Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Three: Captain C. D. Newington, Royal Artillery, attached Hong Kong & Singapore Royal Artillery and a victim of the infamous Burma-Siam ‘Railway of Death’

1939-45 Star; Pacific Star; War Medal 1939-45, together with Buckingham Palace memorial scroll in the name of ‘Captain C. D. Newington, Royal Regiment of Artillery’, and a wartime portrait photograph, extremely fine (3) £140-160

Claude Desmond Newington was born in 1914, the son of Major Claude Newington, M.V.O., and his wife Constance, of Chippenham, Wiltshire. Educated at Marlborough and the R.M.C. Sandhurst, young Claude was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1934.

Posted to the Far East, he was serving on attachment to 3rd Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Hong Kong & Singapore Artillery at the time of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and would have seen considerable action in the period leading up to the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Having been taken P.O.W. on that occasion - and in common with so many of his comrades - he was forced to work on the ‘Railway of Death’, as a consequence of which he died on 12 April 1943, aged 28 years.

In The Marlburian of October 1943, in which was reported news of his death, it is said he died of wounds and that ‘he took the battle in Malaya in his stride and was perfectly splendid in action. His troops were devoted to him’. He is buried in Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, one of three such cemeteries bordering the length of the Burma-Siam Railway and a commemorative plaque erected by his parents is to be found in St. James’s Church, Draycott, Cerne, Wiltshire.