Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A scarce Great War A.F.C. group of three awarded to Captain H. T. Horsfield, Royal Air Force, onetime attached Worcestershire Regiment, late Royal Flying Corps

Air Force Cross, G.V.R., unnamed as issued, in its John Pinches, London case of issue; British War and Victory Medals (Capt., R.F.C.), generally good very fine (3) £1000-1200

A.F.C. London Gazette 3 June 1919.

Henry Taylor Horsfield, who was born in October 1889, was appointed a Temporary 2nd Lieutenant on the General List in December 1914, and sometime thereafter attached to the 13th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment. He did not, however, see any active service until his transferral to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, when, on gaining his “Wings”, he was posted to No. 34 Squadron, an Army co-operation unit, based in France, in July of the same year. Undoubtedly, too, he witnessed air-to-air combat over the coming months, a case in point being a dogfight with an enemy aircraft over Walencourt in the early afternoon of 16 October 1916, when his BE2e was damaged and his Observer, Lieutenant C. K. M. Douglas, wounded.

By early 1917, Horsfield was serving as a Flight Commander, but in July of the same year he was posted back to the U.K. to No. 9 Squadron for employment as an ‘Instructor in artillery or contact patrol work’, in which capacity he appears to have served for the remainder of the War, valuable training work that undoubtedly resulted in the award of his A.F.C. Horsfield was transferred to the Unemployed List in October 1919.