The Bill and Angela Strong Medal Collection

A remarkable Great War D.S.O. group of seven awarded to Captain E. C. Lance, Somerset Light Infantry, late King Edward’s Horse and West Yorkshire Regiment, who was twice honoured by Franco for his part in rescuing a hundred nationalists in the Spanish Civil War: high on the republicans’ wanted list as “The Man in the Tartan Jacket”, Lance was eventually captured by them and sentenced to death, but ultimately lived to tell the tale after 15 months of hellish imprisonment - an extraordinary story vividly retold by C. E. Lucas Phillips in The Spanish Pimpernel

Distinguished Service Order, G.V.R., silver-gilt and enamel; 1914-15 Star (17929 L. Cpl. E. C. Lance, W. York. R.); British War and Victory Medals, M.I.D. oak leaf (Capt. E. C. Lance); Russia, Order of St. Anne, Third Class breast badge, with swords, 35 x 35mm., bronze-gilt and enamel, unmarked; Spain, Order of the Yoke and Arrows, fascist regime issue, breast badge, gilt and enamel, with clasp, ‘Christopher Lance’, in its case of issue; Spain, City of Madrid, Presentation Gold Medal, in its fitted Juan Feu, Madrid case of issue, together with related miniature dress medals (7), including Russian Order of St. Anne, with swords, in silver-gilt and enamel, generally good very fine, the fascist piece extremely rare, so, too, the D.S.O. to such a junior officer (14) £6000-7000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Bill and Angela Strong Medal Collection.

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D.S.O. London Gazette 26 September 1917:

‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He was the only officer left of his battalion when the final objective was reached. Both flanks of his battalion were exposed and they were almost surrounded by the enemy. Thereupon he skilfully withdrew his men from a difficult position to a strong one 200 yards in the rear, checked the advance of the enemy, and held on under intense artillery fire until relieved two days later. The sound tactics, cool judgement and the daring example which he set his men undoubtedly secured a very important position.’

Edwin Christopher Lance was born in Taunton, Somerset in June 1893, and was educated at Lancing College prior to enlisting in King Edward’s Horse in December 1912. Advanced to Corporal in January 1915, he deserted shortly afterwards, his father later stating in a letter to the authorities that he did not wish to disclose the reasons for his son’s sudden departure - instead he confirmed that Lance had enlisted in the West Yorkshire Regiment at York a few days later, which, after further investigation, proved entirely true.

Active service in France and Russia

Embarked for France with the 2nd Battalion in March 1915, the ex-deserter quickly made up for his past misdemeanours, being awarded a commission in the Field that September, when he joined the 6th Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry, as a 2nd Lieutenant. And he remained actively engaged in that capacity until the end of hostilities, winning his D.S.O. for the the above cited deeds in the attack on Inverness Copse on 22 August 1917, during the battle of Ypres, a desperate engagement in which the 6th Battalion took heavy casualties - so heavy, in fact, that Lance, serving as a Temporary Captain and O.C. No. 3 Company, was the only officer left standing after the initial advance. The action is described in detail in the regimental history, including the text of the field messages sent by Lance to his C.O.:

‘9.30 a.m. Arrived eastern edge of Copse with few oddments, about 70 men in all. We were being surrounded so had been forced to withdraw. Both flanks in air. We must have reinforcements.’

This was followed by a pigeon message:

‘9.55 a.m. Have arrived. Strength 2 platoons east of edge of Copse. Am being surrounded so we must fall back. No further supports have arrived.’



The next message was timed 10.05 a.m.:

‘Pushed back from east edge of Copse. More reinforcements required. Lees (10th D.L.I.) unable to give me any more. Am still holding largest part of Copse.’

A message which followed gave the dispositions of the Somerset men:

‘My line now runs from J.14.c.8.5 (northern edge of Copse) to Tank Trap (on the Menin road running through the Copse) to J.14.c.7.3 (a point on the road which runs north-west from the Chateau to the Menin road and about 300 yards from the ruined buildings). Still cannot find the Cornwalls (6th D.C.L.I., who attacked on the left of the 6th Somersets). Germans are congregating at strong point about J.14.c.9.4 (on the Menin road and about 150 yards east of the Somersets). Two platoons of Durham Light Infantry have come up on our left. We have 90 men in all.’

