Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Five: Chief Stoker W. Friend, Royal Navy

1914-15 Star (139677 Ch. Sto., R.N.); British War and Victory Medals (139677 Ch. Sto., R.N.); Royal Navy L.S. & G.C., E.VII.R. (Ch. Stoker, H.M.S. Tenedos); Khedive’s Sudan 1896-1908, no clasp, unnamed as issued, the fourth with contact marks and edge bruising, good fine, the remainder very fine and better (5) £200-250

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Medals for Services at Sea from the Collection of the Late Oliver Stirling Lee.

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William Friend was born at Okehampton, Devon in July 1867 and entered the Royal Navy as a Stoker 2nd Class in October 1886. He subsequently witnessed active service aboard H.M.S. Melita in support of the force under Brigadier-General C. Egerton in the Sudan in 1896 and received his L.S. & G.C. Medal in February 1905. Having been pensioned ashore in November 1908, when he enrolled in the Royal Fleet Reserve, Friend was recalled in August 1914 and first went to sea in the Merchant Fleet Auxiliary’s Floridian. In August 1915, however, he transferred to the auxiliary patrol yacht Sabrina and, in the following month, to the Ombra. His final seagoing appointment was in the trawler Longset between December 1915 and February 1917, in which latter month, on the 6th, she was sunk by a mine. Among the survivors, Friend ended the War at Vivid II and was demobilised in February 1919.