Medals from the Collection of Peter and Dee Helmore

Three: Captain J. B. O. Richards, Devonshire Regiment, later Royal Army Medical Corps

1914-15 Star (Capt. J. B. O. Richards. Devon R.); British War and Victory Medals (Capt. J. B. O. Richards.) light contact marks, good very fine (3) £80-£100

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Medals from the Collection of Peter and Dee Helmore.

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John Barrow Osborn Richards was born in Paddington, London, in 1868 and qualified as a physician and surgeon at Edinburgh in 1894. An active freemason, his medical practice was established in Tavistock, Devon. Appointed Second Lieutenant in the 2nd (Prince of Wales’s) Volunteer Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, on 30 May 1900, he resigned his commission on 26 March 1904. Subsequently appointed to a Temporary Commission in the Regular Army ‘for the period of the war’ on 20 October 1914, he was posted as a Temporary Captain to the 9th (Service) Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, and disembarked with them at Havre on 28 July 1915. As Captain of ‘B’ Company he was in action at Loos on 25-26 September 1915. Admitted to the 23rd Field Ambulance suffering from ‘Tens synovitis’ on 1 October 1915, he was evacuated to England on 5 October 1915. Posted to the 11th (Reserve) Battalion at Wareham, he was found fit for home service only on 3 July 1916, and was appointed Captain in Royal Army Medical Corps and Registrar of Mitcham Military Hospital 1917, a post he held for the rest of the War. In the 1939 Register he is shown as an A.R.P. Ambulance Driver residing in Sunbury. He twice offered his service to the Director-General, Army Medical Services during the Second World War but was declined on both occasion ‘in view of your age’. He died in Sunbury on 4 August 1952, aged 84.

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