Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Royal Humane Society, large bronze medal (successful) reverse inscribed, ‘Thomas Portlock ... 2 July 1857’, ring suspension, edge bruising, very fine £240-280

With original copy of the Oxford University Herald, dated Saturday 4 July 1857 which contains an account of the rescue and another typescript copy (this torn) of this by the recipient's wife Mary Portlock. The latter notes how: 'On Thursday evening last, about half-past seven o'clock, a little boy, the son of Mr Collins the miller, at the Iffley Lock, got into his father's punt and pushed himself down the stream. When about the middle of the stream, in the deep water opposite the Rectory garden, the pole caught under the boat, and elevating the handle, threw the little boy over the side. An alarm was given by a person on the opposite side of the river, and several persons ran down to the bottom of the miller's garden. The boy's head was just disappearing, when Thomas Portlock, pupil teacher at the Iffley National School, threw off his coat and dashed into the water. He swam to the spot where the boy had fallen in, and reached it just as he was sinking. Seizing him with one hand, he struck out for the shore with the other, and assisted by a piece of wood which had been flung towards them, he succeeded in bringing the boy to land, though in a state of great exhaustion, and almost insensible. Restoratives being applied, he soon got better. Two gentlemen, who had witnessed the scene from the further bank of the river, were so struck with the ready courage of Portlock, that they crossed over to express their admiration of his conduct, and the more to mark their sense of it, they made him accept some money as a present; and also were the means of him having a Bronze Medal from the Royal Humane Society'.

The newspaper has the following additional details noted on its margins in pencil: 'My darling husband when he was a boy saved little Collins life... Now my darling ...has been taken too from me, I am all alone, but god has left me here with my child to look after. .... [the script being faint and difficult to read].

Medal awarded for a rescue in Iffley Lock, Oxford. The rescue was referred to the Society by the Rev A. Warburton, incumbent of Iffley, along with Susan Jackson and others, the medal being voted to Portlock at the R.H.S. Committee on 15 July 1857 and sent to Rev Warburton on 1 August that year (ref. R.H.S. case no. 16011).

The 1881 census shows Portlock as aged 39 and born in Iffley, the 1891 census noting him as 50, implying he was born in about 1841, thus being 17 at the time of the rescue. He moved to Birmingham and worked as a pen manufacturer's clerk. He married Mary Ann Amos in Birmingham in 1875 and together they had one daughter Elsie Louise, born in 1880. Thomas Portlock died in Birmingham in 1891. With copy details from the RHS Case Register.

Medal contained in a leather pouch with the tatty remains of a ribbon.