Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The Queen’s Sudan Medal awarded to Surgeon Captain J. E. Trask, Army Medical Services, who died from cholera in the Sudan on 25 July 1896; a First-Class Cricketer for Somerset, he was Mentioned in Despatches for the Dongola campaign, and is believed to be the spirit that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle converses with in his work The New Revelation

Queen’s Sudan 1896-98 (Surg: Capt. J. E. Trask. A.M.S.) impressed naming, good very fine £600-£800

John Ernest Trask was born in Yeovil, Somerset, on 27 October 1861 and after training at the Bristol Medical School was commissioned into the Army Medical Department on 27 July 1887. After two years at Aldershot he was posted to India for almost five years, before returning to England in 1895. A keen cricketer, Trask played First Class cricket for Somerset at home, and also for Bombay and the Europeans whilst in India, where he was largely responsible for the institution of the inter-Presidency matches.

Advanced Surgeon-Captain, Trask was seconded to the Egyptian Army on 23 August 1895, and took part in the Dongola Expedition, and was present at the engagement at Firket on 7 June 1896, being Mentioned in Sir Herbert Kitchener’s Despatch of 30 September 1896 (London Gazette 3 November 1896).

Trask died of cholera at Kosheh, Sudan, on 25 July 1896. However, this is not the last we hear of him, for Trask is believed to be the spirit that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle refers to as ‘Dodd’ in his 1917 work The New Revelation:
‘I still continued during these years to hold table seances, which sometimes gave no results, sometimes trivial ones, and sometimes rather surprising ones... One night, the table was seized by a much more robust influence, which dashed it about very violently. In answer to my questions it claimed to be the spirit of one whom I will call Dodd, who was a famous cricketer, and with whom I had some serious conversation in Cairo before he went up the Nile, where he met his death in the Dongolese Expedition in the year 1896. I began to ask him questions exactly as if he were seated before me, and he sent his answers back with great speed and decision. The answers were often quite opposed to what I expected, so that I could not believe that I was influencing them. He said that he was happy, that he did not wish to return to earth... His death was painless. When he died he had found people to welcome him, but he had not seen General Gordon, nor any other famous spirit.’ (The New Revelation, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle refers).

Sold with an illustrated page from The Graphic, 11 July 1896, showing ‘With the Nile Expedition - Mercy to a Fallen Foe: Surgeon-Captain Trask extracting a bullet from the leg of a wounded Dervish during the engagement at Firket’; and copied research