5.5cm (2.2in) x 14cm (5.5in) x 9.5cm (3.7in)
Silver and enamels. Rectangular form plain box, the hinged lid applied with an enamelled escutcheon charged with stylised representation of Dover Castle overlooking the white cliffs and English Channel. The front engraved with presentation inscription ‘Presented to / Brigadier W.H. Gribbon, CMG, CBE / CO 8th Cinque Ports Bn KHG 1942-1944 / By the officers’. Cedar lined interior. Hallmarked London.
The Kent Home Guard (KHG) numbered no less than thirty-three battalions and comprised 60,000 men in 1944. At the standing down service in Canterbury Cathedral that same year 4,000 men of the various battalions were told ‘You stood at the gateway of Empire’ when remembering the three officers and 34 other ranks of the KHG who were killed by enemy action during the course of the war. No battalion of the KHG stood more in the ‘gateway’ than the 8th (Cinque Ports) Battalion which formed at Dover just twenty miles from occupied France in the dark days of 1940, by the re-designation of the Local Defence Volunteers. It was made up of men in reserved occupations and those over or under age to serve in the armed forces. Armed initially with only ‘shot-guns, bottles and pikes’, they stood ready to oppose the Nazi horde and inevitably perhaps to inspire a fine chapter in the history of British light entertainment.
Brigadier Walter H. Gribbon CMG, CBE, was educated at Rugby School and was commissioned into the King’s Royal Lancaster Regiment in 1900. An Arabic speaker, he served in the First World War as an intelligence officer in Mesopotamia where with the support of Sir Mark Sykes and Sir Wyndham Deedes, he helped set in train an intelligence operation which enabled General Allenby to destroy the Turkish Army in the Levant and to give Britain its ‘moment’ in the Middle East. A full account of Gribbon’s Middle East doings can be found in Anthony Verrier’s 1995 ‘Through the Looking Glass: British foreign policy in the Age of Illusion’.