The Bill and Angela Strong Medal Collection

An interesting post-war civil O.B.E. group of six awarded to Major G. C. Lawrence, Colonial Civil Service, late Middlesex Yeomanry, Royal Signals and Somaliland Camel Corps

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, O.B.E. (Civil) Officer’s 2nd type breast badge; 1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45; Efficiency Medal, G.VI.R., 2nd issue, Territorial (Captain G. C. Lawrence, Gen. List), mounted as worn, contact marks, generally very fine or better (6) £500-600

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

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O.B.E. London Gazette 12 June 1958.

Geoffrey Charles Lawrence, who was born in London in November 1915, would have spent his career with Barclays Bank had it not been for the Second World War - ‘As it is, he found himself in the Horn of Africa, riding a camel across the desert like his more famous namesake, taking on the Italians at the Battle of Tug Argun and running the Colonial Exchequer’ (his Times obituary, 21 June 1994, refers).



The Times continues:

‘Born in London, the son of a Civil Servant in the Post Office, he joined Barclays after leaving the Stationers’ Company School and was posted to the bank’s headquarters in the City. But he also enlisted in the Territorial Army and was called up on the outbreak of war. He went with the Middlesex Yeomanry to Palestine, but then he went down with measles followed by pneumonia. With his comrades in arms sent to fight in North Africa, Lawrence found himself, on his recovery, bored and redundant. In search of action he volunteered for the Camel Corps and, after training in Egypt, was posted to the British Protectorate of Somaliland.

Lawrence was amongst those troops forced to evacuate the Protectorate after retreating before the Italians at Tug Argum. After months nursing their wounded pride in Aden, however, the British returned and recaptured the Territory. Sergeant Lawrence was now commissioned and put in charge of the Customs Office under a new Military Occupied Territory Administration, stationed in Berbera.

A Major by the time the War ended, he applied to join the Colonial Service and in September 1947 was sent to Brasenose College, Oxford on the first so-called Devonshire Course, under which new Colonial Officers were taught the practical skills of administrating the Empire. He and his wife spent the next 16 years in and around East Africa. Starting as a District Commissioner in Berbera, then classed as a hardship post by Whitehall, he was transferred to the Secretariat in Hargeisa, where he rose from being an Assistant Chief Secretary to become Financial Secretary in 1956. In 1960 he accepted the post of Financial Secretary in Zanzibar and remained there until 1963 when internal self-government was introduced. He was also a member of the East African Currency Council.

Out of a job at the age of 48, he was approached by the Colonial Office with the offer of a temporary assignment. The temporary job gradually became permanent and Lawrence was to become involved in, among other things, the Aden Crisis in the 1960s and the Geneva Constitutional Conference which followed. He retired in 1976, aged 61.’



Lawrence was also awarded a C.M.G. for his services as Financial Secretary, Zanzibar (London Gazette 8 June 1963 refers).