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Auction: 17002 - Orders, Decorations and Medals
Lot: 290

(x) Nottinghamshire Yeomanry

Family group:

A Great War M.C. group of four awarded to Major H. S. Cotterill, 1/1st Nottingham (Sherwood Foresters) Yeomanry, onetime seconded to 122 Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery

Military Cross, G.V.R., unnamed as issued; 1914-15 Star (2 Lieut. H. S. Cotterill, Sher. Rang.); British War and Victory (Lieut. H. S. Cotterill), together with a set of related miniature dress medals, occasional edge bruising, otherwise generally very fine (8)

The Second World War campaign group of four awarded to Captain H. A. S. Cotterill, 13th Frontier Force Rifles, who was killed in action in Burma in March 1942

1939-45 Star; Burma Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45, together with a set of miniature dress medals, good very fine (16)

M.C. London Gazette 26 November 1917:

'For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in bringing up two guns and a large quantity of ammunition under fire along a congested road and thence over very difficult ground. He volunteered for this work and showed great coolness and initiative in carrying it out.'

Hugh Stapledon Cotterill was born in Kensington, London on 6 April 1885 and was educated at Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon and at Malvern. In April 1904, young Hugh embarked for Canada, where he would be joined by his brother, Godfrey, and worked as a rancher at Assiniboia in Saskatchewan.

In September 1914, he enlisted in the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force at Valcartier, and he was subsequently embarked for the U.K. as a Trooper in Lord Strathcona's Horse; he was a tall man for the age, standing at 6 feet, 1 inch.

Commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry in March 1915, he was embarked for Egypt in the following month, where, on account of suffering from a hernia, complicated by appendicitis, he was invalided home from Port Said at the end of June.

Having then been declared as unfit for further duty by a Medical Board in early 1916, he badgered the authorities for an appointment overseas and gained secondment to the Horse Artillery Lines in France. He was subsequently attached to 122 Heavy Battery, R.G.A., and it was in this capacity that he won his M.C. in the Ypres salient; he was the subject of a further Medical Board in July 1917, when, following a fall, he was again declared unfit for further service.

Demobilised in March 1919, Cotterill returned to Canada, where he settled at Glen Adelaide, Saskatchewan, but he came home in the 1930s and died in Bristol in December 1963; sold with a file of copied research.

Hugh Anthony Stapledon Cotterill was born in 1919, the son of Major Hugh Stapledon Cotterill, M.C., and was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant on the Indian Army Unattached List direct from the R.M.C. Sandhurst in January 1939. Subsequently gaining an appointment in the 2nd Battalion, 13th Frontier Force Rifles, he was killed in action on 7 March 1942, when his unit mounted an attack against a Japanese roadblock at Taukkyan. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Rangoon Memorial; sold with copied research.


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Sold for
£1,300