Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Four: Captain Hon. D. H. Erskine, Scots Guards, a gentleman scholar who edited ‘an 18th-century ancestor’s lascivious manuscript’

Italy Star; Defence and War Medals, all privately inscribed ‘Capt. The Hon. D. H. Erskine, Scots Guards’; General Service 1918-62, 1 clasp, Palestine 1945-48 (Capt. The Hon., S.G.), mounted court-style as worn, together with a set of related miniature dress medals and Scots Guards 1642-1992 commemorative badge, polished but otherwise generally very fine (9) £350-400

David Hervey Erskine was born at the Hervey family’s residence in St. James’s Square, London in November 1924, a grandson of the 12th Earl of Mar and the 14th Earl of Kellie, but was largely brought up at Ickworth House in Suffolk while his father was Governor of Madras in the 1930s.

During his subsequent career at Eton, young Erskine managed to crash a scout car into the side of a bread van in Devizes street during a corps exercise with men from the 3rd Battalion, Scots Guards, and was duly commissioned into the 1st Battalion of the same regiment towards the War’s end - no doubt to the horror of the somewhat apprehensive piper who had acted as his co-driver on the occasion of the scout car affair. Joining his regiment out in Italy, he participated in the advance on the River Po, and afterwards found himself in Trieste, where he was ‘sickened by the atrocities inflicted by Yugoslavs’ (Daily Telegraph obituary refers). He went on to serve in Palestine.

Returning home to resume his studies, Erskine read History at Trinity College, Cambridge, but subsequently switched to Law and was called to the Bar. Yet he never practised, preferring instead to pursue his earlier interest in history, and his first notable success was his discovery - in the archives at Ickworth House - of the 18th-century unpublished memoirs of his great-great-great-great-great uncle, Vice-Admiral Augustus Hervey, the 3rd Earl of Bristol. As it transpired, there were many good reasons why the Admiral’s memoirs had failed to make it into print, for apart from describing his engagements at sea, he applied equal relish to cataloguing his many sexual conquests, and they ranged from assorted princesses and duchesses to dancers and publicans’ daughters (and even the odd dalliance with ‘the inmates of Portuguese covents’). Indeed the Admiral’s conquests were so numerous that Erskine could not bring himself to count them as he prepared the manuscript for publication. Yet when it did appear in print under the title Augustus Hervey’s Journal in 1953, it was well received - although certain historians were concerned that many readers might assume that all 18th-century naval officers were equally promiscuous.

Erskine also published a much acclaimed history of his old regiment, The Scots Guards 1919-1955, and was onetime Secretary of the Navy Records Society. He died earlier this year.