Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A rare Crimea Medal awarded to E. Walkinshaw, Ottoman Medical Service, who died of cholera at the port of Eupatoria, Crimea in August 1855

Crimea 1854-56, 2 clasps, Inkermann, Sebastopol (Dispenser Edwn. Walkinshaw. Ott. Med. Staff.) contemporarily engraved naming, minor edge bruising and contact marks, very fine £300-£400

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Medals from the Collection of Peter Duckers.

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Edwin Walkinshaw was born in 1819 at Coleford, Gloucestershire, the son of John and Harriet Walkinshaw. He married Sophie Hounsfield in 1840 and was working as a chemist in Sheffield prior to his service in the Crimea. The Inkermann clasp on his medal indicates a fairly early arrival in the Crimea where it is assumed he was initially dispensing alongside army surgeons. Having survived Inkermann and, presumably, duties at Balaklava and near Sebastopol, he was to be next employed working with Turkish casualties at their hospital at Eupatoria. Volunteers from the British medical service and specially hired civilian doctors, dressers and dispensers served with Turkish forces in the Crimea. There were Turkish hospitals at Balaklava (which might explain the clasps on this medal), Constantinople, Smyrna and Eupatoria, the main Turkish army base in the Crimea, and it was here that Walkinshaw met his death on 15 August 1855, through the very cholera he was no doubt treating. The Turkish Army’s medical facilities were deemed primitive even by the notorious standards of the Crimean War (hence the offer of British medical assistance) and cholera in particular ravaged the large army and navy bases in the Black Sea and the Crimea. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph and The Sheffield Independent both reported his death by carrying the same news item:

Mr E. Walkinshaw. – A letter has been received from the Crimea, announcing the death, by cholera, of Mr Edwin Walkinshaw, of the British Medical Staff at Eupatoria, on the 15th ultimo. Mr Walkinshaw formerly resided in Sheffield.
H. Edsall, Esq., Surgeon in Charge writes:
‘I assure you that his loss is much felt by the remaining members of the staff who felt a kind regard for him for his uniform willingness to oblige on every occasion that lay in his power. His remains were followed to their last resting place by all members of the staff at present in Eupatoria and the Chaplain of [H.M.S.] Leopard officiated. It is our intention to erect a suitable tablet over his grave at the earliest opportunity.’

Edsall, along with a significant number of the medical volunteers, also died of disease in the Crimea. Many are buried and commemorated in the Haidar Pasha Cemetery at Uskudar although there is now no record of Walkinshaw’s grave in Crimea or any memorial to him.

Only a handful of medals to the Ottoman Medical Service are known to survive, three are to Surgeons, a couple are known to Dressers (who tended to be men on their way to full medical qualifications) and only one to a Dispenser, the medal to Walkinshaw.

Sold with a file of copied research including an article written by Peter Duckers for Armourer magazine entitled ‘The Ottoman Medical Service in the Crimea’.