Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

An unusual 1966 ‘services to Nigeria’ M.B.E., Great War group of five awarded to Mrs S. Leith-Ross, British Committee for the French Red Cross, an Anglo-American whose love of France and Nigeria, led to her dedicating her life to benefit of others in those countries across two World Wars. An extraordinary woman, who lived to the age of 95, Leith-Ross established hospitals, founded schools and had 6 books published during the course of her lifetime

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, M.B.E. (Civil) Member’s 2nd type breast badge, silver, on ladies bow riband, this stitched to facilitate group wear; British War and Victory Medals (S. H. Leith-Ross.); France, Third Republic, Gratitude Medal, 1st type, silver, with blue enamel star on riband; Society For Aid to the Military Wounded Cross 1914-19, silver, with original Red Cross riband, mounted for wear, lacquered, good very fine (5) £800-1000

Provenance: Flatow Collection, Spink, November 1998.

M.B.E. London Gazette 11 June 1966:

‘For services to Nigeria, particularly in the field of education.’

Sylvia Hope Leith-Ross (née Ruxton) was the daughter of Admiral W. F. Ruxton, R.N. She was born in London in 1884, and after her father’s death, moved with her American born mother (Sylvia Grinnell - daughter of the American philanthropist Henry Grinnell) to Paris in 1896. Leith-Ross was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart Paris, the Finishing School of Fontainebleau. Her brother had gone out to Nigeria to serve with the Royal Niger Constabulary, and then as one of Lord Lugard’s administrators:

“My brother had met my husband [Captain Arthur Leith-Ross] out in Nigeria and had decided at once that he was the man that his little sister ought to marry. Both were having their leaves at the same time and so my brother brought him back with him and he stayed with us in our Sussex home.”

At that time wives were not allowed up to Northern Nigeria without the express permission of the then Sir Frederick Lugard:

“Fortunately I passed all right. But as far as I can remember there were only three wives out in Northern Nigeria at that time. Nigeria was definately known as a White Man’s Grave - and actually it was. The mortality rate was very severe. Official statistics stated that one in five were either invalided or dead within a year. Yet somehow we went out quite carefree and it seemed somehow worthwhile to run the risk. My husband had a job there, I loved my husband and I followed him.....”

Mrs Leith-Ross’s arrival in Zungeru caused something of a stir:

“There were no wives there at all at that moment. There were two nursing sisters and the warden of a freed slaves home. I was the only wife. In fact, I think the officials were astonished to see that any white wife was allowed out, as I think there were only three others in the whole country. The white officials were few and far between themselves; I think I’m right in saying that there were altogether at that time forty administrative officers for the whole of Nigeria..... Of course the evenings were the worst time because mosquitoes and flies of every description gathered around the lamps. And in the evening everybody dressed for dinner, whether you were at home or went out; you wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise. I remember very well having a bath towel put over my side-saddle and riding off to dine in a long, low-necked dress.” (Tales From The Dark Continent, by C. Allen refers)

After being in Zungeru for a year, disaster struck for the married couple:

“My husband had had blackwater once before and had somehow survived, although he’d been completely alone. The second time it happened in Zungeru; one doesn’t know why, it was just an infection, but at the time there was no known cure. He was at once taken to the small hospital and two doctors stayed with him day and night for two days, but he grew weaker and weaker and died within three days.... Everybody was kindness itself to me but the only thing to do was for me to go home. And when I left I found that of the five of us who had started for Northern Nigeria, I was the only one to return to England. The others were dead.” (Ibid)

After the death of her husband, Leith-Ross returned to Paris and studied at the School of Oriental Languages. With the outbreak of the Great War, she volunteered for service with the Red Cross:

‘The next castle I saw, five months later, was that of the Counts of Foix, rising above the dark little town which has the Pyrenees for a background... A military hospital of 500 beds had been opened in the college buildings, and a doctor on the staff had written to an English friend saying how welcome English help would be in this understaffed and poorly equipped hospital.

It had been no easy matter to get a party together. Nearly all the trained people were already at work, and no one cared very much to venture into such a complete unknown as a small French town buried somewhere in the mountains, and a Service de Santè (R.A.M.C.) hospital where we would be the only English, and apparently the only women.... yet, at the end of a week, by some miracle, a trained nurse materialised, and three eager French-speaking volunteers....

