I’ve already written about J. Brixley and his OBE woes, but made the mistake of saying that the person who dobbed Brixley in was anonymous. In fact, two men wrote in to the Home Office reporting Brixley. They were Norman Cockell OBE and J.C. Telford OBE, and were clearly keen to defend the honor and dignity of the Order of which they had been made Officers (both for services in the Ministry of Shipping during the First World War). They both had used the 1921 Burke’s Handbook to the Order of the British Empire as a reference guide, and had found that Brixley’s name was absent from this tome.
But Telford and Cockell’s efforts to protect the Order from people who didn’t belong in it paled in comparison to the Order’s most dedicated defender of the interwar period, Ernest Loftus. Loftus was, again, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and Deputy Lieutenant for Essex, and who worked at the Barking Abbey School in Essex. Loftus first wrote in to the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood in August 1936, complaining about two people who ‘I believe, were awarded a Medal of the Order of the B.E. [who] are calling themselves O.B.E. and this is apt to bring the decoration of the O.B.E. itself into disrepute as these people are not the type to be awarded that Order’. Loftus asked whether there was a list of members of the Order that he could consult. If there were none, he suggested, ‘it is obvious that there is no remedy for abuse of this nature without a lot of trouble’. In reply, Loftus was asked whether he could give the names of the suspects, to which he replied that ‘The names of two people who pose as O.B.E.s to my knowledge are a Mrs. Wilkins who states she obtained the order as Miss L.F. Grasham in 1919 and a Mr. S.P. Carvell.’ Within a month, he also reported Mr A. Lipscombe for appearing in a newspaper cutting in which he was ‘given an order to which, apparently, he has no claim’. Loftus had done his research, and had been told by an informant that Lipscombe had been the recipient of a Medal of the Order as a member of the Barking Fire Brigade. The clipping concerned was an announcement of the marriage of Lipscombe’s daughter.
Lengthy correspondence between Loftus and a Treasury official named Robert Knox followed. Frustrated by the abuse of inappropriate post-nominals, he suggested that those awarded the Medal of the Order needed to be told when they received their medal that it did not entitle them to any letters after their name. He clearly saw this as a major problem which was ‘growing to serious dimensions’, and while he continued to feed names and information to Knox and the Central Chancery, he also suggested that they needed to take some broader action to crack down on people who had mistaken their status in the Order and in society in general. In 1937, he sent four more cases, supported by clippings, of people allegedly inappropriately claiming to have received honours of various types. Again he stressed the ‘confusion in the public mind [which] seems to arise from ignorance’ about what the letters OBE stood for. While Knox said that he found himself ‘in much sympathy with your point of view’, he pointed out that in almost all the cases, it was press errors rather than arrogance or misrepresentation by the individuals concerned that had perpetuated the errors.
Such explanations did little to appease Loftus, who continued to send letters to Knox asserting the need for a change in terminology to avoid confusion. He suggested that ‘Fellows’ or ‘Associates’ be used in place of Officer, probably not realizing that Associates was the initial suggested title for MBEs in the early stages of the development of the Order – Knox disagreed, arguing that this suggested ‘a Society of some kind rather than a great Order of Chivalry’. When within a year Loftus sent yet another letter in to the Treasury about another of his neighbours who seemed to be misusing the infamous three letters, Knox was led to remark in a letter to Harold Stockey, the Secretary of the Order, that ‘It seems to be almost a point of honour among the neighbors of Colonel Loftus to describe themselves in this way.’ On establishing that this was, indeed, yet another case of the misuse of the post-nominals, Stockey replied dryly that ‘Loftus seems to have struck a very bad patch in his district’. W.G. Day, the elderly, mostly deaf gentleman who was the culprit in this case was astonished to learn that he was misusing the letters, and in a personal interview with Knox was very apologetic. Knox was inclined to be tolerant and polite, because his own enquiries about the character of the Day indicated that the man was ‘intelligent and very helpful’. Without this knowledge, Loftus was less tolerant, and continued to harass Knox with his own enquiries until he was informed of the outcome of Knox’s meeting with Day – he clearly feared that not enough was being done to resolve the ‘very bad patch’ of OBE misusers that plagued his existence.
Loftus’s campaign against the Essex imposters continued into 1938, but at this point he made something of a misstep by bringing two men to the attention of Knox who, he claimed, seemed to be medal holders who both, in fact, held ranks in the Order – one a member and one an officer. In this instance, Loftus found their names and postnominals in the committee meeting minutes for the King George Hospital in Ilford, but he managed to misjudge their status, and although in his letter in reply to Knox he expressed himself ‘relieved’, his action must have been embarrassing. He closed his reply with the justificatory sentence: ‘But what a state of confusion reigns in this order!’
This was not the last time Loftus wrote to the Treasury, nor were the cases mentioned above the only ones of mistaken honorific identity that came to Knox’s desk. Many members of the Order of the British Empire around Britain and the empire were keen to stop others from impersonating their honour. Loftus was, however, the most persistent and prolix correspondent, which makes him particularly interesting, as his words did reveal something of his motivations and commitment to maintaining high standards and ensuring that the Order of the British Empire was untarnished by illegitimate use. As the deputy Lieutenant of his county, he had, if not actual responsibility, at very least a greater interest in the area of honours than the average citizen. As a former Colonel, the OBE was at the lower end of possible honours for those in his social position, which may have further motivated him to enforce and assert its importance as a marker of status. For him, these matters of honours were truly matters of honor (and of class).
Source: Treasury Records, National Archives (UK)