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The Ron Penhall Collection The Second World War B.E.M., Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea awarded to Able Seaman A. E. Fry, Merchant Navy, who, having been taken aboard an enemy vessel after the loss of his own to the German raider Komoran, led a mutiny against his captors: sentenced to death by a Nazi court at Hamburg for his efforts, he was brutally tortured by the S.S. and made to dig his own grave but, probably as a result of the intervention of the Swiss authorities, eventually emerged from captivity at the War’s end: in the interim he had been shot following a gallant escape attempt from a train British Empire Medal, (Civil) G.VI.R., 1st issue (Arthur E. Fry); Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea (Sailor A. E. Fry, S.S. “Afric Star”, 13th March 1941), this last with its fitted case of issue, mounted as worn with a Dunkerque Medal, the first with repaired and re-pinned suspension, edge bruising and contact marks, thus generally about very fine (3) £3000-4000 Footnote Arthur Ernest Fry was taken prisoner following the loss of the Blue Star Line’s Afric Star on 29 January 1941. Taffrail’s Blue Star Line at War 1939-45 states: ‘On 15 January 1941, the 12,000 ton, 15-knot, turbine-driven Blue Star steamer Afric Star, built in 1926, sailed from Rio de Janeiro for England by way of St. Vincent, Cape Verde Islands. Commanded by Captain Clement Ralph Cooper, she carried a full cargo of meat, a crew of 72, two naval gunners and two women passengers. On the morning of 29 January, after an uneventful voyage, when still some hundreds of miles short of her destination, they sighted a large ship flying the Russian ensign. For some hours the stranger remained in the distance, apparently keeping the Afric Star under observation. Then at about 2 p.m., the strange ship increased speed, approached the Afric Star, struck the Russian flag and hoisted the German, unmasked her guns and opened fire. Whether this was done before the Afric Star stopped and her crew had a chance to abandon ship I do not know; but the British ship caught fire, and her crew took to the lifeboats. The raider, which was the Kormoran, picked up the occupants of the boats, sank the Afric Star by gunfire, and then proceeded on her way south. Some days later the prisoners were transferred to the German supply tanker Nordmark, which was masquerading under the Stars and Stripes and in the name of Dixie, and a few days afterwards to a ship called the Portland, a motor-vessel of 7,000 tons bound from Chile to Bordeaux, in German-occupied France. On the voyage a fire broke out on board, and the German guard, considering it was a case of mutiny and an attempt to destroy the ship, opened fire, killing one passenger and an able seaman of the Afric Star. The Portland, with about 300 people from sunken vessels, finally arrived at Bordeaux on 14 March, the prisoners eventually being sent to internment camps in Germany.’ Fry’s sojourn in an internment camp was short-lived, however, for, in company with other gallant members of his “Mutiny” team, he was paraded before a special court at Hamburg and sentenced to death, the beginning of a nightmare that lasted three long years - most of them in solitary confinement. In the end he probably owed his survival to the Swiss authorities, who made a point of keeping a close eye on him, but such welcome intervention could not prevent the harsher realities of German justice. Just a few days of the events played out at Hamburg, he was visited in his cell by a brace of S.S. men, both keen to establish the identity of further “mutineers”. His unpublished but extremely interesting wartime memoir, Mutiny on the Portland, takes up the story: ‘Reluctantly, Arthur lay on the bed and took off his boots. Then his socks. Suspecting what was to follow he started to rise, but was knocked back and the two S.S. men seized his arms and handcuffed each one to the bedhead. Still not defenceless, Arthur kicked out with his bare feet, until they produced a rope a