Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The 1914-15 Star awarded to Captain A. E. W. Mason, Manchester Regiment, the noted English novelist best remembered for The Four Feathers, he worked as a secret agent during the war and was a witness to the execution in Paris of the infamous spy Marta Hari in October 1916

1914-15 Star (Capt. A. E. W. Mason Manch. R.) good very fine £200-£260

Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was born on 7 May 1865, and educated at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he received his B.A. After a brief appearance on the stage with F. R. Benson’s Shakespeare Company and Compton’s Comedy Company, he commenced writing novels, the first of these, A Romance of Westdale, being published in 1895. His most famous novel, The Four Feathers, was published in 1907, the year after he had been elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry. In 1910 he introduced the character of Hanaud, a French detective, in the novel At the Villa Rose.

During the Great War, he served in the Manchester Regiment as a Captain, and later attached to the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty with a commission as a Major in the Royal Marine Light Infantry. Mason seems to have been recruited into the Secret Service in 1915 and spent the period 1915-16 cruising about Spain and Morocco setting up counter-espionage networks. After his commission in the R.M.L.I. in 1917 he was despatched to Mexico where he carried on his intelligence work until the end of the war.

After the war his writing career continued to flourish with works like The House of Arrows in 1924, No Other Tiger, 1927, and The Prisoner in the Opal, 1929. His Fire over England, published in 1937, was a very early film starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. In 1939 The Four Feathers was made into a film by Alexander Korda, winning the best British feature film category at the Venice Film Festival. The novel has been filmed twice more, most recently on 2001. The 1960 film Sink the Bismarck was also based on one of his novels.

In 1943 Mason was elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity, Oxford, and in 1946 became President of the Alleyn Club. He was an F.R.G.S., President of the Swiss Alpine Club (London branch) and a member of the Alpine Club and the Royal Yacht Squadron. He died on 22 November 1948.

Sold with a copy of R. L. Green’s biography A. E. W. Mason, The Adventure of a Story-Teller, Max Parrish, London, 1952.