Five: Officer’s Steward 1st Class R. Clarke, Royal Navy

Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, no clasp (Dom. 2 Cl., H.M.S. Rattler); China 1900, no clasp (Dom. 1st Cl., H.M.S. Arethusa); 1914-15 Star (165315 O.S. 1, R.N.); British War and Victory Medals (165315 O.S. 1, R.N.), minor contact marks, very fine or better (5) £300-350

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Barrett J. Carr Collection of Boer War Medals.

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Just 76 Queen’s South Africa Medals were awarded to the ship’s company of H.M.S. Rattler, all of them without clasp.

Robert Clarke was born at Little Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire in January 1873 and entered the Royal Navy as a Domestic 2nd Class in February 1892. He subsequently served aboard the cruiser H.M.S. Arethusa from November 1899 to September 1900, in which period he served off China in the Boxer Rebellion, and in the gunboat H.M.S. Rattler from February 1901 to May 1902, off South Africa. He was awarded his L.S. & G.C. Medal in July 1909.

By the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, Clarke was serving as an Officer’s Steward 1st Class in the cruiser Psyche, in which capacity he remained employed until early 1915, when he removed briefly to the cruiser Hampshire before transferring to the cruiser Glasgow, in which ship he served until November 1916, when he came ashore to an appointment at Victory I - in this latter period the Glasgow was employed in the hunt for the German raider Mowe in the Mediterranean. Clarke was finally demobilised in September 1922.