The medal awarded to Lt Basil Worswick, who was killed on April 29, 1916, at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin during the height of the Easter Rising by a guard who thought he was a Sinn Fein spy, sold for £1300. The 1914-15 Star plus copied research was being sold by a private collector and was expected to fetch £400-500.
Christopher Mellor-Hill, head of client liaison (associate director) of DNW, said: “The medal attracted a lot of interest and was bought by a collector who had owned Lt Worswick’s other two First World War medals for over 30 years and has been looking for his 1914-15 Star all this time, so we are very pleased to have been able to reunite them at long last.”
Brewery duty
Worswick served with the King Edward’s Horse on the Western Front in 1915 and went with the 2nd Battalion to Ireland following the outbreak of the Easter Rising.
At the brewery he went to investigate after a jumpy guard of Royal Dubliners shot dead the night clerk of the brewery and Lt Lucas of the King Edward’s Horse. Challenged and searched by a sergeant of the Dublin Fusiliers, Worswick rushed at him, knocked the man down. The guard, seeing this, and believing Worswick also to be a Sinn Fein spy, killed him instantly.
The Company Quartermaster Sergeant in charge of the party of Dublin Fusiliers, Robert Flood, was subsequently court-martialled for the deaths of lieutenants Lucas and Worswick, but was acquitted, his actions attributed to the general confusion and panic that surrounded Dublin during the Easter Rising. Flood was subsequently killed in action on the Dorian front in Macedonia the following year.
