Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A rare campaign group of six awarded to Perceval Landon, special correspondent for The Times in the Boer War and in the Tibet campaign, an author and lifelong friend of Rudyard Kipling

Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, no clasp (Mr. P. Landon. “Times”) officially impressed naming; Tibet 1903-04, no clasp (P. Landon Esq: Press Corspdt.) officially engraved naming; 1914-15 Star (P. Landon.); British War and Victory Medals (P. Landon); Coronation 1911, unnamed, these mounted for wear in incorrect order; together with Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, Silver Medal, G.V.R., 55mm., edge with engraved inscription (Perceval Landon for his paper on “Basra and the Shatt-Ul-Arab” Session 1914-15) extremely fine and very rare (7) £3,000-£4,000

Perceval Landon was born in 1868 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he was one of the original subscribers to John Woodward and George Burnett's Treatise on Heraldry British and Foreign (1892), and he had a lifelong interest in heraldry.

He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple but in 1899–1900 he was War Correspondent of The Times during the South African War. He was also involved, with his close and lifelong friend Rudyard Kipling and others, in a daily paper called The Friend started by Lord Roberts in Bloemfontein during the Boer War. This South African experience launched a career of world travel, journalism, and other writing, so that he described himself in Who's Who as "special correspondent, dramatist, and author".

Landon was private secretary to the Governor of New South Wales in 1900; in 1903 he was special correspondent of the Daily Mail at the Delhi Durbar, in China, in Japan and in Siberia; in 1903–1904 he was special correspondent of The Times on the British military expedition to Lhasa, Tibet; in 1905–1906 he was special correspondent of The Times for the Prince of Wales' visit to India; and after that he was in Persia, India, and Nepal, 1908; Russian Turkestan 1909; Egypt and Sudan 1910; on the North Eastern Frontier of India and at the Delhi Durbar, 1911; in Mesopotamia and Syria, 1912; in Scandinavia and behind the British and French lines in 1914-1915; behind the Italian lines and to the Vatican in 1917 (the war and Vatican visits with Rudyard Kipling); at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919; in Constantinople, 1920; in India, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine 1921; on the Prince of Wales' tour of India and Japan, 1921-1922; in China and North America 1922; at the Peace Conference in Lausanne, 1923; in China, Nepal and Egypt 1924; and in China in 1925.

By this time, in 1925, Landon was 57 and had travelled constantly since the age of 21. Landon for a time had a cottage in the grounds of Kipling's house, Batemans, in Sussex. His address in 1907 was at Pall Mall Place, St James's, London, and, by the time of his death in 1927, his final address was 1 The Studios, Gunter Grove, Chelsea, London.

He was the author of numerous books, essays and novels, including Lhasa (1905) covering the Tibet Mission, Under the Sun: Impressions of Indian Cities (1906) resulting from his observations during the Prince Of Wales’ visit of 1905-06, and Raw Edges (1908) a volume of short stories, chiefly ghostly or gruesome. Percival Landon died unmarried on 23 January 1927.

Sold with a ‘true copy’ letter requesting tickets from the Royal Society of Arts to the reading of Landon’s paper on Basra and the Shatt-ul-Arab; together with copied extracts from Lhasa and Under the Sun, obituary from The Times and Medal Index Card for ‘War Correspondent’.