The Collection of Medals to the Leicester Regiment and Yeomanry formed by the late Trevor Harris

Six: Major A. F. R. Colquhoun, Leicestershire Regiment and latterly a Military Knight of Windsor

Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, 4 clasps, Relief of Kimberley, Paardeberg, Natal, Transvaal (Lieut., Leicester Regt.); King’s South Africa 1901-02, 2 clasps, South Africa 1901, South Africa 1902 (Lt., Leic. Rgt.), single initial ‘F.’ on these two; British War and Victory Medals (Major); Jubilee 1935, privately engraved, ‘Major F. R. Colquhoun, Mil. Kt. of Windsor’; Coronation 1937, privately engraved, ‘Major F. R. Colquhoun, Mil. Kt. of Windsor’, mounted as worn, the earlier awards with contact marks and edge bruising, otherwise generally very fine (6) £400-500

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Collection of Medals to the Leicester Regiment and Yeomanry formed by the late Trevor Harris.

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Arthur Frederick R. Colquhoun quickly witnessed active service out in South Africa, following his appointment to 2nd Lieutenant in the Leicestershire Regiment, not least in the operations in the Orange Free State from February to May 1900, when he was wounded at Paardeberg. He returned to the fray in December of the same year, in the Transvaal, was attached to the Army Service Corps from April 1901 and remained on active service until the end of hostilities.

During the Great War, having been advanced to Major in September 1915, Colquhoun first went overseas in April 1916, when he joined the 2nd Battalion on the banks of the Tigris in Mesopotamia, but he was wounded a few days later in the heavy fighting at Sannaiyat on the 6 April. On that day, the Leicestershires were called upon to advance in broad daylight on an entrenched position without gun preparation over a perfectly open plain, and the Turks were ready and waiting on naturally elevated marsh ground, from where their subsequent ‘storm of machine-gun and rifle fire, followed immediately by gun fire from both banks of the river’, all but decimated the 28th Brigade - 1100 men fell in the first few minutes and one Staff Officer, on asking why a line of some 500 or so khaki figures near the Turkish positions had not dug themselves in, was bluntly told they were all dead.

Colquhoun appears to have retired (or died) in 1938, having latterly served as a Military Knight of Windsor.