PRIVATE JAMES GIBBONEY, 18TH ROYAL IRISH REGIMENT. India General Service Medal 1854, 1 cla

PRIVATE JAMES GIBBONEY, 18TH ROYAL IRISH REGIMENT. India General Service Medal 1854, 1 clasp, Pegu (officially impressed: JAS. GIBBONEY. 18TH. ROYAL IRISH REGT.). Attractively toned, Extremely Fine and virtually as struck.

Medal sold with photocopy extract from medal roll, which confirms that Private James Gibboney died at Prome on 31/3/1853.

The headquarter companies of the Royal Irish Regiment were based at Prome during the Burma campaign of 1852-53. Conditions there and throughout the area of operations were appalling. As the regimental history notes, “Sickness was rampant in a letter written at the end of November, 1852, an officer of the XVIIIth mentions that the regiment oculd only turn out 350 men fit to take the field. Ninety men had been buried at Rangoon, where cholera broke out a few days after the capture of the Great Pagoda. For a month the Royal Irish had been dying at the rate of almost one a day 137 were in hospital large numbers had broken down and been invalided out of the country. The other regiments were equally unhealthy, and out of the whole garrison of Prome the General could only count on some 900 effectives, whose numbers were daily reduced by the ravages of climate and by the strain of the guards and piquets, which, though cut down as low as safety permitted, told severely upon the troops that remained at duty. The only break in the harrassing and monotonous existence was afforded by occasional reconnaissances and night attacks in which the enemy showed themselves more anxious to murder and decapitate individual men than to close with any formed body of soldiers.”