GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
M. and I were put on duty in two large wards and one small one, some 120 beds in all. We walked rather shyly up and down, wondering where we could begin. The patients looked at us with apathy, the orderlies with suspicion.... In the salles de pansements there was plenty of work for us to do. There was scarcely room to move in the small space, so crowded was it with bandages and instruments, packets of cotton wool, basins of disinfectants, bins for dirty dressings, cans of water (there was no running water in the room), all mixed up among patients awaiting their turn....
The first thing for us to do was obviously to clean up. Fortunately, we could not have found a greater amusement for the men. First curious, then astounded, and finally delighted, they watched us scrub and scour, shake and air, scrape the grime off the washbasins, the mildew out of the pots-de-chambre. When we turned on them, and proposed blanket baths and hair washes and toe nail cutting (” they have toe nails like stags’ antlers,” M., awestruck, whispered to me), their response was at first evasive, then enthusiastic. When the first pillow and clean pillowcase were given out, the patient leant back, looked round the ward, and said gravely: “Now I am as a prince!” (Cocks In The Dawn, Reminiscences of France, by S. Leith-Ross refers)
Leith-Ross took up a more prominent role, ‘Presently our party had become fourteen, and the Directeur du Service de Santé, of the 17th Military Region, in which Foix was situated, suggested that I should visit other military hospitals in his area, and place English volunteers where they were needed most. There began for me then a period of strange and enchanting journeys to out-of-the-way hospitals.... Then came the moment when the Directeur du Service de Santé paid our party the great compliment of suggesting that I should organise a hospital for service in his Région. He already had a building in view, the Château de Saint Rome, placed at his disposal by the Général de la Panouse, the then Military Attaché in London. His wife, the Vicomtesse de la Panouse, was Présidente British Committee for the French Red Cross, and with her unfailing help, the 300 bed hospital was soon open.... After a time, Saint Rome was handed over to another English directrice, and I was asked to organise a hospital for refugees.’ (Ibid)
After the war Leith-Ross briefly returned to London, before travelling out to stay with her brother in Lagos in 1920. Despite the cruel loss of her husband in Nigeria, Leith-Ross returned to the country to carry out a pioneering study of the Fulani language - and indeed published Fulani Grammar in 1921. The latter was one of five books that she had published on Nigeria during her lifetime. In 1925 Leith-Ross became Nigeria’s first Lady Superintendent of Education, and she subsequently helped to establish Queen’s College, Lagos (a girl’s boarding school), and another girl’s school in Kano.
Leith-Ross returned to work with the British Committee for the French Red Cross, and volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Spanish Civil War, and the early stages of the Second World War. With the fall of France, she once again returned to Nigeria and was this time employed to provide intelligence on the French colonies to the Political and Economic Research Organisation. She stayed in Nigeria until the 1960’s, and died in 1908, aged 95, in Holland Park, London.
Sold with the following related items: riband bar (excluding riband for M.B.E.); British Committee For The French Red Cross cloth Blazer Badge; Bestowal Document for the M.B.E., dated 11 June 1966, with Investiture invitation and other enclosure documents; 4 letters and 1 telegram of congratulations on the occasion of the award of the recipient’s M.B.E.; a copy of Cocks in the Dawn, Reminiscences of France, by Sylvia Leith-Ross; a postcard and other ephemera.
29
A Military Division M.B.E. group of four awarded to Major D. T. Batson, Hampshire and Isle of Wight Cadet Force
THE MOST EXCELLENT ORDER OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, M.B.E. (Military) Member’s 2nd type, breast badge, silver; DEFENCE ANDWAR MEDALS 1939-45;CADET FORCESMEDAL,
G.VI.R., with Second, Third and Fourth Award Bars (2/Lt. D. T. Batson.), mounted as worn, generally very fine (4)
£260-300
M.B.E. London Gazette 1 January 1973. Cadet Forces Medal London Gazette 20 March 1951. Cadet Forces Medal Second Award Bar London Gazette 30 March 1965. Cadet Forces Medal Third Award Bar London Gazette 11 July 1972. Cadet Forces Medal Fourth Award Bar London Gazette 2 October 1979.
Derek Trelawney Batson was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Cadet Force, 4 August 1943, and advanced to Lieutenant 5 January 1954. He retired with the honorary rank of Major, 17 September 1983.
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