Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Three: Chaplain to the Forces Third Class the Very Reverend W. C. Mayne, Army Chaplains’ Department, later Dean of Carlisle

1914-15 Star (Rev. W. C. Mayne. A.C.D.); British War and Victory Medals (Rev. W. C. Mayne.) light contact marks, good very fine (3) £140-£180

The Very Reverend William Cyril Mayne was born in 1877. ‘After a few years as VI Form master and house tutor at Eastbourne College, he was made deacon in 1906 and ordained priest in 1907 by the Bishop of Worcester. He served as curate of Great Malvern and assistant master at Malvern College before joining the staff of Rugby School in 1907. In 1912 he went to All Saints’, Poplar, and in 1914 accepted an appointment as vice-principal of Bishop’s College, Cheshunt. Then the war intervened. He was commissioned as Chaplain to the Forces, Fourth Class, in October 1914 and was posted to 29 Division which served on operations at Gallipoli. He was promoted Chaplain, Third Class, in 1916 and moved to 33 Division (the notoriously teetotal division), seeing service in France. After demobilisation and release in 1919 he rejoined the staff at Cheshunt, which he headed between 1920 and 1925. He returned to Poplar as rector in 1925, then moved to Chiswick as vicar in 1930. He was appointed Canon residentiary and Professor of Greek and Classical Literature at Durham in 1934, and remained there till 1943, when he moved as Dean to Carlisle. He retired and was made Dean Emeritus in 1959, and died in Hayton in July 1962. “He was a chaplain in the famous 29th Division, and I recall his holding a confirmation class in a regimental aid post which was little more than a hole in the ground and a few sandbags. He was much loved and known to all of us as a front line padre”.’ (The recipient’s obituary in The Times, 10 August 1962, refers).