Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Three: 2nd Lieutenant G. L. T. Locker Lampson, Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, elder brother of Oliver of armoured car fame and afterwards a long-served M.P. and Under-Secretary of State for Home and Foreign Affairs

1914-15 Star (2-Lieut. G. L. T. Locker Lampson, R. Wilts. Yeo.); British War and Victory Medals (2-Lieut. G. L. T. Locker Lampson), mounted as worn, all official late claims from 1936, good very fine (3) £300-350

Godfrey Lampson Tennyson Locker Lampson was born in June 1875, the son of Frederick Locker Lampson and his second wife, Hannah Jane, and elder brother of Oliver, who would claim fame as C.O. of armoured cars in Russia and elsewhere in the Great War. For his own part, young Godfrey was educated at Cheam School, Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was nominated an attache in the diplomatic service in October 1898, gaining appointment as Third Secretary in December 1900, while employed at the Foreign Office, and quickly seeing service as a Charge d’Affaires in The Hague and at St. Petersburg.

In December 1903, however, he resigned from the Foreign Office and embarked on a political career, standing as the Conservative candidate for the Chesterfield division of Derbyshire in January 1906 and, though defeated on this occasion, he was returned to Parliament as M.P. for Salisbury in January 1910, in which capacity he remained employed until November 1918, though absent on active service in France in 1915-16, when he served as an A.D.C. to Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Wilson, 4th Army Corps, and was credited with effecting a rapprochement between the General and Lloyd George.

Transferring to the Territorial Force Reserve on returning to the U.K., he resumed his political career as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Right Hon. Sir George Cave, the Secretary of State for Home Affairs and afterwards Viscount Cave of Richmond, G.C.M.G., and, from 1918-19, to the Right Hon. Lord Edgar Gascoyne-Cecil, afterwards Viscount Cecil of Chelwood. Meanwhile, Locker Lampson had also been re-elected to Parliament as M.P. for the Wood Green division of Middlesex in the December 1918 election and his subsequent appointments in the 1920s included stints as Under-Secretary of State for Home (1923-25) and Foreign Affairs (1925-29), when Anthony Eden served as his P.P.S. He was also sworn in as a Privy Councillor in June 1928, the same year in which he served as a member of the British Legation to the League of Nations in Geneva.

Locker Lampson, who finally stood down from his parliamentary duties in 1935, and was a published poet, essayist and historian, died while visiting New York in May 1946, his obituary in the New York Times stating that he had sold in 1929, ‘Houdon’s marble bust of George Washington to the Rockefeller family for $250,000. The bust was completed in 1787, and bought by an American named Lampson, a relative of the Lampson family of England from which Mr. Locker Lampson was descended on his maternal side.’