Auction Catalogue

5 April 2006

Starting at 10:00 AM

.

Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Grand Connaught Rooms  61 - 65 Great Queen St  London  WC2B 5DA

Lot

№ 392

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5 April 2006

Hammer Price:
£1,400

Ashantee 1873-74, no clasp (Officiating Chapln. Revd. A. J. Wallace. 1873-4) good very fine and rare £500-600

Arthur Job Wallace was born at Hadleigh in 1841, his father being curate of the Parish. He was educated at the Grammar School at Bury St Edmund’s and at Emanuel College, Cambridge (B.A. 1864, M.A. 1867). Whilst at Cambridge he became a Roman Catholic and entered the R.C. College at Oscott, near Birmingham, being ordained priest by Bishop Amherst, at Northampton, three years later.

He was one of two Roman Catholic priests who accompanied the British Expedition to Ashantee in 1873-74. On reaching the scene for which he received the Ashantee Medal. He returned to England in March 1874 and took up residence in Ipswich, but in 1878 decided to go out to India as a missionary, spending the next two years stationed about 40 miles from Madras, entirely amongst the natives. At the end of his two years he was invalided home and once again returned to Ipswich but, after gaining a seat at the Ipswich School Board, he went out to India again in 1883 where he subsequently took part as a Chaplain in the expedition to Burma. As on previous occasions, his health broke down and he was compelled to return home.

He went abroad for one last adventure in North America, spending about ten months in Omaha, Nebraska, before returning to reside in Ipswich, where he died on 2 September 1898, aged 57.

Colonel H. J. Woodward, Royal Munster Fusiliers, wrote, ‘I served with Father Wallace in Burma in 1886-87. No man ever did his duty more nobly then he. Perfectly fearless he was both with regard to the enemy and to disease. I had to forbid him to go unprotected from one post to another. The country was swarming with Dacoits, whose cruelties to captured strangers are too horrible to relate.’ Sold with copies of obituary and letters which include a portrait of Wallace.