Special Collections

Sold between 2 March & 1 December 2004

2 parts

.

Medals for Services at Sea from the Collection of the Late Oliver Stirling Lee

Oliver Stirling Lee

Lot

№ 115

.

1 December 2004

Hammer Price:
£120

Three: Able Seaman R. Anderson, Royal Navy

1914-15 Star
(SS. 26 A.B., R.N.); British War and Victory Medals (S.S. 26 A.B., R.N.), very fine (3) £40-50

Robert Anderson was born in Stirling in May 1884 and was one of the first men to enter the Royal Navy on the Special (Short) Service Scheme in September 1903. Coming ashore and enrolling in the Royal Fleet Reserve on completion of his five years in September 1908, he was recalled on the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 when he joined the battleship H.M.S. Jupiter. He was subsequently aboard her during her epic ice-breaking voyage to Archangel in early 1915, but transferred to the destroyer Manly in July of the same year. Anderson’s next seagoing appointment was in another destroyer, the Lassoo, from October 1915 until she was torpedoed and sunk off the Maas lightship in August 1916, and, having survived this ordeal, he returned to sea in the Rowena a few weeks later. Indeed he was still serving in the latter destroyer at the end of hostilities, finally being demobilised in March 1919.