PRIVATE V.C.H. CAYLEY, 51ST (PAGET’S HORSE) COMPANY, 12TH BATTALION IMPERIAL YEOMANRY. Que

PRIVATE V.C.H. CAYLEY, 51ST (PAGET’S HORSE) COMPANY, 12TH BATTALION IMPERIAL YEOMANRY. Queen’s South Africa Medal, type 3, 4 clasps, Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Transvaal, South Africa 1901 (officially impressed: 27218 Pte. V.C.H. CAYLEY 51st. Coy. IMP: YEO:). Attractively toned, Extremely Fine.

Medal accompanied by biographical details, 6 pages copied service papers, extract Burkes Peerage & Baronetage re. the Baronets Cayley of Brompton, Yorkshire, copied extract from 1871 census and QSA Medal rolls (2), confirming medal and clasps.

Valentine Charles Hugh Cayley (1868-1949) was the son of Digby Cayley of Brompton, Yorkshire, and the grandson of Sir Digby Cayley, 7th Baronet Cayley. The 1871 Census lists Valentine Cayley as the 3 year old son of Digby Cayley and Charlotte Philadelphia Cayley, resident at Brompton Green, Brompton, Yorkshire. His father, Digby Cayley, was a land agent, with 9 children, 4 boys and 5 girls, the eldest 10 years old and the youngest 7 months. With so many children, the Digby family not surprisingly, had a number of servants, some eight in all, whose principal purpose seems to have been to assist Charlotte Cayley in looking after the domestic side of the house and bringing up the children, the servants all being female and including a governess, a cook, a nurse, a waiting maid, a housemaid, a nursery maid, kitchen maid and a ladies maid.

Cayley enlisted into Paget’s Horse on 18/2/1901 at Carlton Street, London, attesting at the Police Court, Marlborough Street, the following day. The 51st Company Imperial Yeomanry formed part of the 1st Imperial Yeomanry Contingent, the 51st Company arriving in South Africa on 4/4/1901. Queens South Africa Medal roll confirms that Cayley was discharged as “inefficient” on 21/6/1901, after seeing total service of 170 days with the colours, 94 of which were spent in South Africa.

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.”

Despite having responded enthusiastically to the call to arms, and, like Cayley, at some considerable financial expense, not all the recruits to the Imperial Yeomanry were suitable material for military service on horseback. Deficiencies with regard to riding and shooting were supposed to have been sorted out back in the UK, however, in the rush to get troops to South Africa, checks on recruits were no always all that they should have been. As a result, it was only discovered when the recruits reached South Africa that some of them were not up to the task physically, or in terms of the skills required to remain on a horse and fire a rifle, and, if necessary, do both at the same time. Recruits who failed to pass muster were weeded out, like Cayley, as inefficient.

PROVENANCE: Spink August 1971, price 90 shillings