Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria, to include the Brian Ritchie Collection (Part III)

A fine Great War M.C. group of eight awarded to Quarter-Master and Major J. H. Greasely, Leicestershire Regiment

Military Cross, G.V.R., unnamed as issued; Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, 2 clasps, Natal, Transvaal (851 Q.M. Sejt., 1 Leic. Regt.); King’s South Africa 1901-02, 2 clasps, South Africa 1901, South Africa 1902 (Lt. & Qr. Mr., Leic. Rgt.); 1914 Star (Hon. Capt. & Q.M., Leic. R.); British War and Victory Medals (Q.M. & Major); Coronation 1911; Army L.S. & G.C., E.VII.R. (851 Serjt. Maj., Leicester Regt.), the earlier awards with contact marks, otherwise generally very fine or better (8) £1000-1200

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Collection of Medals to the Leicester Regiment and Yeomanry formed by the late Trevor Harris.

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M.C. London Gazette 1 January 1917.

John Henry Greasely first witnessed active service in the Boer War, when he was present in the operations in the Transvaal from May 1901 to May 1902, in addition to the operations on the Zululand frontier of Natal in September 1901. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant and Quarter-Master in May 1903.

Still a regular soldier in the Leicestershires by the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, he arrived in France with the 1st Battalion in the following month and witnessed his first major encounter with the enemy on 26 October, when, following a day of hand-to-hand fighting, the Battalion repelled an enemy attack on its positions near Le Quesne Distillery. And while the first few months of 1915 proved a little quieter for the 1st Leicestershires on the Rue de Bois line, the Battalion was shortly afterwards catapulted into the bloody fighting at Hooge and Ypres, the latter operations in December of that year witnessing a number of casualties caused by a poison gas attack. But it was probably in 1916 that Greasely would have witnessed the heaviest fighting, present as he was as the Battalion’s Q.M. during its operations on the Somme that September, and given the date of the announcement of his M.C., it seems likely that he was decorated for that period of the War. Yet he remained on active service right up until the Armistice, witnessing further fighting at Cambrai in November 1917 through to the enemy’s 1918 “Spring Offensive” and beyond, and did not return home until April 1919, when the Battalion ended its tour of duty with the Army of Occupation on the Rhine; see Colonel H. C. Wylly’s The 1st and 2nd Battalions the Leicestershire Regiment in the Great War, for further details.