At 11.15 a.m. another message from the O.C., No. 3 Company, was sent back:

‘We hold strong point at J.14.c.9.5 Several enemy machine-guns in front of us and Copse strongly held. We will hold on at all costs.’

The precarious position of these brave fellows can be better appreciated by these last two messages, which give the co-ordinates of the opposing positions: they were but fifty yards apart. About 1 p.m., a hostile party of about one hundred Germans marched up the Menin road and turned south, just where the Chateau road joined up with the former. Several small parties of the enemy, each of about twenty men, were also seen moving up north and south. Next, a whole battalion of Germans was observed advancing over the ridge east of Inverness Copse. In response to our S.O.S. the guns opened fire and these hostile advances were checked. But again, about 2 p.m., the enemy was seen massing in the valley of the Bassvillebeek and some minutes later he was reported ‘advancing towards us north of Menin road, 400 yards in front of our line.’ Machine-gun, Lewis-gun and artillery fire again checked this advance and dispersed the enemy. At evening the line held by the 6th Somersets appears to have been from a point about 250 yards in and from the western edge of Inverness Copse, back along Jasper Avenue to the bend in the road running directly south from Clapham Junction and just south-east of Stirling Castle. During the night the 6th Somersets and one company of D.L.I., who had been holding the front line throughout the whole day, were relieved by the K.O.Y.L.I. and other companies of the Durhams, and moved back to the western edges of Inverness Copse in support. The Somerset men were greatly exhausted. In addition to the attack early in the morning of the 22nd, they had had to beat off three counter-attacks pressed with vigour. It is impossible to give the numbers of the Battalion at this period, but they must have been small, and it was but a remnant which held the western edges of the Copse.’

But Lance’s trials were far from over:

‘Although the Battalion narrative does not mention it, the 6th Somersets were engaged with the enemy on the 24th. Throughout the night of the 23-24 the enemy concentrated the fire of his heavy batteries upon the Clapham Junction-Inverness Copse Sector. This bombardment intensified after midnight, and at dawn on the 24th the enemy launched his fourth counter-attack. This attack was delivered by a fresh German Division led by “Sturm” troops. The two leading waves were lightly equipped, the four succeeding waves carried full arms, tools and equipment. The forward posts, now held by companies of the K.O.Y.L.I., fell back upon the supports, which consisted of the survivors of the 6th Somersets (under Captain Lance) and 10th Durham L.I. (under Captain Jerrard). These two officers and their troops put up such a determined resistance that the hostile waves were broken in succession. “Sturm Truppen” infiltrated round the north of the Copse and actually crossed the Menin road, west of the Copse. Here fortunately they bumped into Battalion H.Q. 6th Somersets, now situated in Jasper Avenue 70 yards west of the wood, and were repulsed. Captain Manson, the Adjutant, fell at the junction of the Menin road and the Copse, though not till the enemy had been driven back, and his comrades in the wood made safe from being surrounded. As a result of these operations the C.O. was able to report that though heavily attacked he was still holding the N.W. end of the Copse. The 6th Battalion was by this time reduced to three officers (Captain Lance and Lieutenant Denman in the Copse and the C.O. at Battalion H.Q.). At 10 a.m. the C.O., after reporting that his Adjutant had been killed, asked that command of the right sector should be taken over by the O.C. 10th D.L.I. This was eventually done.

At 12.20 the enemy counter-attacked in force all along the whole line and every gun in the neighbourhood opened on his troops as they advanced. But no supports or reserves were left and at 12.45 the O.C., 10th D.L.I., informed Brigade that his men were retiring from Inverness Copse and forming posts along the western edges. Driven out of their position also the Brigade, nevertheless, managed to hold the western edge of the Copse and when relieved on the night of 24-25 August, held the line Jasper Avenue-western edge of Inverness Copse to Menin road to a point where Jargon Drive cut the sunken road north of Menin road ... The 6th Somersets had 6 officers killed, 9 wounded and 2 missing. In the other ranks the Battalion lost 44 killed, 213 wounded and 74 missing.’

Lance was awarded the D.S.O., a rare distinction indeed for a young Acting Captain; so, too, a brace of “mentions” (London Gazettes 22 May and 18 December 1917 refer).

