Orders, Decorations and Medals

MacGregor Memorial Medal, silver, 70 mm (Awarded to Captain G. E. Leachman for Exploration Work 1910) good very fine and very scarce

Colonel Gerard Evelyn Leachman, C.I.E., D.S.O., Royal Sussex Regiment, served in the Boer War 1899-1902 (despatches). Awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Gill Medal and the MacGregor Memorial Medal for his travels and exploration in North East Arabia during 1910. He was attached to the Political Department in Mesopotamia during the Great War and served with great distinction throughout Townshend’s advance to Kut in 1915. He was created C.I.E. in 1916 and, in 1919, awarded the D.S.O. ‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty at Huwaish on 28 Oct. 1918, and again at Qaiyarah on 30 Oct. 1918. He displayed marked courage in personally reconoitring in his own unarmoured car, under heavy fire, ground over which the heavier armoured cars could not move. He then returned to guide them to the attack. The success attained by these cars during the operations was largely due to his intimate knowledge of the country and fearless leading over a trackless desert’. Colonel Leachman was murdered during the Arab Rebellion in Iraq on 12 August 1920, in an Arab encampment between Baghdad and Falluja on the Euphrates.