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Create new listThe magnificent ‘Defence of Sadon 1891’ D.S.O. group awarded to Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., D.S.O., Royal Artillery, later Commander-in-Chief in Mesopotamia and Quarter-Master General in India
(a) Distinguished Service Order, V.R., silver-gilt and enamels, complete with top suspension brooch
(b) India General Service 1854-94, 2 clasps, Burma 1889-92, Chin Hills 1892-93 (Lieut. G. F. Macmunn, No. 6 Bo. Mt. By.)
(c) India General Service 1895-1902, 3 clasps, Punjab Frontier 1897-98, Samana 1897, Tirah 1897-98 (Lieutt. G. F. MacMunn, No. 1 Kashmir Mn. By.)
(d) Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, 3 clasps, Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Transvaal (Major G. F. MacMunn, D.S.O. R.F.A.)
(e) King’s South Africa 1901-02, 2 clasps, South Africa 1901, South Africa 1902 (Major G. F. MacMunn, D.S.O. R.F.A.)
(f) 1914-15 Star (Bt. Col. G. F. Macmunn, D.S.O.)
(g) British War and Victory Medals, with M.I.D. oak leaf (Maj. Gen. Sir G. F. MacMunn)
(h) General Service 1918-62, 1 clasp, Kurdistan (Maj. Gen. Sir G. F. MacMunn)
(i) Defence Medal 1939-45, unnamed as issued
(j) Delhi Durbar 1911, unnamed as issued
(k) Jubilee 1935, unnamed as issued
(l) Legion of Honour, Officer’s breast badge, gold and enamels
(m) Royal Artillery Institution, silver prize medal, 47mm (Lieut. G. F. MacMunn, D.S.O., R.A.)
(n) The King’s Medal, Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, G.V.R., silver, 55mm (Lieut-General Sir G. F. MacMunn, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., D.S.O., for the Sir George Birdwood memorial Lecture “The Romance of the Martial Races of India”. Session 1931-32) contained in its fitted presentation case, the first thirteen on original ‘Court’ mounting as worn, some minor enamel chipping but generally very fine or better £5000-6000
This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals.
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George Fletcher MacMunn, the eldest son of Surgeon J. A. MacMunn, P.M.O., Chelsea Hospital, and Charlotte, daughter of the Rev. George Mathias, Chaplain Royal, was born on 14 August 1869, and brought up at the Royal Hospital, ‘in the heart of all the glory and pathos of Army tradition’. His nurse was the widow of a Sergeant in the 32nd Light Infantry and had been through the Defence of the Lucknow Residency; and his childhood companions men who had served from Waterloo to Lucknow - ‘old James McKay of the ‘Forty-Twa’, John Irby who had lost a leg in the Quarries at Inkerman, Johnnie Green of the Rifle Brigade, all scars and wounds from the Mutiny ... and so forth’. Educated at Kensington Grammar School and ‘The Shop’, he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in July 1888, and the following autumn embarked with the 55th Field Battery for India under a Major ‘of extreme outward ferocity and two senior subalterns whose reputations were second to none in the regiment’. ‘Steeped to the teeth in tradition’, as he was, he was fascinated to find that the dining table in the Gunner Mess at Kirkee was the one on which the bodies of officers of the 24th Foot had been laid out after Chilianwala . The 24th sold it to the 14th Light Dragoons who used it during the Mutiny, and in turn they had sold it when they left for home. Indeed nothing ever changed very much in cantonmental India, as MacMunn discovered when he asked an old General what it was like before the Mutiny. “Oh,” came the reply, “very much like it is now, except that you young fellows wear such beastly clothes.”
