Auction Catalogue

22 July 2016

Starting at 10:00 AM

.

Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

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Lot

№ 265

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22 July 2016

Hammer Price:
£650

Three: Lieutenant R. W. A. Usher, Lancashire Fusiliers, twice wounded at Gallipoli and killed in action in France, 2 May 1917, being his Battalion’s first casualty on the Western Front

1914-15
Star; British War and Victory Medals (Lieut. R. W. A. Usher.); Memorial Plaque (Robert William Armitage Usher); together with the recipient’s Memorial Scroll, all mounted in a glazed display frame, nearly extremely fine (4) £340-380

Robert William ‘Billy’ Armitage Usher, of Bolton-le-Sands, Lancashire, was born on 14 April 1889 and educated at Seafield School, Lytham, Lancashire, and at Wakefield Grammar School, Yorkshire, where he was a school prefect, where he subsequently worked as a Laboratory Assistant. On the outbreak of the Great War he attested for the Manchester Regiment, and was mobilised on 4 August 1914, but owing to sickness did not accompany them to Egypt that year. Commissioned instead as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, 16 January 1915, he joined the 1st/7th Battalion in Egypt in early 1915, before accompanying the Battalion to Gallipoli, 1 May 1915. ‘Twice he was wounded in the Gallipoli Expedition, and, subsequently, nearly died of sunstroke and exhaustion in the Egyptian desert. Returning home he was injured in the torpedoing of the Lanfranc’ (Obituary in the Wakefield Grammar School magazine, Summer Term 1917 refers). One of his wounds possibly came at the Battle of Krithia Vineyard, 7 August 1915, where the fighting was ‘a singularly brainless and suicidal type of warfare’, and out of a strength of 410 officers and men only 139 were unscathed when they were relieved, and Usher lost the sight in his left-eye. He subsequently served in the Sinai campaign, and took part in the Battle of Romani, 4 August 1916, before accompanying the Battalion to France in February 1917. He was killed in action by a shell on 2 May 1917, whilst in command of a Wiring Party in the front line near Lempire, along with two of his men, who were the first casualties in the Battalion when on the Western Front, and is buried in Villers-Faucon Communal Cemetery, Somme, France.

Owing to the way the medals are attractively mounted and framed, the reverse of the 1914-15 Star has not been inspected, and consequently this lot is sold as viewed.

For the medals to Private H. Y. Usher, Royal Army Medical Corps, see Lot 266.