In common with a few other men in his Battalion, he next volunteered for service in North Russia in support of Kerensky’s abortive offensive against the Bolsheviks in Karelia, and was wounded while serving as a Captain & Adjutant in the 1st Volunteer Battalion, Karelia Regiment, on 7 August 1919 - a bullet passing clean through his left arm just above the elbow. Without having received proper treatment, he was embarked for the U.K. and admitted to the Edinburgh War Hospital in West Lothian, and thence a Red Cross Hospital in Bath, from which latter establishment he was finally discharged in September 1920. He was awarded the Order of St. Anne, Third Class, with swords.
The Spanish Pimpernel

Returning to his pre-war studies as a civil engineer, Lance was working in that capacity out in Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. And when the British Ambassador and his staff departed Madrid for Valencia, the Consul-General approved Lance’s appointment as an Hon. Military Attache at the recently evacuated embassy building in the capital - no place to be in such perilous times, as evidenced by the wound he collected during an air raid on 8 January 1937 - but already several hundred unfortunates had sought refuge there.

In his autobiography, Trail Sinister, the journalist Sefton Delmer describes how Lance set about getting these endangered refugees to assorted ports and safety:

‘Officially, the function of the Scottish Ambulance Unit, one of whose vans had conveyed the dying Alastair MacDougall to Alicante, was to pick up the wounded at the front line dressing stations and rush them to the nearest hospital. They were also expected to distribute food and clothing to the stricken population of Madrid. Most certainly they carried out both tasks with gallantry and humanity ... But the Scottish Ambulance Unit had yet another humanitarian mission. And this one was secret - secret, it was hoped, from the Valencia government and its police. For secretly the Scottish Ambulance were serving as the transport section for the British Scarlet Pimpernel who was saving the lives of some of Spain’s hunted aristocrats and middle class by smuggling them out of Spain under the noses of the Reds. At least once a fortnight, and sometimes oftener than that, a convoy of lorries and ambulances, each decorated with a huge Union Jack and a Red Cross, would leave the Madrid H.Q. of the Scottish Ambulance in order to drive down to one of the ports on the coast - Valencia, Alicante, or the little British owned orange port of Gandia.



Ostensibly the purpose of their journey was to collect food and clothing for Madrid from British ships in the ports, and at the same time to evacuate from Madrid some of the host of Gibraltarians, Maltese and other British subjects camped in the British embassy and see them safely on board a British ship for home. The Pimpernel had the brilliant idea that he could pack a few Spaniards in among the British and smuggle them through with the rest. It worked. The Gibraltarians nearly all had Spanish names, talked Spanish among themselves, and gave the perfect cover to the Pimpernel’s contraband of Dukes and Duchesses. So daring did the Pimpernel become, that on one spectacular convoy he managed to take through a party of no fewer than seventy-two hunted Spaniards and get them on board a British merchant ship, in which they sailed to safety.

It was tricky enough passing through thirty-four police checkpoints on the road from Madrid to the coast. But the trickiest part of all was the transfer of the escapees to the British ships. Gandia, a little port which had been built by a British company fifty years before, and most of whose buildings were covered with protective Union Jacks, was the best escape port ... ’

Here then Lance at work, a highly risky enterprise that led to the republicans dubbing him “The Man in the Tartan Jacket”; so, too, to General Franco interviewing him, as a result of which several prominent nationalists were rescued, among them the General’s nephew. In fact, as concluded in Lance’s Times obituary, ‘Many prominent nationalists owed their liberty and probably their lives to his efforts.’

At length, however, he was indeed arrested by the republicans while on a mission to Valencia, the beginning of a sorry chapter of suffering which extended to 15 months - with a death sentence hanging over his head. Sefton Delmer continues:

‘Alas for gay, luckless Lance. He scored his hundredth escapee all right and pushed him to safety. He was Alvarez Martin Moreno, eighteen year old son of Franco’s chief of staff, General Moreno, and a nephew of the Genaralissimo himself. The Reds had been hunting him everywhere. They wanted to hold him as a hostage to extort concessions from his powerful uncle. When they discovered, through a informer, that it was the red-haired Englishman who had stolen him from them they determined to get the British Pimpernel.

Lance had not been able to resist making another trip - both Moreno and this last effort were without the benefit of the Scottish Ambulance - and this time the Reds caught him in flagrante as he was stowing away his man on a British steamer. But Lance managed to get away and shake off the police in a wild motor car chase by night through winding roads between Alicante and Madrid. With a contempt for the Red police born of his past successes Lance thought he could get away with it. Instead of trying to get back to Gandia and hiding in one of his caches until Apfel could smuggle him out, he walked openly around Madrid as though everything was normal.