Promoted Lieutenant in 1891, MacMunn veered away from the usual goal of ambitious gunner subalterns - an appointment in the R.H.A. - and put his name down for the native mountain artillery, being ‘agog to see the frontiers’. Being engaged to be married, he was anxious to secure the extra pay. He was duly appointed to No. 5 Bombay Mountain Battery, and hearing that they ‘bestrode chestnut Arabs and wore lion tamer boots’ provided himself with both. En route to join his new battery at Loralai he met at a rest-house in one of the passes a famous frontier character, Colonel Nicholson, who had many of the attributes of his namesake, and around whom many yarns centered. ‘The story then most current was that at a recent parade at which the Colonel was inspecting the recruits wearing side-arms, a Kakur lad had stepped forth and tried to stab him with his bayonet. The former carried a huge oak stick which he swung round, catching the lad on the knuckes and sending the weapon hurling away. With a “Fall in, you fool!” he passed on.’
MacMunn did not remain long at Loralai for news soon came that he was to take the place of a subaltern in No. 6 Mountain Battery at Bhamo in Upper Burma, who had died of malaria. Accordingly he travelled to Calcutta, crossed to Rangoon, and at Mandalay boarded a steamer for the long journey up the Irrawaddy to Bhamo. On board the steamer he learned that his guns were a long way north of Bhamo and were in fact employed with the Irrawaddy Column, under Major Yule of the Devons, suppressing banditry up among the Kachins of the Confluence. He continued on via the Third Defile, to Myitkhyina, ‘The-Town-of-Big-Fish’, and was here ordered to take command of a convoy of stores for the newly-built post of Sadon, where the Irrawaddy Column had left its sick, four marches away in the hills. His party consisted of a dozen Gurkha mounted infantry and a native officer.
‘I swam my little party of mules and ponies over the river,’ wrote MacMunn, ‘and started on my march into the mountains ... For two days we climbed away and bivouacked peacefully enough and started without ado on the last stage but one from Sadon. Here the Indian officer asked my leave to ride straight through with four men, as he had tobacco and letters for his own officers of the military police. All was quiet, he urged, and no one would molest us, and indeed so it seemed, so I let him go.’
‘The day was hot and drowsy, insects droned and hardly a leaf stirred as with my convoy and the eight remaining troopers we wound our way down a very steep path towards the Namli River, which we could hear on the stony bed below. My Arab stumbled behind me after the manner of Arabs, his reins over my arm, and I remember to this day wondering if any power on earth would make me mount and canter down that hill-side. Far below in the jungles a shot would echo, said to be the villagers scaring deer from their buckwheat. Then something scurried round the corner, and I beheld in front of me one of the Gurkhas of the jemadar’s party. He had lost his snider carbine and his Kilmarnock cap, his Mongolian eyes were like teacups, his round little Burman pony was pulled up on its haunches as the boy looked up at me and shouted, “Bahuti Daku nadi men!” - “There are many dacoits in the river!” - and then tried to explain how riding unsuspecting towards the ford, they had been greeted with a volley from some new entrenchments on the opposite bank, his pony had been shot and his carbine lost, so they had sent him back with the news. That was enough to banish the respect for the steep path. Below I could now recognize the muffled noises of the sullen carbines. Scrambling on my horse and taking four more of the men, we slithered down that road to the thick undergrowth of the river bank, and I crawled to where the native officer was lying with two of his Gurkhas, and peered at the opposite bank some 80 yards away.’
MacMunn found himself confronted by a Kachin entrenchment, strengthened by logs, stone walls, and split bamboo revetments, commanding the only possible crossing place for some distance both up and down river. As musketry ripped through the leaves on his side of the water, MacMunn decided to try a flanking movement. ‘So I left the jemadar where he was to fire steadily, while I slipped downstream where a small island looked as if it might help one in a scramble across ... away we went slipping into the stream opposite the islet. It was deep and boulder-strewn and in full view of the enemy, who let us have it, splash and splutter, till scared but unharmed by what was a very real baptême de feu for all of us - all lads - we lay dripping and breathless, waiting to make a second rush that should carry us over. After a few minutes I called to my drenched little otter hounds, and we plunged into the stream again, this time with every available piece turned on us to the accompaniment of shouting, of abuse and the banging of gongs.’
