{"product_id":"it-was-me-that-did-it-a-rare-early-victorian-18ct-gold-percussion-pistol-novelty-propelling-pencil-on-the-first-attempted-assassination-of-queen-victoria-copy","title":"\"You broke the square\": An Intriguing Pre-WW1 Sterling Silver \"Trench\" Whistle Presented by Colonel Sir Percival Scrope Marling, VC, CB, DL","description":"\u003ch2 style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e“Our orders was to break you, an' of course we went an' did. We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't 'ardly fair; But for all the odds agin' you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square” \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0);\"\u003e(\"Fuzzy-Wuzzy\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0);\"\u003e, by Rudyard Kipling, published 1890\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0);\"\u003e)\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA Pre-War Sterling Silver 'Trench' Whistle Presented by Colonel Sir Percival Scrope Marling, 3rd Baronet, VC, CB, DL, late 3rd Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eS. Mordan \u0026amp; Co.\u003c\/strong\u003e (London), hallmarked \u003cstrong\u003e.925 Silver, Chester, 1911 [L]. \u003c\/strong\u003eCatalogue No. 15\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003e80mm, 24g. Plain cylindrical barrel with mouthpiece and suspension ring, engraved in a neat cursive hand \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom Colonel Marling 1911\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eRepolished otherwise very fine, with a few cosmetic blemishes to apperture; the engraving sharp, the hallmark rubbed, both legible throughout.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eOn the afternoon of 13 March 1884, on a low plain of red rock and scrub twelve miles south-west of Suakin, a British infantry square broke.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eIt was, in the long history of Victorian colonial warfare, a singular catastrophe. The infantry square its four faces bristling with rifles, its interior carrying the artillery, the machine guns, the supplies was the standard British defensive formation against an enemy without modern weapons, and it was considered, with some justification, effectively impenetrable.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eAt the Battle of Tamai, the Hadendoa warriors of Osman Digna's Mahdist army — the soldiers Kipling would immortalise as the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, for the great oiled discs of their hair proved otherwise. Breaking through a gap opened when the 2nd Brigade lurched forward out of formation, they poured into the square itself, capturing two Gardner guns and fighting hand-to-hand among the transport camels. It was the first time in decades that a British square had been broken in the field, and the shock reverberated through the army and the press long after the position was recovered and the day won.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eAmong those who survived it was a twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant of the 3rd Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps, attached to the Mounted Infantry, Percival Scrope Marling, eldest son of the 2nd Baronet, of Stanley Park, Selsley, Gloucestershire. His regiment had marched from Suakin two days earlier with General Sir Gerald Graham's force of 4,500 men. They had already fought at\u003cem\u003e El Teb\u003c\/em\u003e a fortnight before. Tamai was to be harder.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eIn the chaos that followed the breaking of the square, with Hadendoa warriors among the British transport and the afternoon dissolving into close-quarters fighting with sword and rifle and bayonet, Marling saw a private of the Royal Sussex Regiment - a man named Morley - shot and fallen. He rode to him, lifted him onto his horse, and attempted to carry him clear. Morley fell almost immediately. Marling dismounted, gave up his horse entirely, and carried the wounded man on foot approximately eighty yards to a place of comparative safety, with the enemy pressing in behind him throughout.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eHis Victoria Cross citation, published in the \u003cem\u003eLondon Gazette\u003c\/em\u003e of 21 May 1884,: \u003cem\u003e\"For his conspicuous bravery at the battle of Tamai, on 13th March last, in risking his life to save that of Private Morley, Royal Sussex Regiment, who, having been shot, was lifted and placed in front of Lieutenant Marling on his horse. He fell off almost immediately, when Lieutenant Marling dismounted, and gave up his horse for the purpose of carrying off Private Morley, the enemy pressing close on to them until they succeeded in carrying him about 80 yards to a place of comparative safety.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eHe was presented with his Cross by the General Officer Commanding Egypt, Sir Frederick Stephenson, in Cairo that July, having in the intervening months continued active operations across the Sudan. He would go on to serve with the Camel Corps in the Nile Expedition the following year, fighting through the Bayuda Desert in the attempt to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum an attempt that arrived two days too late. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eThe decades that followed were those of a complete Victorian and Edwardian soldier's life. India with the 18th Hussars. The Second Boer War, where in March 1901 he took command of his regiment in the field. The colonelcy he achieved in 1907. The Deputy Lieutenancy of Gloucestershire. The High Shrievalty in 1923. The memoir \u003cem\u003eRifleman and Hussar\u003c\/em\u003e, published by John Murray in 1931, with a foreword by Field Marshal Viscount Plumer that set down a career spanning five conflicts across four continents.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eHe had succeeded as 3rd Baronet in 1919, and it was as Colonel Sir Percival Marling that he presided over Stanley Park, the Cotswold estate his grandfather Samuel Marling, cloth manufacturer, Liberal MP, and creator of Selsley's All Saints Church had transformed into the seat of one of Gloucestershire's most prominent industrial dynasties.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eThe whistle offered here was presented in 1911, in the high summer of a new Georgian age. Marling was fifty years old, nearly three decades removed from the broken square at Tamai, newly a Colonel, settled at Stanley Park with a long life of service and command behind him. Who received it, and on what occasion, the engraving does not precisely record, but another such presentation by Marling that year does colour our image of this object. In December of that year, a newspaper recorded Marling presiding over a ceremony at St Briavels schoolroom, in the Wye Valley parish he called home, presenting a Royal Humane Society medal to a Boy Scout named James Stanley Thompson who had pulled a comrade from the River Wye.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eHarold Reedwell, the boy who had been saved, pinned the medal on his rescuer's breast. Colonel Marling told the assembled Scouts that going to the rescue of a drowning person required infinitely more courage than valiant deeds on the field of battle, because in the former case it was done in cool moments, with a cooler douche into the bargain! It is the kind of gift a man of his generation and standing gave freely and often: to estate staff, to tenants, to the officers and volunteers of the local yeomanry he supported, to the small web of rural Gloucestershire life over which the Marlings presided from their hilltop park above Selsley.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eThree years later, in August 1914, the world Marling had served all his life went to war in earnest. He was recalled in 1915 as a General Staff Officer. The whistle he had given away in the last of the peacetime summers — a Mordan silver trench whistle, the standard instrument of command in the infantry assault — acquired, in the years that followed, a significance its maker could not have anticipated when he ordered it engraved.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eMarling died at Stanley Park on 29 May 1936, and was buried in the vault of All Saints, Selsley. His Cross is held today in the Lord Ashcroft Collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"SHOP | SPINK","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58272603865472,"sku":"63352\/3","price":425.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0560\/8243\/2198\/files\/Percival_Marling_VC.jpg?v=1781615769","url":"https:\/\/shop.spink.com\/zh\/products\/it-was-me-that-did-it-a-rare-early-victorian-18ct-gold-percussion-pistol-novelty-propelling-pencil-on-the-first-attempted-assassination-of-queen-victoria-copy","provider":"SHOP | SPINK","version":"1.0","type":"link"}