No. 70
Silver, gilt, enamel.
Size 63 mm.
Order was awarded to the head of the British Naval Mission to China John Anthony Vere Morse in 1937 /authority to wear received on July 13, 1937).
John Anthony Vere Morse, always known as Anthony, was born in October 1892 and entered the Royal Navy as a Cadet in May 1905. Advanced to Lieutenant a few days after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, when he was serving in the destroyer Nubian, he removed to the battleship Cornwallis that November, in which capacity he was embarked for the Dardanelles.
Cornwallis supported the landings at Gallipoli until the 28th, Morse being given credit for his coolness and skill and the accuracy of the ship’s fire, hits being scored under difficult circumstances.
Morse removed to the destroyer Harpy in July 1915, also in the Dardanelles, and thence, in January 1916, to another destroyer, the Napier. Then in March 1917, he was given his first command, the P-46, in which capacity he served until removing to his final wartime appointment, the destroyer Unity, in February 1918 He was mentioned in dispatches for his services on convoy and patrol duties.
Between the Wars, Morse enjoyed a number of seagoing appointments and was advanced to Commander in June 1927 and to Captain in June 1934, in which latter year he also received an expression of appreciation from the British ambassador in Brussels for valuable services rendered on the occasion of the funeral of the late King of the Belgians; so, too, from the War Office and Air Ministry.
Later in the same year, Morse was appointed Head of the British Naval Mission to China, in which capacity he remained employed until 1937 and was awarded the Order of the Brilliant Jade.
By the renewal of hostilities he was serving as Flag Captain to the C.-in-C., Africa, but shortly thereafter took command of the cruiser Neptune and was deployed to the South Atlantic to the search for the Admiral Graf Spee - his young son was similarly employed in the Exeter and would be killed at the battle of the River Plate.
Having then returned home in June 1940 to take up appointment as Chief Staff Officer to the Rear-Admiral Northern Patrol, he was ordered to the Mediterranean in the new year and, by May 1941, was serving as Naval Officer in Command (N.O.I.C.), Suda Bay, Crete.
Following Crete, Morse was appointed by Admiral “ABC” Cunningham as N.O.I.C., Syrian Ports, then made S.N.O. Levant Area, in order to get around De Gaulle's French naval officers at Beirut. Morse handled them with his usual forceful tact and urbanity, and was very soon in complete command of everything that was worth commanding.
Then in early November 1942, and once more at Cunningham’s behest, he was appointed Commodore 1st Class and Flag Officer, Algiers, his arrival in the Bulolo with Admiral Burrough at his side taking place amidst a German air raid - a near miss from one bomb damaged the Bulolo’s engine-room telegraph and she ended up driving her bows into a thick bank of sand. Such mishaps aside, Morse excelled in his new duties.
Advanced to Rear-Admiral, he next took up appointment as Flag Officer, Western Italy, in which capacity he was awarded the C.B.E. for his part in Operation “Shingle” (London Gazette 6 June 1944 refers), in addition to the French Legion of Honour, this latter in May 1945. Here, then, a period in which he made massive improvements at Naples, where, as he put it, he oversaw the arrival of ‘an army of ants to eat their way into the wreckage’ - in fact, by early 1944, Naples had more traffic than New York.
He also received a number of high ranking visitors to his H.Q. in a villa on Capri, onetime the property of Mussolini’s daughter, Edda Ciano; similarly, too, when he moved to another villa, formerly the property of the German Ambassador to Spain, on Ischia - when Harold MacMillan and his wife paid a visit, Morse had them collected in a launch formerly owned by Prince Umberto.
But it was for his subsequent service as Flag Officer, Northern Area, Mediterranean, that he was elevated to K.B.E. and awarded the American Medal of Freedom in 1946.
Having been already invested with his C.B. and C.B.E. at Buckingham Palace in July 1945, Morse served as Flag Officer, Malaya, 1945-46, prior to returning home and receiving his K.B.E. back at the Palace in July 1946. Advanced to Vice-Admiral and placed on the Retired List in the following year, he died in a road accident in Southern Rhodesia in May 1960. And, as reported in The Times that August, his ashes were scattered from H.M.S. Puma in the South Atlantic, where the battle of the River Plate had been fought, and his beloved son killed.
John Anthony Vere Morse awards.
