Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

An R.V.M. group of three awarded to Deputy Superintendent F. L. Clifford, Aden Police, late Indian Medical Department

Royal Victorian Medal, G.V.R., silver, unnamed; Egypt and Sudan 1882-89, 1 clasp, Suakin 1885 (Clerk F. Clifford. Ind. Med. Dept.); Khedive’s Star 1884-6, good very fine (3) £180-£220

R.V.M. (Silver) awarded on 27 July 1911, on the occasion of the visit of H.M. King George V to Aden. Mr Frederick Lakeland Clifford was then Deputy Superintendent of Police in Aden.

Frederick Lakeland Clifford was probably born in India around 1861 where his father William Walter Clifford was a District Superintendent of Police. He appears to have been a Clerk in the Indian Medical Department and took part in the operations at Suakin in 1885, where clerks would have been engaged writing up records of casualties, pay, stocks, etc. At the time of his marriage at Poona on 28 December 1886, he was described as being an Inspector of the Abkari Department, India’s equivalent of customs and excise, and would have been engaged in tax collection. Subsequently living at Surat in 1887, where they had a son who died aged 2, and Bombay in 1889, by 1892 they had moved to Poona, where they had a second son. Information is very scant and it is not possible to prove that the Clifford in the Indian Medical Department is one and the same as the Clifford who later became Deputy Superintendent of Police in Aden but the geography fits well. The Royal Commission on the Public Service in India, published by H.M.S.O. in 1916, includes a discourse on pay and allowances by one F. L. Clifford, who states ‘The Aden appointment, which is recruited from the Deputy Superintendents of the Bombay Presidency, is one that causes infinite hardship. It is an appointment which has nothing to do with the Bombay District Police.’ Sold with research.