Orders, Decorations and Medals

An excessively rare Great War airship pilot’s D.S.C. group of four awarded to Flight Commander W. F. Horner, Royal Naval Air Service, who, having served in the Airship Expeditionary Force in the Aegean 1915-16, was killed on an operational flight in the SSP.4 over the North Sea in December 1917

Distinguished Service Cross, G.V.R., hallmarks for London 1917; 1914-15 Star (S. Lt., R.N.); British War and Victory Medals (Flt. Cr., R.N.A.S.), together with original illuminated Memorial Scroll in the name of ‘Flight Commander William Frith Horner, D.S.C., R.N.’, with date ‘Dec. 21 1917’ added later, and a fine quality studio portrait photograph, the whole contained in a contemporary folding, part-glazed fitted leather display case, extremely fine (Lot) £4000-5000

D.S.C. London Gazette 1 May 1918:

‘To officers of the Royal Naval Air Service for zeal and devotion to duty in the period 1 July to 31 December 1917.’

The original recommendation states:

‘Flight Commander Horner has displayed great zeal and energy as Commanding Officer of Caldale Airship Station. He has carried out many submarine and convoy patrols in the North Sea under trying conditions.’

William Frith Horner, a native of Warlingham, Surrey, who was born in December 1894, was appointed a Midshipman in May 1912 and was serving in the battleship H.M.S. Vanguard on the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Shortly afterwards, however, he transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service, being appointed a Flight Sub. Lieutenant in March 1915 and trained as an airship pilot at Kingsworth, Polegate and Dover.

Once qualified, he joined the Airship Expeditionary Force in the Aegean at the end of 1915, initially with a posting to Mudros, on the Island of Lemnos, but such was the attention paid to the sheds used for the force’s Sea Scout Airships by Turkish bombers that the base became known as the “Pepper-pot”. In due course, therefore, the force was transferred to a new base at Kassandra, where, as confirmed by the following report, Horner assumed command sometime in 1916:

‘He is a most excellent Sea Scout Airship pilot, and has been constantly patrolling Kephalo and Mudros. He is now in command of Kassandra. He attempted a night spotting flight over Gallipoli. A most excellent officer with a good command of men. He is recommended for promotion’ (Report of the Wing Captain, Eastern Mediterranean, refers).

Horner was accordingly advanced to Flight Commander soon after his return to the U.K. and commenced his next operational posting at Kirkwall Airship Station in April 1917. Transferring to Caldale Airship Station in the Orkneys, as Commanding Officer, that July, he flew many anti-submarine and convoy patrols in the period leading up to his death on 21 December 1917, mainly in Sea Scout Pusher SSP.4, which airship had been placed on the strength of the Caldale establishment on 12 June 1917, and carried a crew of three, comprising pilot, W./T. Operator and Engineer. Official records further reveal that the SSP. 4 had amassed 165 airborne hours prior to her disappearance in December 1917, many of them with Horner at the helm, a record saved for posterity in Caldale’s “Airship Daily Reports” (now held in the National Archives at Kew). Thus her very first flight under Horner on 5 July 1917:

‘On SSP.4’s first patrol today, magneto drive seized up owing to choking of oil pipes. Leading Mechanic Anthony took down magneto and drive, and started engine off Remy by cranking propellor. Airship was drifting for 40 minutes. She was ready for flight two hours after landing.’

Notwithstanding such mechanical defects, Horner took SSP.4 on a submarine patrol of 220 miles less than a week later, and followed up with another patrol of similar distance on the 21st. Then on 12 August he flew a 170 mile mine-searching and convoy escort patrol, while on the 17th - following a few local flights for ‘dummy bomb dropping and Lewis gun pratice’ - he flew 110 miles in the course of another convoy escort patrol. And so his work continued right up until his demise on 21 December 1917, when the SSP.4 failed to return from patrol - wreckage was subsequently discovered on Westray Island, and Horner, who was 22 years of age, was posted missing, believed drowned. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial. Sadly, too, the aforementioned Leading Mechanic E. F. Anthony, himself an “Airship D.S.M.”

Sold with four original wartime photographs, one of them showing a Sea Scout Pusher about to embark on patrol, the reverse captioned, ‘Orkneys, 1917, Fritz in centre’.