Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A family pair of British War Medals 1914-20 to 2nd Lieutenant C. C. Studley, West Yorkshire Regiment, late “Leeds Pals”, who was killed in action in October 1917, and his brother, Midshipman G. C. Studley, Royal Naval Reserve

British War Medal 1914-20 (2) (2 Lieut. C. C. Studley; Mid. G. C. Studley, R.N.R.), good very fine (2) £100-120

Charles Carr Studley was born in Leeds in 1897, and was educated at the local Boys’ Modern School before moving to Leeds University. But with the advent of hostilities in August 1914, he interrupted his studies and enlisted in the “Leeds Pals”, in which capacity ‘he was in France for nearly the whole of 1916, going through the fighting on the Somme’. Returning home at the end of the latter year, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, but at the time of his death in action on 9 October 1917, he was attached to the 1/8th Battalion (Leeds Rifles) - as sadly observed by a local newspaper report, ‘What makes his death all the more sad is the fact that his parents, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Studley, of Clarence House, Hill Avenue, Leeds, received the news on his birthday’. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial.

George Carr Studley, Charles’ younger brother, was born at Goole, Yorkshire, in January 1899, and entered the Royal Naval Reserve as a Midshipman in July 1915. Quickly witnessing active service in the Mediterranean and Aegean, where he was onetime borne on the books of Europa ‘for motor lighters’, he appears to have returned home to an appointment in the armed merchant cruiser Avoca in 1916 - his service record noting he was ‘to be sent to England as soon as his services can be spared’. His subsequent seagoing appointments included time in the cruiser Berwick, and the destroyers Torrid and Manly, in which latter ship he was present in a supporting role off Zeebrugge on 23 April 1918. Studley was demobilised in January 1919.