Beschreibung:

An unusual and interesting group of nineteen awarded to Alexander Gault MacGowan, an accredited War Correspondent in the 1939-45 War, whose extraordinary career commenced with service as a subaltern in the Manchester Regiment and as an R.A.F. Observer in the Great War: having been wounded in North Africa in 1943, he was captured by the Germans in France in 1944, but escaped ‘through a series of adventures that would make a Hollywood scenarist bite his nails with envy’ - and briefly fought alongside the Maquis 1914-15 Star (2 Lieut., Manch. R.); British War and Victory Medals (Lieut., R.A.F.); 1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Italy Star; France and Germany Star; War Medal 1939-45; France, Third Republic, Legion of Honour, Chevalier’s breast badge, silver, silver-gilt and enamel; France, Croix de Guerre 1939-1940, with bronze star on ribbon; Academic Palms, Officer’s breast badge, gilt metal and enamel, with rosette on riband; War Commemorative Medal 1914-18; Somme Commemorative Medal; Colonial Medal, 2 clasps, Algerie, Maroc; War Commemorative Medal 1939-45, 1 clasp, Liberation; Medal of Liberated France 1947; Morocco, Order of Ouissam Alaouite Cherifien, Officer’s breast badge, gilt metal and enamel, with rosette on riband; Portugal, Republic, Military Order of Christ, Officer’s breast badge, silver-gilt and enamel, with rosette on riband; U.S.A., Purple Heart, gilt metal and enamel, the Legion of Honour severely chipped in places and the Portuguese piece less so, otherwise generally good very fine (19) £3000-3500 Footnote Ex Sotheby’s 6 March 1986. Alexander Gault MacGowan, who ‘crammed more dangerous adventures into his lifetime than most men would care to experience’, was born February 1894 and was educated at Manchester Grammar School. Mobilised as a pre-war member of the Cheshire Yeomanry on the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, he was commissioned into the 24th (Oldham) Battalion, Manchester Regiment in October 1915 and is believed to have been wounded by rifle-grenade fragments in the head and legs on the Somme in July 1916. Declared as ‘unfit for anything other than mounted duty’, he transferred to the Royal Air Force and went on to serve as an Observer on the Italian front in 1918. Commencing his career as a journalist in 1922, when he worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press out in India (where MacGowan also held a commission on the Indian Army Reserve of Officers), he moved to a new appointment in Mesopotamia in the following year. Indeed for much of the 1920s and 1930s he travelled extensively, working variously for The Times and Daily Express, and others newspapers, and was credited with discovering a new pass into Little Tibet, for which he received the thanks of the Survey of India, in addition to participating in the first flight over the Orinoco Delta and the Venezuelan Ilanos, between Trinidad and Maracay, and the first flight between Trinidad and British Guiana. Added to which he had further adventures during an epic motor car trip across the desert from Kurdistan and Mosul to Syria, the first of its kind. He later reported, ‘Hold ups were frequent, and an officer who tried it after me was stripped of everything and had to walk naked into the Lebanons!” In 1934 MacGowan joined the New York Sun, for whom he reported on the Spanish Civil War and produced two controversial features entitled “The Scarlet Pimpernel of Spain” and “The Red Vultures of the Pyrenees”, for he had no time for the Spanish loyalists and their left-wing sympathisers. He also had an assignment with the French Foreign Legion out in Algeria and Morocco in 1937, in addition to covering the coronation of George VI in the same year. In fact, MacGowan was still working in London on the renewal of hostilities, and accordingly he was assigned to cover the events of the Battle of Britain, in addition to acting as ‘Press Observer with the Commandos in the raid on Dieppe’. As an accredited War Correspondent with the American forces, he next