Orders, Decorations and Medals Including five Special Collections

Three: Captain C. F. Balleine, Rifle Brigade, the first officer casualty of the 8th (Service) Battalion

1914-15 Star (Capt., Rif. Brig.); British War and Victory Medals (Capt.) nearly extremely fine (3) £300-350

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Fine Collection of of Great War Medals to the Rifle Brigade.

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Cuthbert Francis Balleine was educated at Victoria College, Jersey (where he was in the Football XV, got his cricket colours and won gold medal prizes for Classics and French) and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he had a distinguished career. Entering Oxford in 1902, he held a Charles I scholarship in Classics and obtained a Second Class in Honour Moderations in 1904 and a First in Literae Humaniores in 1906. He was awarded a Senior Scholarship for Travel and Research and in 1907 went on an excavating expedition to Upper Egypt with Dr. Randall Maciver. He held a Tutorial Fellowship at Exeter College and was Junior Bursar, 1911-13, and Sub-Rector, 1913-14. He was a keen member of the O.T.C. serving as sergeant then lieutenant and was appointed Captain in 1910. On the outbreak of war he served on the Oxford Committee for awarding commissions and under Lieutenant-Colonel R.C. MacLachlan in the training camp at Churn. He was gazetted Captain in MacLachlan’s 8th (Service) Battalion, Rifle Brigade in December 1914 and commanded “A” Company. The battalion went to France in May 1915 and very quickly formed part of the line in the Ypres Salient. Sydney Woodroffe, VC, of the same Company, described the manner of his company commander’s death at Railway Wood on 2 July 1915 in a letter home: “The next day we were gas-shelled again - and properly this time. They got the range exactly and put them right on the parapet. The first smashed to pieces our one and only anti-gas sprayer; the second blew to blazes the stretcher-bearers dug-out and buried a stretcher; the third blew the head clean off the captain of my company, killed two corporals in my platoon and wounded a sergeant… You can’t imagine how bestial it was with the place as an absolute fog and everyone coughing and choking in their helmets…” Captain Balleine was buried the next day at the Ecole, outside Ypres. After the war this cemetery was gathered in and he now lies in beautiful Bedford House Cemetery. A colleague wrote: “on the outbreak of war he was as a war-horse straining at the bit, and in him we gave to the country’s war our best possible. He went to the front in a spirit of high courage and, I think, deep joy, though we knew he had a presentiment that he would never return…”

Sold with several copy portrait photos. & further research