Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Five: Corporal R. G. Valentine, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, later Royal Pay Corps, whose group is accompanied by a typescript memoir by the recipient

1939-45 Star; France and Germany Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45; Efficiency Medal, G.VI.R., 1st issue, Territorial (5382549 Cpl. R. Valentine. R.P.C.), mounted as worn; together with seven commemorative medals, including the recipient’s Dunkirk Medal; and a quantity of badges, good very fine (lot) £80-£120

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Medals from the Collection of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum.

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Reginald George Valentine was born in London in 1911 and was employed as a gardener at Worcester College, Oxford. Attesting for the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, ‘he was part of the British Expeditionary Force which crossed into France in 1939 and was one of only a handful of his battalion’s survivors of the German blitzkrieg to be evacuated from Dunkirk the following year. After taking part in the 1944 D-Day landings, he saved a group of Belgians from death at the hands of the Nazis’ (recipient’s obituary refers). He died in Oxford in 1992.

Sold with various certificates, photographs, an obituary cutting and a 22 page typescript memoir, modestly entitled ‘the orphan who became a hero’.