Pair: Major E. E. Craster, Royal Engineers, late Principal Medical Officer, Niger Protectorate

East and West Africa 1887-1900, 1 clasp, Niger 1897 (E. E. Craster, Esq., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.); Royal Niger Company Medal 1886-97, 1 clasp, Nigeria 1886-97, silver issue (Dr. E. E. Craster) one or two edge scratches, generally extremely fine and rare (2) £2200-2500

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Richard Magor Collection of Medals Relating to India and Africa, and other Fine Awards.

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Collection

Just 100 Royal Niger Company Medals 1886-97 were issued in silver, around 40 of them being awarded to Officers of the Company.

Edward Ernest Craster, who was born in 1867, attended both Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and qualified in medicine in the latter city in 1888. Originally gaining employment as a Surgeon and Doctor to several industrial businesses on Tees Side, he eventually opted for a more challenging post out in Africa, and gained appointment as the Principal Medical Officer of the Royal Niger Company.

Subsequently employed in the Niger operations of 1897, he was one of 14 civilians to qualify for the appropriate clasp on the East and West Africa Medal. And judging by Dr. Craster’s subsequent article in The Lancet, published in 1899, under the title Bullet Wounds and Their Treatment, this period of employment in the field was not without incident. A full account of the campaign is also to be found in Lieutenant S. Vandeleur’s Campaigning on the Upper Nile and Niger.

Craster was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in December 1914 and served as a Major (and Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel) out in Mesopotamia from 1917, but, after the War, returned to the medical profession and was onetime employed as Senior Medical Officer of the Shaw, Savill and Albion Line.