‘Again fortune held us scathless, and we scrambled up the bank and started to enfilade the enemy trenches, and, as our breath returned, to cheer like mad. Then cheering again we rushed on to the flank of a big reveted work, and that finished it. There was a wail and a scuttle of blue skirts, and we cheered once more to the answering shouts of our party opposite. Then to assemble, collect the convoy, and discuss the position! Fourteen fighting men all told, two and a half stages completed, one and a half still ahead! What was to be done? I sat like a master among his pack of hounds and the jemadar urged that the whole countryside must be in rebellion, that the Chinese must be over, for there were rifles among the muskets, and only Chinese could make such revetments as those of the trenches we had just captured. He advised return! But I was a damned cantankerous Irishman, and with those confident little otter hounds around me in no mood to go back. On! would be the order, and as we were too few to bivouac we must go straight through the remaining march and a half to Sadon. The Gurkha faces said, Aye, aye!’
MacMunn and his party proceeded to climb out of the Namli valley, and from the village of Kritu were shadowed by a crowd of tribesmen who fired occasionally at the rear of the convoy. Eight miles from Kritu they approached a stream, the Tingri Kha, where the Irrawaddy Column had first been opposed, and here MacMunn supposed he too might encounter further opposition. But the stockades were unoccupied and they passed on round a bend. ‘Then a volley rapped out in front of us, and the jemadar fell shot through the chest. Eighty yards ahead was a high reveted stockade across the road with protruding bamboo loopholes. The Gurkhas, skirmishers by instinct, jumped aside into the jungle, and as I followed a musket ball caught me in the arm. That was soon put right, and leaving three men with the wounded jemadar I took the three down into thick undergrowth, intending to work up behind the stockade, the jemadar calling to us to turn upwards. Up we came to the sound of beating gongs and defiant shouts. But our direction was wrong. The Gurkha in front of me, who was hacking a path up a very steep slope, slipped; using his shoulder as a stepping stone I swung myself up on the track, but immediately came up against the stockade on the wrong side. The only thing to do was to climb it, and I got myself on top with a firm foothold, blazing with my revolver into a mass of shouting blue-clad tribesmen armed with guns and spears, who fired and threw the latter as two of my little lads clambered up beside me and loosed off their carbines. That was the end of it and the enemy vanished into the jungle. We cleared the road, collected the convoy, tied up our wounds and started on. Far away on a distant hill-top we could now see the fort of Sadon, where we expected to win our way that night, and from which, said the men, an outpost in the village of Sadon was furnished, and as we looked fire opened from another breastwork in front of us and a bit down hill. Too tired to outflank this new obstacle, we rushed cheering and entered it as the enemy fled after an ineffective volley. On and on we now pushed, still fired at, till nightfall found us at the Sadon-Kha, to find the sapper bridge destroyed, and the ford spiked, while, as we searched for spikes, muskets squibbed at us from all sides.’
‘Struggling up to Sadon village, and turning into a street, every hut seemed to blaze at us. The men’s ponies and the pack mules here stampeded, and with ammunition almost finished we staggered up the last 500 feet to where we hoped our garrison might still be on their perch, a fact of which I had begun to have a sickening doubt. But at last there before our eyes stood up the profile of our own stockade, clear-cut against the starry sky. Would they fire at us? They had not expected us. We tried a cheer, a happy hysterical tired men’s cheer ... And then came a bugle call to advance, and an answering cheer, and the spiked gate arose and men surged out, and I found myself carried on men’s shoulders to the Commandant [Harrison of the Sappers].’