But only for four days. Then the police called on him, as he was in the office of the British embassy’s commercial secretariat. They pushed him into an enormous Rolls Royce and, with drawn blinds, he was taken down to Valencia. Russians and Spaniards put him through a racking third degree. After that it was prison, prison, prison.’

All in all Lance would be moved to seven different places of incarceration, including a prison ship, and the length and extent of his suffering is vividly described by C. E. Lucas Phillips:

‘The last move came. The seventh prison and by far the worst. Again some sort of religious establishment, it was near Gerona, far away on the cold fringes of the Pyrenees, at the extremity of the north-east corner of Spain, which was all that remained under the dominion of the Republicans. The weather was bitterly cold; snow was falling and the mountain wind cut like a knife. Christopher Lance, weak, emaciated, verminous, clothed only in ragged trousers and shirt, yet strangely standing out with some elusive air of distinction from the other prisoners, could not disguise his dismay when he found himself once more in solitary confinement. The prison was one in which all the worst and most dangerous offenders were being concentrated and, together with a few others, he found himself separated from the main body and put into a tiny stone cell, measuring eight feet by six feet, on the third floor, with a small, unglazed, iron-barred window through which the wind whistled with freezing breath. The place was as cold as an ice-box. Vile though his other prisons had been, Lance felt that over this forbidding place, in which the guards seemed scared, there lay a chill and deadly hand that held every being in an iron grip, final and inexorable. The breath of the grave, earthy and fetid, invaded stone cells and corridors and stairs ... ’

Here, in January 1939, a surge of new prisoners arrived and Lance’s small eight-by-six cell became a temporary home for six men, temporary because some of them were shortly afterwards shot:

‘A day or two later, at an hour when his pains had temporarily subsided, all the prisoners were paraded in a courtyard in the biting cold of the early morning ... The handsome young Governor arrived, looking very smart, very brisk and matter-of-fact. He read out the names of some thirty men, several of whom Lance knew, and ordered them to fall in front of the rest. No explanation was necessary and none was given. Everyone knew ... Two hundred yards down the road, where the spilled earth of a newly dug trench could be clearly seen, the little column was seen to halt and turn about, the sleet driving into their faces ... The Governor took up position twenty-five yards in front of the centre of the line. Without more ado, as casually as if at a shooting gallery, he swung his blazing tommy-gun from one end of the line to the other. Twenty-six out of the thirty fell. Three or four more bursts and they were all down. In a world otherwise deadly silent, that never-to-be-forgotten rattle of the tommy-gun echoed from wall to wall of the stone prison and echoed again faintly against the ramparts of the distant mountains.

Handing his tommy-gun to a guard, the Governor then drew his revolver and, walking briskly down the line of dead and wounded, turned over each body and administered the final death-stroke. Calmly he stopped after each sixth body to refill his magazine and as calmly at the end walked home again, stopping only to light a cigarette ... That was the beginning. Every morning afterwards about twenty or thirty more were shot down in the same manner.’

And it was a rate of attrition that left Lance about eight more days of life, for he discovered via a guard that his name was 250th on the nominal list of those to be executed. But at midnight - after the tally of slaughtered had reached 240 - he was suddenly taken from his cell and, in the company of an old English friend from Ambulance Unit days, taken by car to an unknown destination. Convinced that their British nationality was the cause for the journey - namely to be finished off in the mountains, without trace or witness - it was to their huge relief that, at journey’s end, they were actually handed over to a British Embassy official, Skrine Stevenson: “I’ve come to take you home.”

In addition to his Yoke and Arrows insignia, Lance was presented by the Mayor of Madrid with the City’s Gold Medal in 1961, after his story had appeared in C. E. Lucas Phillips’ The Spanish Pimpernel in the previous year - “I never dreamed of receiving such an award,” he told the gathered throng of officials and journalists. And in the interim he had been recalled on the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939 and attached to M.I. 6 and the Intelligence Corps before ill-health resulted in his early retirement in the following year.

Lance retired to Alicante, scene of his daring exploits in the Civil War, and he died there in March 1971, aged 77 years; sold with copies of The Spanish Pimpernel and Trail Sinister, volume I, by Sefton Delmer, together with a quantity of related research.