Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A fine Great War M.C. group of four awarded to 2nd Lieutenant F. E. S. “Pip” Phillips, Royal Flying Corps, late Artists Rifles and Devonshire Regiment, who was killed in action while serving in No. 3 Squadron in October 1916 - he flew as Observer to Cecil Lewis, the author of Sagittarius Rising, in which memoir he receives due recognition

Military Cross, G.V.R., unnamed as issued; 1914-15 Star (2 Lieut. F. E. S. Phillips, Devon R.); British War and Victory Medals (2 Lieut. F. E. S. Phillips), nearly extremely fine (4) £3000-3500

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Collection of Medals to the Coldstream Guards, R.F.C., R.N.A.S. and R.A.F. formed by the late Tom Baugh.

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M.C. London Gazette 20 October 1916:

‘For conspicuous gallantry and skill. He has done fine contact patrol work. On one occasion he came down to a low altitude while making a report and his machine was much damaged by rifle and machine-gun fire, but he carried on and successfully put our artillery on to the enemy who were massing for a counter-attack.’

Fenton Ellis Stanley “Pip” Phillips, who was born in Hampton, Middlesex in July 1895, enlisted in the Artists Rifles in September 1914 and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, Devonshire Regiment in January 1915, and witnessed active service out in France and Flanders before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps.

Posted to No. 3 Squadron in May 1916, Phillips flew his first operational patrol as Observer to Cecil Lewis in one of the unit’s Morane Parasols on the 18th - ‘Dived on an Albatross 2-seater. E.A. got away. Heavily Archied. Chased by a Fokker’ (his Flying Log Book refers). Over the coming months, No. 3 was heavily employed in support of the Somme operations, one such patrol with Phillips being described at length by Cecil Lewis in Sagittarius Rising:

‘Next day we were up at 3 a.m. and took the air at four. Dawn over the trenches, everything misty and still above, with the prospect of heat to come; even the war seemed to pause, taking a deep, cool morning breath before plunging into action. We were out to find the exact position at Boisselle, for even now, on the fourth day of the offensive, the Corps Intelligence did not seem clear on the point. We sailed over the mines and called for flares with our Klaxon. After a minute one solitary flare spurted up, crimson, from the lip of the crater. It looked forlorn, that solitary little beacon, in the immense pitted miles of earth around. We came down to five hundred feet and sailed over it, trying to distinguish the crouching khaki figures huddled in their improvised trenches in the khaki-coloured earth. It was not easy. We crossed the crater going north, wheeled south again to come back over it, when suddenly there was a crash, and the whole machine shook, as if at the next moment it would wrench itself into pieces.

I thought I had been hit by a passing shell. In a flash I pulled back the throttle and switched off. The vibration lessened; but we still shook fearfully. Now! Where to land? Five hundred feet over the front line, the earth an expanse of contiguous shell-holes! We should certainly crash, perhaps catch fire, right on the line! Such thoughts raced through my head as I looked frantically for some spot less battered than the rest. There was a place! Right underneath me! I dived at it, and the speed of the machine rose to a hundred miles an hour. Of course we could never hope to stay in that one green patch. We should overshoot, crash in the trenches beyond; but at five hundred feet there is no time to change your mind. You select your spot for better or worse and stick to it. So we dived.

“What’s the matter?” shouted Pip from behind me.

“Cylinder blown off, I think,” I shouted. (Actually it was a connecting-rod which had crystalised and snapped in half).

“Undo your belt!” I yelled. I didn’t want him to be pinioned under the machine when it caught fire, if it did catch fire.

By now we were down to a hundred feet, and the contours of the earth below took on detailed shape. I saw - God be praised! - that the green patch that had caught my eye was the side of a steep hill. There was no wind. I swung the machine sideways and pulled her round to head up the slope. She zoomed grandly up the hillside. The speed lessened. Now we were just over the ground, swooping uphill, like a seagull on a steep Devon plough. Back and back I pulled the stick. The hill rose up before me, and at last she stalled, perched like a bird on the only patch of the hill free of shell-craters, hopped three yards, and stopped - intact!

With a gasp of amazement and relief – for no one could have hoped to have got down in such a place undamaged - we jumped out of the machine. It was Pip’s twenty-first birthday. Suddenly I remembered it. “Many happy returns!” I said.

We stood looking at the machine - for nothing, perhaps is quite as awkward and useless as an aeroplane that can’t fly. Evidently we should have to get a new engine put in. Equally evidently it would be quite impossible to fly the machine out of this tenement patch of turf. It would have to be dismantled. As if the thought had entered other heads than our own, at that moment came the “Wheeeee ... wheeee ... whee-ow ... whe-ow ... whow ... whow ... whow ... Zonk!” of a German shell. They were evidently going to dismantle it for us. The shell fell wide. We dived for a trench beyond, and waited. Two more shells came over. Then silence. They had given it up. Well ... we’d better get back to the aerodrome and have some brekker. It was five o’clock.’

Phillips, whose Flying Log Book bears testament to numerous operational patrols (and several occasions on which his aircraft was damaged by A.A. and machine-gun fire), also regularly flew as Observer to Lieutenant L.C. Kidd, and it was with him during a dawn patrol on 13 October that he was killed in action, their Morane Parasol taking a direct hit from one of own artillery shells and being blown to pieces.


A closing tribute from Cecil Lewis:

‘For months we worked together daily on patrol. His life was in my hands a hundred times, and once, at least, mine was in his. He was the darling of the Flight, for he had a sort of gentle, smiling warmth about him that we loved. Besides, from the old rattling piano, out of tune, with a note of gone here and there, he would coax sweet music - songs of the day, scraps of old tunes, Chopin studies, the Liebestraum, Marche Militaire. Youth and the sentiment attaching to those days obscure my judgment; but I believe that he had talent. Well, that does not matter now, and it did not matter then. He had enough for us, to make us sit quietly in the evening, there in the dingy room where the oil lamp hung on a string thick with flies, and listen.’

Sold with the recipient’s original Flying Log Book, covering the period May to October 1916, with detailed operational entries, together with 28 original Great War photographs, featuring the recipient, fellow pilots, Observers, and aircraft; and a file of research.