Blast expert’s medal set to fetch £120,000
A GEORGE Cross awarded to a mine disposal expert buried alive in the London Blitz could fetch £120,000.
Sub Lieutenant Jack Maynard Cholmondeley Easton lay alone for hours on end with a fractured skull, broken back and two broken legs when an enemy parachute mine exploded in London’s East End during the Blitz in October 1940.
His brave assistant Bennett Southwell, an Ordinary Seaman, wasn’t so lucky – his decapitated body was discovered six weeks later.
Before the incident, Lt Easton, inset, a member of the Admiralty’s secretive Land Incident Section, had saved lives by defusing 16 explosives. One had crashed through the roof of the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury and ended up hanging from a chandelier.
He explained in his book Wavy Navy: By Some Who Served:
“At the back of the minds of us who did this work was an acceptance that there probably would be a ‘last’.
“But in defence of our sanity, and perhaps to stop us leaping from the cars that carried us to each assignment, we did not dwell on this probability. If and when the ‘last’ mine came... well it came.”
Lt Easton recovered after a year in plaster – and was awarded a George Cross. The Admiralty sent three cases of champagne to his hospital and told him to listen to the 6pm news, during which the medal was announced.
It is being sold by Noonans Mayfair on April 10, where it is predicted to fetch up to £120,000. The firm’s Nimrod Dix said of the Russell Hotel incident: “The grateful owner presented Easton with a cheque for £140 – and an offer of Sunday lunch for his family for life – but both had to be rejected ‘as a matter of honour’.”
Lt Easton died at the age of 88 in December 1994.