A Fine Collection of Awards to the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force (Part II)

A rare Great War C.M.G., C.B.E., M.C. group of eight awarded to Air Commodore A. Fletcher, Royal Air Force, late Royal Engineers and Royal Flying Corps

The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, C.M.G., Companion’s neck badge, silver-gilt and enamel; The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, C.B.E. (Military) Commander’s 1st type neck badge, silver-gilt and enamel; Military Cross, G.V.R., unnamed as issued; 1914 Star, with clasp (4 S./Mjr. A. Fletcher, R.F.C.), renamed; British War and Victory Medals (Lt. Col. A. Fletcher, R.F.C.); Defence and War Medals 1939-45, generally good very fine (8) £1200-1500

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Collection of Awards to the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force.

View
Collection

C.M.G. London Gazette 3 June 1919.

C.B.E. London Gazette 7 June 1918.

M.C. London Gazette 1 January 1917. The original recommendation states:

‘For excellent work in connection with the organisation and working of 4 Army Aircraft Park. Major Fletcher has produced a very high efficiency in this new unit.’

Albert Fletcher was born in Plumstead, Kent, in June 1881, and enlisted in the Royal Engineers as a Sapper during the course of 1899. He subsequently became a member of the Air Battalion, R.E., in 1911 and was consequently one of the first to transfer to the newly established Royal Flying Corps in May 1912, when he held the rank of Company Quarter-Master Sergeant.

Having then been advanced to Sergeant-Major, he qualified for his aviator’s certificate (No. 519) in a Maurice Farman at Montrose in June 1913, a rare accolade indeed for a non-commissioned rank.

Embarked with the original R.F.C. contingent for France in August 1914, he was quickly selected to receive a commission, and was appointed a Quarter-Master & Lieutenant at the end of the same month. A long and distinguished career in administration ensued and by the time of the formation of the R.A.F. in April 1918, the former Sapper had been awarded the M.C. and risen to the acting rank of Brigadier.

An Air Ministry communique issued later in his career states of the Great War period:

‘Fletcher was transferred to No. 2 Aeroplane Squadron, R.F.C., and went to France at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. In the following year he was given responsibility of taking over the control of aircraft equipment from the Army Ordnance Stores Department, serving under Lieutenant-Colonel (now Lord) Trenchard, and handling supplies of all kinds except foodstuffs. From the winter of 1916 he commanded an Aircraft Park on the Western Front.

At the end of 1916 Air Commodore Fletcher returned to the War Office to become Inspector of Stores Depots, R.F.C., and was given the monumental task of amalgamating the stores and supply organisations of the R.N.A.S. and R.F.C. for the newly constituted R.A.F. He was afterwards appointed Director of Air Quartermaster Services, serving in this post with the rank of Brigadier-General until the end of the War when he served under Sir John Salmond at an R.A.F. station in England.’

He was awarded the C.M.G. and C.B.E.

Post-war, Fletcher was given command of the R.A.F’s Aircraft Park in Iraq in 1921, with the rank of Wing Commander and, having then returned to the U.K., was for several years Deputy Director of Organisation at the Air Ministry, finally retiring with the honorary rank of Air Commodore in 1930. He then, according to the same communique, played his part in ‘the trail that Imperial Airways blazed across the Empire’, acting as the airline’s Ground Services Manager with responsibility for the entire ground organisation on newly opened routes as far afield as Africa, Australia and India.

But he returned to uniform in the 1939-45 War, when he served as a Deputy Director of Personnel at the Air Ministry and as A.O.C. Administration in Transport Command, in addition to a final tour of duty as a Liaison Officer between Transport Command and the civilian airline B.O.A.C.

The Air Commodore, ‘a cock-sparrow of a man, about five feet nine inches tall, fair-haired and with a pair of sparkling blue eyes betokening the energy that lay in him’, died at Willesden, Middlesex in January 1956; sold with a file of research.