Be Excellent To Each Other

So, we're tidying up all the junk from Mrs Grim...'s gran's house (apostrophe check!) which has been living in our dining room in place of a pool table for a couple of years.

Didn't really expect to see this:

Who's is it?

Mrs Grim...'s great-grandfathers, we think. He used to live here.

By live, you mean 'own', yes?

Bloody hell!

Aye.

Aha, this is him: http://thepeerage.com/p26473.htm#i264726

Blimey, does it not say on the medal who it was awarded to?

That's gotta be a small house.

Hands up if you didn't search for your name....

Are those ones on the side ribbons to little dress medals?

As far as I can work out :

1914-18 Victory Medal
British War medal 1914-1918
1914-18 Star
What appears to be the Queen's South Africa Medal

That big one might be the Special Constabulary Long Service Medal

It perhaps would if we could find the OBE itself


Good going - that sounds pretty likely as he was chief of police in South Africa. I'll post some better pictures of the dress medals in a minute.

Here we go.

How come you know medals so well, Squirt?

Bit of an interest of mine - we found some of Mrs Squirt's great-uncle's medals and I did some looking - poor bloke got a posthumous Military Medal on the first day of the Somme.

He was an important chap, wasn't he? Civil OBE, Coronation Medals, and a couple I can't work out. The "Palestine" clasp meant he served in Palestine after WWII during the Israeli Independence Campaign, which must have been interesting.


[Edit] - Grim... - what colour is the one between the pink one and the "palestine" one - can't tell if it's blue or green or black or purple

Or he collected medals.

Possibly!

All ties up though - various Police medals, and presumably the 1914-18 ones he got as a younger chap. The green and blue one is the Overseas Territories Police Medal for Meritorious Service, so that ties into his policing work. Also, can you read the writing on the clasp of the red, orange and blue one in the bottom pic?

Hmm, they can't all be his - if he died in 1946 he'd be hard pressed to get the Elizabeth II Coronation Medal. Possibly two generations worth there.

Looks like Tugela Heights to me, so from the Boer War, February 1900.

Presumably that's his son's civil CBE, with his Military OBE ( which is what the box is for ) lost somewhere

Black.

You're right, they do cover two generations - he had a son called Hugo (this is about him) who was something to do with the Bahamas. There's a number of photos of Hugo with JFK and Harold Wilson.

In that case, it he was at least an Officer of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.

I should write this shit down

Beex is fucking excellent.

You wife has some very awesome ancestors, best I can come up with is that my Great great (and a few more Greats) Maternal Grandfather was the last person to be hung in England for Sheep Theft, after that they deported them to Australia. There is a plaque with his name and glorious achievement on it down Brighton and Hove way. That beats all these poxy new fangled Xbox achievments

My Grandad was one of the first Commandos, according to my Dad. Never bothered to try and look it up to see if he was telling the truth, though.

Stick a most excellent (£$%T^**&^%$&*) MBE in the pile

Next on BeEx: Mrs. Grim...'s great-grandfather is revealed to be King George VI!

So her Gran's house lives in the middle of your dining room? Very small lady, I take it?

She's clearly got you on ignore, GazChap

Gazchap is still on the forum?!

(OK, so I only read the first post. Shh)

My ancestors did fuck all as far as I can tell, apart from work in various factories and mines, which isn't fuck all in the individual sense, it's actually a hell of a lot more worthy than what I do, but it isn't much in the grand scheme of things, so to speak, if you know what i'm saying, no disrespect to the hard working common man etc....

The question we really need answering, as Mrs Grim... comes from such prestigious stock, what the hell did she do to end up with Grim...!

Depends if you are religious and believe in original sin

I was a bit of rough that, from her father's point of view, went fantastically wrong.

Things I found when I was tidying up my parents' house after my step mother finally died (both my parents having died years earlier), included a large bag of live shotgun ammo which I handed in at the local cop shop, much to the disgust of the desk officer, a photo of my dad's class passing out photo from when he completed his basic training in the Royal Marines, and the actual deeds to the house itself. Damn lucky we found the deeds or it could have been ages before we could have put the house on the market.

Never found all my dad's WWII campaign medals, which I'd seen many times as a child. My step-mother's scally family probably found them and flogged them.

That's a shame. Campaign medals aren't normally worth a vast amount, but they're a great bit of family history.

Absolutely, but those tinkers would have swapped them for a couple of pints, given the chance.