860. It transpired that he had had a seizure while burying his head in the water butt in his yard, a regular practise by which he attempted to relieve the violent headaches he suffered from.