Special Collections
Create new list‘We set out on our weary march, arriving at Tel-el-Nujeid, on the Wadi Ghuzzeh, in profuse perspiration and profound bad temper! Here we found Tom Armstrong, the Quarter-Master, and Jack Jones, the Transport Officer, who revived us with lime juice. They were well dug-in, which was necessary as the Turk was fond of sending his love to them, and that morning they had come in for some sharp shelling … ’
John More describes an encounter with Q.M. & Major Tom Armstrong during the Palestine campaign in August 1917; see With Allenby’s Crusaders.
A good Great War M.B.E. group of six awarded to Q.M. & Major T. Armstrong, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, onetime seconded to the Royal Flying Corps
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, M.B.E. (Military Division) Member’s 1st type breast badge, silver, hallmarks for London 1919; 1914-15 Star (Q.M. & Major. T. Armstrong, R.W. Fus.); British War and Victory Medals, M.I.D. oak leaf (Major T. Armstrong, R.A.F.); Coronation 1911, privately engraved, ‘Capt. T. Armstrong, 6th Royal Welsh Fusiliers’; Territorial Decoration, silver, silver-gilt, hallmarks for London 1919, mounted court-style as worn, generally good very fine (6) £400-500
This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Collection of Medals to Welsh Regiments formed by the Late Llewellyn Lord.
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M.B.E. London Gazette 10 October 1919.
Tom Armstrong was appointed a Quarter-Master in the 3rd (Volunteer) Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers in May 1900 and transferred to the 6th (Caernarvonshire and Anglesey) Battalion as Q.M. and Honorary Lieutenant in July 1908. He was advanced to Q.M. & Captain in the same unit in May 1910 and was likewise employed at the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914.
He was subsequently embarked for Gallipoli, where he served with distinction in the period August to December 1915, gaining a mention in despatches (London Gazette 13 July 1916, refers). Of the 6th Battalion’s trials and tribulations on the embattled peninsula, much has been written, not least in Lord Silsoe’s memoir Sixty Years A Welsh Territorial. By way of summary, however, a war diary entry written by the Battalion’s C.O., Lieutenant-Colonel T. W. Jones, towards the end of August 1915, speaks volumes: ‘Nothing but sand and shrapnel … Of the 30 officers that came out from England at present I have only 12 left.’ In fact it became necessary to amalgamate the Colonel’s depleted ranks with the 1/5th R.W.F.
Following his departure from the peninsula in December 1915, Armstrong served in Egypt until March 1916, and thereafter in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force until October 1917, when he was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps as a Staff Officer, 3rd Grade. Thus extended service in the Palestine operations, in which period he was advanced to Q.M. & Major and was awarded the M.B.E.
Remaining on secondment to the Royal Air Force after the war, he returned to Army duty as a Camp Commandant in November 1920 and was placed on the Retired List in June 1922; sold with copied research.
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