TROOPER B. STAPYLTON, 68TH COMPANY, 19TH BATTALION IMPERIAL YEOMANRY (PAGET’S HORSE). Quee

TROOPER B. STAPYLTON, 68TH COMPANY, 19TH BATTALION IMPERIAL YEOMANRY (PAGET’S HORSE). Queen’s South Africa medal, type 3, 2 clasps, Cape Colony, Transvaal, (officially impressed: 13400 TPR: . STAPYLTON, 68TH. COY. 19TH. IMPL: YEO:=). Note, initial omitted from naming, otherwise Extremely Fine.

Trooper Bryan Stapylton was mortally wounded at Lichtenburg, 12/3/1901, dying of his wounds the following day. He is buried in St Anne’s Churchyard, Kew, London.

Bryan Stapylton was the son of Miles Stapylton (Senior Customs Officer) and Sara Dorcas Stapylton. The 1881 census records him as being 10 years of age and living at 10 Mortlake Road, Kew.

Paget’s Horse, the 51st, 52nd, 68th and 73rd Companies, which together made up the 19th Battalion Imperial Yeomanry, was an elite unit. The following description of that regiment, the man who raised it and its recruits is taken from “Absent Minded Beggars” by Will Bennett’. “They were public school-educated men recruited through advertisements in gentlemen’s clubs. The battalion was raised by George Paget, the son of a British general and a compulsive amateur soldier with a penchant for getting himself involved in any conflict that afforded the chance of action. He never seems to have been a regular officer but served in the Russo- Turkish War of 1877-8 and the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, as well as the Zulu War in 1879. Although aged 46 when the Boer War broke out, he went out to South Africa as second-in-command of his regiment and proved himself to be a man of some courage, being wounded twice. A portly figure who felt at home in the dining rooms and smoking rooms of Pall Mall, Paget recruited 500 officers and men from a tiny, hopelessly inadequate room at the Imperial Yeomanry Committee’s offices in Suffolk Street. However, it at least had the advantage of being only a short stroll from the clubs of which he was a member. Paget’s Horse wore a badge made up of the letters PH which provided a source of instant merriment for the wags on the streets of London, who suggested that it stood for ‘Piccadilly Heroes’ or more commonly for ‘Perfectly Harmless’. Gentlemen troopers such as Cosmo Rose-Innes, a barrister, found that wearing their new uniforms in the capital produced a rich variety of reactions and some odd social contradictions. He later recalled: “The khaki drew to its wearer, however, many amusing experiences the fervent ‘God bless you’ of old ladies in the bus, the friendly offers of navvies to “ave half a pint’ in the street, the respect of substantial citizens for one’s opinion on the war. The “ave half a pint’ situation was the most embarrassing. We were clad as troopers but flattered ourselves we bore the impress of officers and hence a conflict of emotions, the desire to be rollicking good fellows qualified by surprise that our would-be host should not detect the gentleman under the plain khaki.”