A Collection of Napoleonic War Medals

Ensign Samuel Laing, Royal Staff Corps

Military General Service 1793-1814, 3 clasps, Roleia, Vimiera, Corunna (Saml. Laing, Ensn. Royal Staff Corps) good very fine £2500-3000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Collection of Napoleonic War Medals.

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Provenance: Sotheby, May 1910; Glendining, February 1927; Elson Collection 1963; Dix Noonan Webb, June 2005.

This unit was formed in 1800 as Rutherford’s Regiment and redesignated as ‘A Corps to be Attached to the Quarter Master General’s Department’ in 1801, becoming the Royal Staff Corps in 1803. It comprised of specially appointed officers and men whose duties were as combat engineers. Ensign Laing was the only officer of this corps to receive a clasp for any of these three actions and one of only 14 officers to claim the medal.

Samuel Laing was born in 1790 and was appointed an Ensign in the Royal Staff Corps on 26 September 1805. He served in the Peninsula from August 1808 to June 1809, including the actions at Roleia, Vimiera and Corunna, and retired from the army on 16 July 1809.

However, the full and remarkable story of Laing’s life only recently came to light with the discovery of his original manuscript notes in the Orkney Archives and the subsequent publication of a biography of his life, as described in a news cutting from January 2001:

‘The swashbuckling story of Orkney's very own Scarlet Pimpernel has been rescued from obscurity by a local historian.

Samuel Laing saved three Royal Navy officers in French occupied Holland in a lull in the Napoleonic Wars before escaping on ice skates. Laing's Boy's Own adventure is told in his autobiography, which is being published for the first time more than 130 years after his death. He was a man of many parts - scholar, soldier, entrepreneur, agricultural improver, linguist, author, translator, provost of Kirkwall, failed politician and bankrupt. But the story of his undercover mercy mission in the Netherlands is rated particularly highly by Dr Ray Fereday, who edited and made sense of Laing's unpublished manuscript. Laing's adventures in Holland began when he went there to learn about business and fell for a Miss Ferrier, sister of a Scottish merchant. In 1803, three naval officers were shipwrecked in Holland on an intelligence gathering mission. Laing immediately offered to help them, even though he could have been shot. He took the men to his lodgings and got rid of their British uniforms before placing the two younger men in a boarding school, advising them to be "cautious and boyish in their conduct". Then, after fitting out the older lieutenant with "plain clothes", the two set out on a hazardous journey by canal boat and ferry across Holland to the Prussian frontier. Laing returned to the Netherlands, skating along frozen canals and dodging a sentry before returning to Britain with valuable intelligence. His autobiography says his adventure took him from Holland and the danger of an "imprudent marriage" to Miss Ferrier, who was "very good natured, but not sensible or handsome". Dr Fereday said: "He was the Scarlet Pimpernel for a week. He boasts about lots of other things in the book, but he was quite modest about that particular episode in his life." Laing's greatest achievement in his varied career was translating the Heimskringla, the saga of the Norwegian kings. With its tales of brave deeds and fast moving action, the work proved hugely popular in Victorian Britain, and is still highly regarded today. The innovations in farming and fishing that Laing brought to Orkney laid the foundation for prosperity in the islands in the 19th century. But later, after running into financial problems and narrowly failing to enter Parliament, he left Orkney to follow a new career as a travel writer. Laing's original manuscript has been lost. Dr Fereday produced the new book - adding his own biography - after many years working on a manuscript lodged with the Orkney Archives.’

Sold with extensive extracts from Laing’s manuscript which describe in detail his wartime experiences.