The Sadon post contained some 130 men together with a number of Gurkha women and children. For three days Chinese Blackflags surged around the fort, until finally, after a further ten days of ‘a fairly desperate defence’, the garrison was relieved from the south by a column under Captain Davies of the Devons. ‘Then’, MacMunn continued, ‘came up the Commander-in-Chief from Burma, Sir Richard Stewart, and Mat Gossett, the Brigadier in Mandalay, and to my surprise I was to be made a fuss of. The force paraded on a long spur, the garrison of Sadon on the right, and my little party in the post of honour on the right of all. I was fallen out, and General Stewart, a Mutiny man and a friend of Bobs, said I should have the Victoria Cross. The Commander-in-Chief in Madras and Lord Roberts the Commander-in-Chief in India were good enough to recommend me for the Cross, and the Government of India sent home a despatch about the matter, but the Duke of Cambridge gave me the D.S.O. instead ...’
MacMunn obtained for his Sikh Jemadar the I.O.M., but failed to get the same for four of the Gurkhas, the Government reasoning that while the whole party deserved it, they could not expect as highly paid military policemen to share ‘to the full in a soldier’s reward’. For the remainder of the summer and the autumn of 1892 MacMunn remained at Sadon. He went to Bhamo in the winter but found that the rest of his battery had gone to India, and in June-July 1893 saw service with his sub division in the mountains with the expedition to Sima, some fifty miles south of Sadon. In late 1893 he returned to India, and soon after his marriage to Alice, eldest daughter of Colonel J. R. Watson, I.S.C., he was appointed Inspecting Officer of the Kashmir Imperial Service Artillery.
At the fanatical rising in the Swat Valley in July 1897, which hailed the general revolt all along the frontier, MacMunn was in Jammu squaring up his kit, preparatory to first Home leave, when a telegram arrived ordering him to proceed at once to Ferozepore, to join the Jaipur Imperial Service Transport Corps coming up from the south. He accompanied the corps to Miranzai where transport was badly needed, and marched hard to supply the force under Major-General Yeatman-Biggs trying to relieve the outposts on the Samana and protect Miranzai from the joint predatory efforts of the Afridis and Orakzais. Following the fall of the Saragarhi post and the massacre to a man of the 36th Sikhs therein, and other outrages, the Tirah Field Force was formed in early autumn to exact reparation in the heart of the tribesmen’s own highlands. The Field Force was to enter Tirah not up the long narrow valleys that led from the Indus, but from far up in the wide Miranzai Valley by scaling the far passes and taking the long valleys in reverse - a plan designed to minimize the formidable resistance to be expected. MacMunn, meanwhile, was ordered to return to Jammu and mobilize No. 1 Kashmir Mountain Battery, and return with it to join the Tirah F.F., now concentrating from all quarters at Shinawari.
‘Into the midst of this gathering’, wrote MacMunn, ‘I marched at the head of No. 1 Kashmir Mountain Battery, and a remarkable and martial sight it was. One division was marching over the Kohat Pass from Peshawar, the other was already in Miranzai, - we could see the long winding columns and pack animals zig-zagging down the mountain-side, - and the whole place was seething with pack artillery, with mules and with camels. We were pushed up, at once, some three marches to the point below the great pass of Chagru Kotal, which leads to the Afridi Tirah by way of the Orakzai uplands, and to this day the memory of those crowding echelons of all arms stirs my memory, the jinkity-jink of the gun mules, the Bengal Lancers with their pennons flying high above the acrid dust, and long strings of commissariat camels padding softly by right and left of the roadway. With my echelon, lilted by a battalion of the Frontier Force to that lawless Kabul lovesong Zakhmi Dil - The Bleeding Heart - we swung out in the early morning hours beneath the great grey bastions and the forty-pounder guns that frowned therefrom on the turbulent city of Kohat, and ere long found ourselves in bivouac on the rolling plain of the Shinawri, below the ridge and heights of Dargai, a few thousand yards ahead and high above. The top of the heights bristled with tribal banners, and in the telescope lens defiant tribesmen danced derision atop the rocky ledges that crowned them.’
