The medals of a Sudbury headmaster and war poet killed at the Battle of the Somme have sold for nearly £1,000.

%image(15286714, type="article-full", alt="Captain Robert Smylie Picture: SUBMITTED BY SELLER")

The decorations awarded posthumously to the widow of Captain Robert Smylie were bought by a private collector via online auction site eBay for £804.

The medals were the British War Medal and Allied Victory Medal. Missing was the 1914/15 Star, although its ribbon survived.

Also sold were copies of some of his papers, newspaper cuttings of his death, and an anthology of his war poems and those of his wife Beatrice which she published after the war.

Capt Smylie was born in 1874 in Kings Norton, Worcestershire, now in Birmingham, and grew up in Ballymena in Ireland.

%image(15286717, type="article-full", alt="Capt Smyllie's medals and the copy of "Verses by You and Me" containing poems written by both Captain Smylie and his widow, Beatrice, published after the war Picture: SUBMITTED BY SELLER")

At the outbreak of war he was married with two daughters and was headmaster at Sudbury Grammar School.

He was commissioned in 1914 into the Royal Scots Fusiliers and was killed on July 14, 1916, leading his men in an assault on German positions at Langueval in the second week of the Somme offensive.

He is buried at Flatiron Copse Cemetery at Mametz.