Officer Casualty Afghanistan Medal 1878-1880, no clasp, awarded to Lieutenant H.R. Ross, 1st/5th Battery, Royal Artillery, who came from Cromarty, Scotland, where his father was the Colonel of the Highland Rifle Militia, and his mother was a daughter of the Lord Lieutenant of Ross-shire. Commissioned in October 1873, and out in India from October 1874, he saw service with Field Artillery Battery F/5 at Sitapur. With the outbreak of hostilities for the Second Afghanistan War in the autumn of 1878, he volunteered for active service, and became one of the first Artillery subaltern’s to fill a vacancy in one of the batteries ordered to the front. He however contracted dysentery at Quetta when on the march to Kandahar, and having refrained from reporting the illness, lest he might by left behind, continued the advance with the 1st/5th Battery, only to succumb from the disease in camp at Pishin Valley on 12th January 1879.
Afghanistan Medal 1878-1880, no clasp; (LIEUT. H.R. ROSS. 1/5TH: R.A.)
Condition: toned, Nearly Extremely Fine.
Hugh Rose Ross was born on 31st May 1854 at Cromarty House, Cromarty, Scotland, he being the second son of George W.H. Ross, a Cromarty, who was a Colonel of the Highland Rifle Militia, and his wife, Adelaide Lucy, the third-daughter of Duncan Davidson, of Tulloch, who was the Lord Lieutenant of Ross-shire. Educated over in Belgium at the Reverend J.C. Jenkin’s School at Brussels, he then studied with the Reverend Dr. Frost, L.L.D., in Kensington, London, and having decided on a career in the British Army, passed into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1872, being then commissioned as a Lieutenant into the Royal Artillery in October 1873. After twelve months duty at Woolwich and Aldershot, on 1st September 1874 he was posted to Field Artillery Battery F/5, which he joined a month afterwards out at Sitapur in India. For the next four year he saw service with this battery out in Bengal.
With the outbreak of hostilities for the Second Afghanistan War in the autumn of 1878, he volunteered for active service, and became one of the first Artillery subaltern’s to fill a vacancy in one of the batteries ordered to the front. However his promising career was to be cut short from the very outset, and when at Quetta on the march to Kandahar, he came down with dysentery, however he refrained from reporting the illness, lest he might by left behind, and therefore took part in the further advance of the 1st/5th Battery, and ‘continued to perform his duties with the utmost cheerfulness’, however at length, he became completely prostrated, and eventually died in camp at Pishin Valley on 12th January 1879.
A photograph of Ross appears in 'The Afghan Campaign of 1878-1880' by S. H. Shadbolt.
