Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Three: Captain G. S. Miller, Royal Army Medical Corps, who was killed in action at High Wood on the Somme in September 1916

1914-15 Star (Lieut., R.A.M.C.); British War and Victory Medals (Capt.), good very fine or better (3) £300-350

George Sefton Miller was born in 1891, the son of Leonard Miller, the Vice-Chairman of the Miller Hospital for South-East London (Greenwich), and was educated at Colfe’s Grammar School and Guy’s Hospital, where he took the diplomas of F.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. in 1912, and was for a time the House Surgeon to Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane.

Appointed a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in April 1915, he went to France in the same month and, having been advanced to Captain, was killed in action at High Wood on the Somme on 8 September 1916, aged 25 years, while attached to the 1st Field Ambulance. He met his death under the following circumstances:
‘During a local attack and long before the enemy bombardment had abated, he expressed his intention of taking two squads of stretcher-bearers up to the Regimental Aid Posts to bring down any wounded men he could find. On his way back he was helping a bearer lift a wounded man out of a trench when all three were killed instantly by a shell. His fellow officers write of Captain Miller’s courage in the face of danger - he applied to be transferred to a more exposed position - and his warm-heartedness as a friend. Just before his death he had ridden 10 miles to see if he could do anything for a fellow officer. If he had lived his surgical skill would have brought him to the fore’ (The Lancet refers).

Miller was buried in the Dantzig Alley British Cemetery, Mametz.