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Auction: 19001 - Orders, Decorations and Medals
Lot: 434

Three: Colour-Sergeant T. Dixon, 1/7th Battalion, Essex Regiment, who died of wounds in Egypt in March 1918

1914-15 Star (2502 L. Sjt. T. Dixon, Essex R.); British War and Victory Medals (2502 C. Sjt. T. Dixon, Essex R.), good very fine (3)

Thomas Dixon first saw action in Gallipoli, where he landed as a Lance-Sergeant in the 1/7th Battalion at 'A' Beach, Suvla Bay on 11 August 1915; Dixon and his comrades undertook extensive tours in the trenches atop Hill 60 in the following month, where the dead of both sides 'lay thick all around'.

As senior N.C.O. during the First Battle of Gaza, he would have seen the effects of losing four officers and 50 men killed with over 100 wounded, as the Battalion was heavily engaged on the 27 March trying to regain captured ground relinquished the evening before. On 2 November 1917, the Battalion made rapid progress for over a mile to capture enemy trenches around Gun Hill, being held by stout enemy fire:

'Communication between Rafa Trench and H.Q. was impossible except by runners, the majority of whom did not get through owing to the enemy machine-gun fire which swept all the intervening ground. Some of the messages which did arrive took three hours to do so' (The 7/Essex War Diary, refers).

Dixon died of wounds in Egypt on 29 March 1918. Aged 30, he was the husband of Amy E. Dixon of 67 St. Andrew Road, Higham Hill, Walthamstow, London, and is buried in Kantara War Cemetery, Egypt.


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Sold for
£170