Awarded to Captain Maurice Harold Jones MN (1881-1949). Obverse: Head of King George V (left). Legend: 'GEORGIVS V BRITT : OMN : REX ET IND : I MP:'. Reverse: Within a laurel garland in relief, the bow view of a drifter, a ship in the distance (right).Exergue: 'FOR WAR SERVICE MERCANTILE MARINE 1914-1918'. Inscription on edge: 'MAURICE H.JONES'. Fitted with a bar, the ribbon is missing.

Maurice Harold Jones (1881-1949) was a master in the merchant service, born in Rye, Sussex to mechanical engineer Edward Percy Stoakes Jones and his wife Annie. The family were comfortably off. Maurice Jones went to sea in 1898 with George Milne & Co and obtained his Board of Trade Certificate as a first mate in Rye in 1907. He was granted his master’s certificate in 1909 at Poplar and from 1910 until his retirement, he commanded ships owned or managed by the Glasgow-based Clan Line which carried cargo and passengers. Jones’s voyages were mainly to the Cape of Good Hope and South Atlantic or to ports in the Indian Ocean and East Indies. In 1915 he joined the Royal Naval Reserve as a Temporary Sub-Lieutenant. At the start of World War I, he commanded ‘Clan Fraser’ and from 1916 served as Lieutenant in HMS ‘Devonshire’. On 2 July 1917 he married Gladys Stoakes Jones (a cousin) at Stanford near Hythe, Kent. The couple settled in Horsham but Maurice Jones continued to spend much of the time at sea. During World War II, he commanded ‘Clan Munro’ until March 1940 (before the ship was mined off Harwich). He transferred briefly to ‘Clan Mactaggart’ and from the 26 October 1940 he was the master of ‘Clan Chattan’. In May 1941, she participated in Operation Tiger - one of five ships in a convoy delivering aircraft and tanks to Alexandria for the 8th Army. In February 1941, ‘Clan Chattan’ was back in Alexandria and with ‘Clan Campbell’, sailed for Malta with a cargo of military and naval stores only to be bombed en route. The crew were rescued by her escort, HMS ‘Decoy’ which sank the damaged vessel. He was awarded the OBE after he commanded a ship, travelling alone, which fought off two separate attacks by enemy planes at sea and in port (probably ‘Clan Chattan’) (see ‘London Gazette’ of 20 July 1943). At this time, defensively equipped merchant ships carried guns manned by Royal Navy and Royal Artillery personnel. Jones continued his war service in ‘Clan Cameron’ and ‘Samokia’ before retiring in 1946. He died three years later at Horsham.