Pair: Captain C. G. Collins, Cameron Highlanders, who commanded the Howe Battalion of the Ro...

Pair: Captain C. G. Collins, Cameron Highlanders, who commanded the Howe Battalion of the Royal Naval Division throughout the Gallipoli campaign and ‘led a dashing life that made the romantic heroes of fiction seem pale’ Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, 4 clasps, Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Johannesburg, Diamond Hill (Lieut. C. G. Collins. 1/Camn. Hdrs.) engraved naming; King’s South Africa 1901-02, 2 clasps, South Africa 1901, South Africa 1902 (Lieut. C. G. Collins. Cam. Hrs.) engraved naming, edge nick to QSA, otherwise about extremely fine and the recipient’s only extant medals (2) £700-£900 --- Charles Glen Collins was born in 1880, the grandson of William Collins who founded the well-known publishing firm of the same name. He was educated at Cheltenham College, where he was an outstanding sportsman, and the Royal Military College Sandhurst. Commissioned into the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders on 14 September 1898, he joined his regiment in Cairo after the conclusion of the Sudan campaign. His colourful unpublished memoirs in the National Army Museum (Archives 2007-07-02) give a full account of the pleasures of peacetime soldiering in a crack Highland regiment. He played on the regimental polo team, shot duck and left detailed accounts of regimental customs such as dinner nights and subaltern’s court martials. His time in Egypt was not without incident. He was challenged to a duel in Alexandria after an altercation over a Hungarian dancer and he was nearly lynched in Marseilles on his way home on leave. Having pushed a drunk cab driver, who fell over, word spread along the corniche that an English officer had killed a Frenchman. Memories of the Fashoda incident were fresh and a mob soon attacked the Hotel De Noailles where Collins was staying and in his pyjamas by that time. ‘Stones and missiles were every moment breaking the windows in the hotel. The affair of the drunken cabman was beginning to assume serious proportions. At the same time loud knocking at my door announced the arrival of the hotel manager who, badly frightened, very strongly suggested that I should go out and quiet the mob. I saw that this man had completely lost his head so I slammed the door and locked it in his face. I then pushed a large wardrobe in front of the door, drew my Claymore, which happened to be among my hand luggage and decided to put up the best fight possible under the circumstances. I then saw through the window that a large body of police, both on horse and on foot, had arrived. A few minutes later, imperative orders to open my door, with the repeated mention of “Police!” caused me to push aside the wardrobe and admit a Captain of the Gendarmes. He also appeared somewhat excited so I decided it would be wise to start off by handing him a hundred franc note.’ The Boer War, Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts and Mentioned in Despatches Collins survived the ordeal and was later recalled from leave in England to re-join his regiment in Cairo. It was held in readiness for immediate embarkation for South Africa. The 1st Battalion Cameron Highlanders arrived in South Africa on 23 March 1900 and fought their way to Pretoria as part of the 21st Brigade in General Ian Hamilton’s force. Their exploits were well recorded by Winston Churchill in his book Ian Hamilton’s March. They covered over 2,500 miles on foot. For his part, Collins noted that Churchill and the Duke of Marlborough, on the staff, were billeted next to their lines: ‘We were always entertained by observing that the Duke invariably did all the dirty work: pitching and striking their bivouac, cooking and cleaning the pots and pans while his cousin smoked his pipe and freely criticised him.’ On 10 June 1901, Collins was appointed Adjutant of 1st Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts with the rank of local Captain. He was only twenty-one years old. Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts was an irregular regiment of volunteers raised in December 1900 and commanded by the legendary colonial warrior, Johan Colenbrander, called ‘The White Whirlwind’ by the Zulus. They fought the Boers, General Beyers and his commando especially, in the harsh Northern Transvaal. The officers and Troopers were some of the toughest Rhodesians, South Africans, Australians and Americans. They were notoriously averse to the discipline exerted by a regular Adjutant but which was required if the regiment was not to run amok, as happened to ‘Breaker’ Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers operating in the same area. Collins’s memoirs detail some of the incidents he dealt with, including the execution of three captured Boers who were dressed in British uniform and had lured some of the KFS into a lethal ambush. Colenbrander and his men captured many Boers, their laagers, wagons and cattle but not Beyers during the guerrilla war. Colenbrander recommended Collins to Lord Kitchener for an award on 23 December 1901: ‘Capt. C. G. Collins, S.O. and Adjt. 1st K.F.S. (1st Cameron Highlanders). To whom as my Staff Officer I have always left the organisational work of the Column and to whose capability I attribute in a great part captures and successes we have been able to make’; and again on 28 April 1902: ‘Adjutant 1st K.F.S. and Staff Officer to my column to whose untiring energy and most able management I owe in great measure any success we may have accomplished. To this officer I have on all occasions entrusted the whole of the organisation of the Column, and his assistance to me has always been of the most ready and practical order’ (The National Archives, Kew, WO108/140 & 141). Collins was Mentioned in Despatches in Kitchener’s final despatches (London Gazette 29 July 1902). Balmoral, bankruptcy, marriage and divorce in the U.S.’s ‘Gilded Age’ Collins was chosen as one of the three Cameron officers of the first King’s Guard to be mounted at Balmoral during King Edward VII’s reign. His memoirs contain much detail about life at Balmoral and the Royal family, some of it repeated in a series of articles about Collins published in the book Mississippi Gumbo by Bob Jones in 2003. Collins’s time at Balmoral got off to a shaky start when he nearly crashed his newly acquired car, a Panhard Levassor, into a coach containing the Princess of Wales and her five children including the future Kings Edward VIII and George VI. He was ordered to garage the car for the remainder of his duty. Collins was an inveterate gambler, at Monte Carlo and on the racecourse. He later attributed his financial difficulties to backing bills for his friend Charles Innes-Ker, a Gentleman Usher to the King. Whatever the cause, according to Collins it was ill-health, he resigned his commission in February 1904 before he was declared bankrupt in September 1904. By this stage he was in New York and conspicuous as a polo player and charming member of the Gilded Age set which included his friends the Vanderbilts, Goulds and Belmonts. In April 1904 he had married the American heiress Nathalie Schenck, the ‘Granddaughter of Brooklyn’. The marriage was short lived, not least because of his gambling. He lost a quarter of a million dollars on Boxing Day night in December 1904 playing baccarat at the Khedieval Club in Cairo. She divorced him in 1905. Collins spent the next ten years in recurrent financial difficulty in the United States, often reported in the U.S. papers. He set out to marry an heiress. In 1911 he was engaged to be married to Clara Parks, stepdaughter of the millionaire John H. Parks. The engagement ended when Princess Zoltykoff, the former burlesque dancer Ethel Clinton, accused him publicly of having appropriated two valuable Chinese vases from...