PREVIEW: NAVAL MEDALS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE JASON PILALAS (Pt.1): 23 JULY

Not many people get to buy a lighthouse; fewer still go on to restore one. The fact that Jason Pilalas (1941-2023) did both provides a glimpse of a man whose collection proved to be as extraordinary as his ambition.

Connecticut born and bred, and a United States Navy officer who completed three tours of Vietnam, Pilalas was also a graduate of Harvard Business School and a highly successful investment analyst specialising in the pharmaceutical and medical products sector.

Along with his family, Jason’s great passion was the Royal Navy, and he dedicated a significant part of his life and fortune building an outstanding collection that, among other things, featured hundreds of ships’ bells. He added the lighthouse – at Morgan Point, Noank, Connecticut – in 1991.

Five years later, when Dix Noonan Webb, (as Noonans were then known) had the honour of offering the unsurpassed (until now) collection of Naval Medals belonging to the late Captain K. J. Douglas-Morris, Jason Pilalas made his first medal purchases, instantly becoming a die-hard medal collector.

“In medals Jason had discovered something small and portable that not only satisfied his interest in the tangible, but also the personal stories that came with them that touched on so many areas of British naval history, about which he knew so much,” says Nimrod Dix, then the CEO and chairman of the auctioneers.

Over 27 years, Pilalas searched for, researched and pursued what was to become and exceptional collection of naval medals. Now, following his passing last year, Noonans have the privilege of finding new homes for those pieces, starting with this 250-lot offering.

The highlights are numerous, from the outstanding Great War Dogger Bank D.S.C. and Antarctic 1902-04 group of six awarded to Lieutenant-Commander F. E. Dailey, Royal Navy (estimate £18,000-22,000) to the superb Trafalgar and Arctic exploration pair awarded to Rear-Admiral William Robertson, who served as a Midshipman at Trafalgar (estimate £30,000-40,000).

Leading the pack is a truly outstanding lot: the Great War Victoria Cross group awarded to Captain H.P. Ritchie for his gallant command of H.M.S. Goliath’s steam pinnace at Dar-Es-Salaam on 28 November 1914. It was the Royal Navy’s first VC of the Great War. Severely wounded several times Ritchie remained in post, inspiring all by his example, until, at his eighth wound, he became unconscious. “The interval between his first and last severe wound was between twenty and twenty-five minutes,” the London Gazette noted.

Henry Peel Ritchie was born in Edinburgh on 29 January 1876, the son of Dr Robert Peel Ritchie and Mary (née Anderson). Educated in the city at George Watson’s Boy’s College, he joined Britannia as a Naval Cadet on 15 January 1890 and first served at sea as a Midshipman in H.M.S. Camperdown, between October 1892 and January 1895.

He advanced to Lieutenant in June 1898, and then qualified as a gunnery officer, becoming the Army and Navy lightweight boxing champion in 1900. He was also commended by Their Lordships of the Admiralty for attempting to save the life of a rating from drowning at Chatham in 1903.

Ritchie was Executive Officer of the pre-Dreadnought battleship Goliath in the 4th Squadron when it was dispatched to East Africa at the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914. It was tasked with helping locate and destroy the German commerce raider Königsberg.

The British, including the Goliath, chased the Königsberg and trapped it in the Rufiji river delta, on the east coast of Africa.

As second-in-command of the Goliath, Commander Ritchie was given the independent command of Duplex, an old German cable ship converted into an armed auxiliary vessel.

In November Goliath, the cruiser Fox, and Duplex went to Dar-es-Salaam, where a number of German ships had been keeping Königsberg supplied. While Goliath and Fox remained outside, Ritchie made his preparations to enter the harbour.

According to John Winton’s The Victoria Cross at Sea, Duplex’s engines were unreliable, “so a Maxim gun and extra deck protection were fitted to Goliath’s steam pinnace, which Ritchie himself drove into Dar-es-Salaam on 28th November, accompanied by Lieutenant Paterson, Goliath’s Torpedo Officer, in an ex-German tug called Helmuth, and Lieutenant E. Corson, of Fox, in Fox’s steam cutter.”

All seemed quiet in the harbour: no warships; no signs of hostilities; and two white flags flew as tokens of truce from the harbour signal station flagstaffs.

“The Governor of Dar-es-Salaam had already agreed that any German ships found in the harbour would be British prizes of war and could be destroyed or immobilised,” wrote Winton.

Ritchie and his officers set about their task, with Paterson boarding the Feldmarschall to lay demolition charges and Surgeon Lieutenant Holtom, of Goliath, inspecting the bona fides of a hospital ship called Tabora.

Ritchie himself boarded the König and found her almost deserted. “The few people on board were told to get into her boats, and the ship was demobilised by charges exploded under the low-pressure cylinders of her engines.”

The Kaiser Wilhelm II, was also deserted, but Ritchie was alerted by a clip of three Mauser bullets with their pointed ends sawn off lying on the deck and showing that someone had been preparing small arms for action. “Ritchie had never been at ease in the eerie quietness and emptiness of that harbour, and as a precaution had two steel lighters lashed one on either side of the pinnace.”

Soon after, despite the white flags, the Germans started firing from the main harbour on Fox’s steam cutter. Ritchie immediately set out for the harbour entrance in the pinnace, with German shells and bullets raining on them from the water’s edge, as well as from houses in the city, wooded groves and hills above, even from a cemetery.

“Without the steel lighters, the pinnace must have been lost,” wrote Winton. “As it was, Clark was hit and Ritchie took over the wheel but he, too, was hit eight times in twenty minutes – on the forehead, in the left hand, twice in the left arm, in his right arm and hip; finally, two bullets through his right leg laid him low and he fainted from loss of blood. Clark, roughly bandaged, took over the wheel from Able Seaman George Upton, and brought the pinnace back alongside Goliath with her decks literally running blood. In retaliation, Goliath opened fire with her main 12-inch guns and flattened the Governor’s house …”


Ritchie received his V.C. from King George V at a Buckingham Palace investiture held on 24 April 1915 and, in the following month, returned to light duties with an appointment at the Haslar Gunboat Yards.


He took command of the armed boarding steamer Suva, then employed in the Red Sea Patrol, in April 1916. She lent valuable service in supporting military operations ashore in Palestine over the coming months, including those being undertaken by Lawrence of Arabia. Most notably Suva persuaded the Turkish garrison at Qunfandu to surrender after a bombardment on 7 July 1916, and then remained on station to likewise discourage local dissent by use of her searchlights and guns at night. Ritchie backed up that process by coming ashore to meet the Sheik of the Idrissi at the end of the month.

Despite his effective command, Ritchie stood down at the end of the year and was invalided home where he was later found to be suffering from ‘delusional insanity’ and placed on the Retired List as ‘physically unfit’. Admitted to the R.N.H. at Great Yarmouth, he remained there until August 1918, when his wife, Christiana, requested he be fully discharged into her care; they had married, in March 1902, at St. Cuthbert’s Edinburgh and had two daughters.

Ritchie, who was promoted Captain on the Retired List in January 1924, lived at Craig Royston House in Edinburgh and died there on 9 December 1958, aged 82.

“The gallantry and sacrifice of men like Ritchie were exactly the qualities that Jason Pilalas sought to acknowledge and honour in building his collection,” says Noonans’ chairman and CEO, Pierce Noonan. “As much as Jason cherished his collection, he was always mindful of the fact that he was just the custodian of these objects in his own lifetime. There is no doubt, therefore, that he would have been very happy to know that the items in his collection will now be finding new homes with a new generation of collectors who will appreciate them as much as he did.”