The storming of Dargai Heights, the principal dramatic action of the campaign, took place on 20 October 1897, and was witnessed ‘breathlessly’ by MacMunn. The campaign thereafter dragged on, with MacMunn passing the winter months in the snow on the Samana until the spring of 1898, whence he returned to Jammu. The next year saw him in a Captain’s appointment with a Siege Train Company, ‘deep in slide rules’, in the south of England. On the outbreak of the Boer War he was appointed to the command of the howitzer portion of the corps ammunition column which he accompanied to South Africa. He subsequently served in command of the 37th Battery in Lord Methuen’s division taking part in the advance on Kimberley. Shortly after the relief of that place, he was given the task of destroying Boer Krupp guns concealed in the scrub near Fourteen Streams station. His guns were brought up under cover of dark to an old police redoubt. As soon as he opened fire at dawn, ranging in on some bell tents as the only clue to the Krupps’ position, the Boers replied with an intense barrage. ‘I was leaning on the parapet’, he recalled, ‘looking through a telescope and correcting the elevation, when a shell struck the sand-bag in front of me. The telescope was smashed and I collapsed apparently dead, to the great delight of the men, who would now have something to talk about - the Captain dead! They pulled me under the howitzer’s muzzle out of the way, and went on. Slowly I came to with the foul smell of cordite in my nostrils and the jar of discharges in my head. I was only concussed, and automatically tried to go on with an order altering the range that was on my lips when the shell fell. But I was pretty rotten for some days with shell shock.’ General Arthur Paget then galloped up and taking in the scene as he turned his horse around, remarked, “Well, you’ve made a mess of it! Wire me your casualties in the evening!”
In 1900 MacMunn took part in several cumbersome attempts to catch up with De Wet, before being appointed to the command of six guns in an irregular force known as the Commander-in-Chief’s Body-Guard. In 1903 he passed the Staff College and piloted his horse Donovan to victory in the annual heavy-weight point-to-point. Returning to India, he was unexpectedly promoted en route and appointed to the command of the 80th Field Battery at Saugor, but soon accepted a war staff post in the Derajat Military District. He remained on the frontier for four years hoping for a war which never came and afterwards joined Kitchener’s staff at Simla. At the end of the latter tour he returned to the 37th Battery, R.F.A., as its commanding officer at Lahore, and then went back to Simla during the period of reorganization under Kitchener’s successor, General Sir O’Moore Creagh, V.C. MacMunn joined the new Chief of Staff’s department and was soon identified as one of Sir Douglas Haig’s ‘golden-haired boys’ and was constantly selected by him for work in connection with his Staff tours, usually being detailed to command the enemy against him, and thus assisted in developing the doubtful system of battle in which Haig then was training himself and his staff.
In 1911 MacMunn was present at the Delhi Durbar, an event which he firmly believed India needed, and later that same year he was invited to fill a new post at the War Office, ominously looking into the horsing of an expeditionary force to the Continent. In 1913 MacMunn was promoted Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and the following year was appointed Assistant Director of Remounts. During the Great War MacMunn served with distinction in the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia notably under General Sir Stanley Maude as Inspector-General of Communications. He was twelve times mentioned in despatches, and given the Brevet of Colonel on 1 April 1915. He became Major-General and a C.B. in 1916; a K.C.B. in 1917; a C.S.I. in 1918; and a K.C.S.I. in 1919. In the latter year he was appointed General Officer Commanding-in-Chief in Mesopotamia. In 1921 he returned to India as Quartermaster-General with ultimate responsibility for all movements and quarterings, supply and transport, and the holding and distribution of all war stores, and remounts. He retired in 1925 and from 1932-38 held command of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. He served with the Home Guard during 1940-42. Sir George MacMunn was the author of several well known books on Indian and military subjects, most notably The Armies of India published in 1911, Martial Races of India (1933), and History of the Sihk Pioneers (1936). Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn died on 23 August 1952, aged 83.
Refs: The Distinguished Service Order 1886-1923 (Creagh); Behind the Scenes in Many Wars (MacMunn).
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