The Julian Johnson Collection

The rare Great War A.R.R.C., M.M. group of seven awarded to Matron H. K. Repton, British Red Cross Society, for prolonged service at the Friends’ Ambulance Unit’s Queen Alexandra Hospital, Dunkirk

Royal Red Cross, 2nd Class (A.R.R.C.), G.V.R., silver and enamel, fitted with additional ring for suspension; Military Medal, G.V.R. (H. K. Repton, Q.A. Hpl:-B.R.C.S.); 1914-15 Star (H. K. Repton, B.R.C. & St. J.J.); British War and Victory Medals (H. K. Repton. B.R.C. & St. J.J.); Q.A.R.A.N.C. Cape Badge, unnamed; France, Medal of Honour, Ministry of War, for Epidemics, 3rd Class, bronze (Miss H. K. Repton, 1917) embossed naming, in case of issue embossed with name; together with companion group of seven miniature dress medals, good very fine and better (14) £4000-5000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Julian Johnson Collection.

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Provenance: Christie’s, April 1990, when sold by a descendant; Colonel D. G. B. Riddick Collection, D.N.W., March 2007.

A total of 127 gazetted awards of the Military Medal were made in the period 1914-20, plus a further 11 non-gazetted awards, mostly to foreign nationals.

A.R.R.C. London Gazette 1 January 1918.

M.M. London Gazette 17 December 1917: ‘... for bravery and conspicuous devotion in the performance of their duties whilst exposed to enemy shell fire or bombs dropped by enemy aircraft:- Miss Helena Kate Repton, Queen Alexandra Hpl., B.R.C.S.’

The short recommendation held at the Imperial War Museum adds: ‘By her courage and presence in the wards while the town was shelled and bombed she was the means of allaying the fears of the patients when several bombs fell near the hospital.’

Miss Helena Kate Repton was born c.1873 in Norton le Moors, Staffordshire. She trained as a Nurse at Leeds General Infirmary and was later a night sister at Plymouth and then at St. Bartholomew’s, Rochester and at Plaistow. In 1907 she was employed as Assistant Matron at Haine Isolation Hospital.

With the outbreak of war, Miss Repton joined the Friends Ambulance Unit. Entering the France/Flanders theatre of war on 27 April 1915, she went to Dunkirk, where after a few weeks she took charge of the Queen Alexandra Hospital, which was equipped by the Quakers and which was one of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit’s largest enterprises during the war. The hospital was originally established to help cope with the 1914-15 typhoid epidemic in Flanders, and was, for official purposes attached to the French 8th Army. During the autumn of 1914-15 arrangements were made for the admission of British patients, and from then on men were admitted from all the British services. The hospital was in one of the most dangerous areas on the Western Front, being shelled many times. In particular, during September 1917, it was subjected to almost daily bombardment from land, sea and air. Throughout the whole of that trying time Matron Repton and her staff worked cooly and gallantly with the never ending influx of patients. Finally the hospital was moved to the Chateau de Petite Synthe, about a mile and half from Dunkirk. In August 1918 the hospital and staff were honoured by a surprise visit by King George V.

For her brave services at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Dunkirk, Miss Repton was awarded the M.M. and later the A.R.R.C. In addition she was awarded the French Medal of Honour for her ‘constant proof of the greatest zeal and devotion in her care of the sick and of contagious cases’. She was decorated by King George V with the Royal Red Cross and the Military Medal at an investiture at Aldershot at the end of the war.

She afterwards returned to Haine Hospital and in 1922 became Matron. The same year she returned to Dunkirk when the Duke of York (the future King George VI) laid the foundation stone of the Seaman’s Institute, the Dunkirk War Memorial. Miss Repton retired from Haine in 1939 but with the onset of war she volunteered for service. She was serving as Matron at Biggleswade Isolation Hospital when she died suddenly when shopping in Ramsgate, Kent. Sold with 11 original photographs - mostly of the recipient; together with a number of (fragmentary and fragile) newspaper cuttings relating to the recipient.