We arrived at Foix on a Sunday morning, just before Christmas 1914. Snow covered the hills, and on the snow-powdered platform, ces dames de la Croix Rouge, representatives of the local Red Cross, were drawn up to meet us.... The hospital was installed in large, ugly red buildings built round gravelled courtyards. The students’ long dormitories had been turned into wards of forty to sixty beds, the classrooms into smaller wards, and the poky little rooms where the masters had slept, were now the salles de pansements. Each section of the hospital had its own salles de pansements, where nearly all the dressings were done. The badly wounded were carried in on stretchers, the others hobbled in as best they could. Apart from a few medical students who helped with the dressings, and the orderlies who brought round the pails of food, there was no nursing....

M. and I were put on duty in two large wards and one small one, some 120 beds in all. We walked rather shyly up and down, wondering where we could begin. The patients looked at us with apathy, the orderlies with suspicion.... In the salles de pansements there was plenty of work for us to do. There was scarcely room to move in the small space, so crowded was it with bandages and instruments, packets of cotton wool, basins of disinfectants, bins for dirty dressings, cans of water (there was no running water in the room), all mixed up among patients awaiting their turn....

The first thing for us to do was obviously to clean up. Fortunately, we could not have found a greater amusement for the men. First curious, then astounded, and finally delighted, they watched us scrub and scour, shake and air, scrape the grime off the washbasins, the mildew out of the pots-de-chambre. When we turned on them, and proposed blanket baths and hair washes and toe nail cutting (”they have toe nails like stags’ antlers,” M., awestruck, whispered to me), their response was at first evasive, then enthusiastic. When the first pillow and clean pillowcase were given out, the patient leant back, looked round the ward, and said gravely: “Now I am as a prince!” (Cocks In The Dawn, Reminiscences of France, by S. Leith-Ross refers)

Leith-Ross took up a more prominent role, ‘Presently our party had become fourteen, and the Directeur du Service de Santé, of the 17th Military Region, in which Foix was situated, suggested that I should visit other military hospitals in his area, and place English volunteers where they were needed most. There began for me then a period of strange and enchanting journeys to out-of-the-way hospitals.... Then came the moment when the Directeur du Service de Santé paid our party the great compliment of suggesting that I should organise a hospital for service in his Région. He already had a building in view, the Château de Saint Rome, placed at his disposal by the Général de la Panouse, the then Military Attaché in London. His wife, the Vicomtesse de la Panouse, was Présidente British Committee for the French Red Cross, and with her unfailing help, the 300 bed hospital was soon open.... After a time, Saint Rome was handed over to another English directrice, and I was asked to organise a hospital for refugees.’ (Ibid)

After the war Leith-Ross briefly returned to London, before travelling out to stay with her brother in Lagos in 1920. Despite the cruel loss of her husband in Nigeria, Leith-Ross returned to the country to carry out a pioneering study of the Fulani language - and indeed published Fulani Grammar in 1921. The latter was one of five books that she had published on Nigeria during her lifetime. In 1925 Leith-Ross became Nigeria’s first Lady Superintendent of Education, and she subsequently helped to establish Queen’s College, Lagos (a girl’s boarding school), and another girl’s school in Kano.

Leith-Ross returned to work with the British Committee for the French Red Cross, and volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Spanish Civil War, and the early stages of the Second World War. With the fall of France, she once again returned to Nigeria and was this time employed to provide intelligence on the French colonies to the Political and Economic Research Organisation. She stayed in Nigeria until the 1960’s, and died in 1908, aged 95, in Holland Park, London.

Sold with the following related items: riband bar (excluding riband for M.B.E.); British Committee For The French Red Cross cloth Blazer Badge; Bestowal Document for the M.B.E., dated 11 June 1966, with Investiture invitation and other enclosure documents; 4 letters and 1 telegram of congratulations on the occasion of the award of the recipient’s M.B.E.; a copy of Cocks in the Dawn, Reminiscences of France, by Sylvia Leith-Ross; a postcard and other ephemera.