Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Pair: Orderly S. F. Peirson, Friends’ Ambulance Unit, late British Red Cross Society and Order of St. John of Jerusalem

1914 Star (S. F. Peirson. B.R.C.S. & O. St. J.J.); British War Medal 1914-20 (S. F. Peirson.) nearly extremely fine, the BWM scarce to unit (2) £200-240

Samuel Francis Peirson was born in Dorking, Surrey, on 21 June 1892 and was educated at Dorking High School for Boys. In November 1914 he followed his elder brother, Charles James Peirson, in volunteering for service with the British Red Cross Society, and almost immediately was despached to France where he joined the Friend's Ambulance Unit in Dunkirk, as an Orderly, on 13 November 1914, being reunited with his brother who had joined the unit in September 1914.

The Friends’ Ambulance Unit originated partly in the desire for young men of the Society of Friends to be of service to their country in a time of war, who by their religious principles were deterred from enlisting in the army. Early in August, several young men formed themselves into an Ambulance Corps under the leadership of Philip J. Baker, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, who had formerly been President of the Cambridge Union and the University Athletic Society. His appeal for volunteers appeared in The Friend of 21 August 1914.
On the 30th of October, forty volunteers, with three doctors, eight ambulances and medical supplies left London for Dunkirk, under the title of the ‘First Anglo-Belgian Ambulance Unit’ (a name subsequently changed to that by which the corps came to be known in Dunkirk, the ‘Friends’ Ambulance Unit’). The purpose of the Unit was to render first aid to the sick and wounded under the banner of the Red Cross, and almost immediately, without having any established base, set to work treating wounded soldiers who were detrained for embarkation on hospital ships and lay in large numbers awaiting either removal or first aid dressing or redressing. In the absence of other available agencies, both functions fell to the Unit. This work fully occupied the next few days, and in the meantime the officers made inquiries with the object of establishing some dressing and ambulance stations near the fighting line, and, if practicable, a small clearing hospital. By the middle of November, the French military authorities, as a result of their experience of the work of the Unit, were prepared to accept its services in connection with their army in the Ypres district, and most generously provided a surgical hospital equipment of fifty beds, which was placed in the Villa St. Pierre, at Malo les Bains, Dunkirk. On 1 December 1914, a second temporary hospital was opened in the lunatic asylum, attached to the Sacre Coeur, at Ypres, where the Unit rendered first aid and ambulance service to the civil population which had suffered enormously from the German bombardment.

Peirson continued to serve with the Unit until March 1916, when he returned to England having been granted a commission in the Army Service Corps. He died at Eastbourne on 27 November 1973.