Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Pair: Leading Seaman C. J. Budden, Royal Navy, a veteran of the Battle of the Falklands 1914

East and West Africa 1887-1900, 1 clasp, Gambia 1894 (Ord., H.M.S. Raleigh); Royal Navy L.S. & G.C., E.VII.R. (151098 Btn., H.M. Coast Guard) edge nicks and minor contact wear, very fine and better (2) £180-220

Charles James Budden was born in Bridport, Dorset in May 1874 and entered the Royal Navy as a Boy 2nd Class in Boscawen in September 1889. Joining H.M.S. Raleigh in July 1891, he went on to serve in the Gambia operations of 1894 and was advanced to Able Seaman in April of the same year. Further advanced to Leading Seaman in April 1901, Budden subsequently transferred to H.M. Coast Guard and served as a Boatman at assorted stations on the Irish coast, including Kingstown and Bangor.

Recalled to regular duties as a Leading Seaman in August 1914, Budden joined the ship’s company of the cruiser Cornwall and quickly found himself in action at the Battle of the Falklands on 8 December 1914. In company with the Glasgow, the Cornwall sank the Leipzig, a classic naval encounter recalled in Barrie Pitt’s Coronel and Falkland:

‘By now Cornwall had established the range and her 6-inch salvoes crashed on and around Leipzig with relentless regularity ... The superstructure began to disintegrate and jagged holes appeared in the decks, through which licked the tongues of flame from the holocaust below ... Visibility was declining and Captain Luce ordered Cornwall to close and change from firing common shell to lyddite. The effect was immediate, and as devastating as it had been in the other actions fought this day. From a range of just over seven thousand yards, Cornwall fired salvo after salvo into the doomed vessel, every salvo hitting and every shell exploding; Leipzig was inexorably reduced to the flaming core of a mass of black, billowing smoke ... At 7.17 p.m. he [Captain Luce] had signalled by Morse code to the stricken ship that he was anxious to save life and asking if the Leipzig would surrender, but as at the time the German torpedo personnel were still endeavouring gallantly but vainly to strike their last dying blow against his ship, he had received no reply ... At 7.50 p.m. he ordered his own guns and those aboard Cornwall to reopen fire - still firing lyddite shell ... The effect on the crowds of men still gathered on Leipzig’s deck was horrific. Shell after shell burst violently among them, mowing down fifty or a hundred at a time, stripping limbs and heads from agonised trunks, splattering blood about the deck and the shambles of the superstructure as though with a giant paint brush dipped in a slaughterer’s trough. Men went mad with pain as their flesh was torn away from their bones and the heat from the explosions cauterised the open wounds. Blast picked up bodies from the deck and tossed them high into the air, sometimes tearing them apart as they spun and twisted, sometimes dropping them whole and complete into the sea - icy beyond imagination after the pulsing furnace which Leipzig had become ...

Both Glasgow and Cornwall had lowered boats, and while the search for survivors went on, Leipzig lay further and further over to port until the sea flooded in through the casemates and at last quenched the fires and cooled the white-hot metal within her. Her bows dipped, the starboard propeller lifted high out of the water, and at 9.23 p.m. she vanished from sight, wreathed in smoke and steam, and leaving a spreading stain on the sea and a yellow fog above it ...’

Just 17 men were eventually picked up from the German light cruiser’s original complement of 286.

Budden remained in the Cornwall until March 1917, served in the blockade of the Konigsberg off East Africa in 1915, in the Dardanelles later in the same year and finally off China between 1915-17. Transferred ashore in the latter year, he served at Devonport and other shore establishments until finally discharged in April 1920.