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Auction: 25007 - … British and World Coins and Medals featuring The Oriole Collection of Gold and Silver English Coins
Lot: 433

Harrow School Strangford Geography Prize Medal, Frosted Silver and Lunette Medal, awarded to Charles James Emerton Branson (1860-1939), 1877, by A. B. Wyon, PERCY VISCOUNT STRANGFORD 1825 - 1869, bare head left, rev. HARROW SCHOOL PRIZE FOR GEOGRAPHY, school arms within quatrefoil, JAMES CHARLES EMERTON BRANSON, 1877., 179.08g, 66mm (BHM 2905), evidence of silver polish to edges, faint hairlines to obverse and with some deposits beneath obverse glass, otherwise much as struck, in original Wyon case of issue

James Charles Emerton Branson, (1860-1939), born in St John's Wood to James Henry Spring Branson, barrister and advocate general of Madras, and Mary Isabella (née Emerton) Branson. Educated at Harrow, he was awarded the Strangford Prize for Geography in 1877. He matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford on 16th October 1879, aged 19.

During his time at Balliol, the now infamous The Masque of B-ll-l, a broadsheet of forty quatrains making light of the superiors and students at the college was anonymously published by seven undergraduates. Branson is mentioned as such in the following stanza:

I am BR-NS-N; Nature's laws
Govern all things; some first cause
May exist, but I don't know;
It's Nature makes my whiskers grow

Staff of the university were outraged, and the publication was immediately suppressed. Only a few copies survive and over the years a handle of examples have been acquired by the college and one by the Bodleian. Verses of this amusing and mocking nature, where the subject introduces themselves to the reader, have come to be known as Balliol rhymes.

Branson went on to marry Sophia Olympia Eleanor Klimovich on 28th March 1892 in Bombay, India.


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Estimate
£300 to £500

Starting price
£250