Orders, Decorations and Medals

Three: The Reverend G. G. W. Clemenger, Royal Navy

Baltic 1854-55 (Revd., H.M.S. Gladiator); Crimea 1854-56, 1 clasp, Sebastopol (Revd., H.M.S. Gladiator); Turkish Crimea, Sardinian issue (Revd., H.M.S. Gladiater) fitted with Crimea type suspension, all with contemporary engraved naming, note misspelling of ship’s name on the last, all with re-fixed suspension and sometime plugged, contact marks and edge bruising, otherwise very fine (3) £450-550

The group is sold with Clemenger’s original manuscript diary for the period May 1854 to December 1862. The detailed entries cover his period of war service in H.M.S. Gladiator during the Baltic and Crimean operations of 1854-56, and give some excellent first hand accounts of daily life on board ship and ashore. On 19 August 1855, he went ashore to view the battlefield after the action at Tchernaya: ‘After breakfast went on shore and borrowed a horse from Hewett to ride over the battlefield. On my way rode through the Sardinian camp which was arranged on a hill over Tchernaya. When I arrived on the battlefield there was a flag of truce up as the Russians were burying the remainder of the dead, about 100 who lay on both sides of the river. There was a nasty smell off them and they had become quite blackened and swollen ... This was the first battlefield I have ever walked over and seeing the dead bodies scattered about made the horrors of war appear more terrible ... The French soldiers had a great number of medals stripped off the bodies for sale.’ Approximately 150pp., restored and rebound in red morocco leather, a rare journal.

George Godfrey Clemenger entered the Royal Navy as a Chaplain aboard H.M.S. Gladiator in May 1854 and remained in her until May 1857. During that period he was present at the capture of Bomarsund, when Gladiator was under fire for three hours while endeavouring to help the grounded Steam Frigate Penelope. Clemenger next sailed in Gladiator for the Black Sea where she was frozen in for the winter during the blockade of Odessa. Gladiator subsequently accompanied the expedition to Kertch and was present at the night attacks on Sebastopol and with the Inshore Squadron at the capture of Kinburn. Returning home in May 1857, Clemenger was next appointed to the Hawke, in which ship he served off the coast of Ireland, and in September 1861 to the Forte. In this ship he travelled to South America, his journal ending with her arrival at Rio de Janiero in December 1862.