Orders, Decorations and Medals

Pair: Troop Sergeant Major John Coombs, 15th Hussars

Military General Service 1793-1814, 1 clasp, Toulouse (J. Coombs, Tp. Serjt. Major, 15th Hussars); Waterloo 1815 (John Coombs, 15th or King’s Reg. Hussars) fitted with steel clip and contemporary silver bar suspension, edge bruising and contact marks, therefore good fine, the first very fine (2) £3000-3500

John Coombs was born in Romsey, Hampshire, and attested for the 15th Hussars at Guildford on 18 January 1810, aged nineteen. He served ‘nearly five months in France in 1814 and was present at the Battle of Toulouse; about a year in the Netherlands and France in 1815 & 16, was at Waterloo’. His papers note that he ‘distinguished himself as a brave soldier in action’. He was stationed at Manchester in 1819 at the time of the Peterloo Massacre on 16 August, when the 15th Hussars together with the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry charged a rally of some 60,000 protesters, resulting in ‘11 deaths and over 500 severe injuries’. Coombs was discharged at Dublin on 16 October 1834, having been found unfit for service from severe rheumatism and being worn out. Sold with copied discharge papers and muster rolls.