Williams underwent his baptism of fire as a member of Percy Scott’s celebrated Naval Brigade during the Boer War operations culminating in the relief of Ladysmith. In April 1900, during the Boxer Rising, he was part of the naval detachment landed in China with the mission to relieve the besieged embassies. Williams was commended for his gallantry during both campaigns.
Peace-time service offered little opportunity for advancement, however, and he was still an able seaman when his regular service ended a day short of his thirtieth birthday. Williams joined HMS Vernon, as part of the Royal Fleet Special Reserve, on 19 September 1910. Returning to the Welsh border country, Williams lived with a married sister at 12 Victoria Crescent, Newport, and found work with Messrs Lysaghts Orb Works. Later he served as a policeman in the Monmouthshire Constabulary, being stationed at St Mellions and Tredegar. The lure of the sea, however, proved too strong. Williams joined the Merchant Navy and when war broke out in August 1914 he was at sea, serving aboard a steamer. His family had not seen him for nearly a year, and they were never to see him alive again.
As a member of the Fleet Reserve, Williams was recalled to active service on 28 August, and within a month he was serving on HMS Hussar. His family had no inkling of his final mission on the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula until the announcement of his Victoria Cross in August 1915. His last letter home, shortly after the outbreak of war, had merely requested his family send on his naval pension papers and other documents.
Williams’ VC was presented to his father by George V at Buckingham Palace on 16 November 1916. Six years later, the people of Chepstow paid their own tribute to Williams’ great courage. On 8 January 1922 a gun from a German submarine, given to the town by the king, was unveiled by his sister, Mrs Frances Smith, and dedicated in his honour. On the same day, in St Mary’s Parish Church, Chepstow, Charles Dixon’s painting of the V Beach landing was unveiled by Capt. Unwin. It had been purchased by public subscription as a memorial to the town’s Gallipoli VC. Both memorials survive to this day, although the gun was moved closer to the town’s war memorial because of redevelopment work in the 1960s. Williams’ decorations, his VC, 1914–15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal, Queen’s South Africa Medal with clasps for Relief Of Ladysmith and Tugela Heights, and China Medal, 1900, were held by his family for many years, but are now part of the Lord Ashcroft collection.
Williams has no known grave. He is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.
George Leslie Drewry, the first officer of the Royal Naval Reserve to be awarded the Victoria Cross, was only twenty years of age when he won the nation’s premier award for valour. Yet in a short life, dogged by misadventure, he had already experienced more incidents of high drama than most men manage in a lifetime.
Born at Forest Gate, Essex, on 3 November 1894, the third of four sons to Thomas Drewry and Mary (née Kendall), he appears to have been destined for a sea-going career. His father was works manager for the P. & O. Steam Navigation Company, a prestigious enough post for the family to live in the comfort of a detached house in Claremont Road, Forest Gate. Drewry was educated at Merchant Taylor’s School, Blackheath, and at fourteen joined the Merchant Navy as an apprentice.
By then he had already survived two narrow brushes with death. Once, while playing with his younger brother Ralph in Wanstead Park, they had fallen into a bog. Disappearing up to their necks, their cries were heard by a passer-by who hauled them to safety. On another occasion, Drewry had been knocked over by a car. The catalogue of accidents followed the high-spirited youngster to sea. During his early training aboard the sailing vessel Indian Empire, he fell from the mast into the sea and was only rescued by the gallant efforts of the ship’s mate who dived overboard. On a subsequent voyage, the ship ran into a storm as it rounded Cape Horn and was wrecked on the remote, uninhabited Hermit Island. Drewry and the crew survived for fourteen days as castaways, living on roots and shellfish, until discovered by a Chilean gunboat.
In 1912 he joined the P. & O. Line, serving as an officer on the Australia and Japan routes. The following year he joined the Royal Naval Reserve. On 3 August 1914, while at Port Said, he was called up and posted as a midshipman to HMS Hussar. The months prior to the Dardanelles expedition were filled with the monotonous routine of ferrying the Mediterranean Fleet’s mail and officers from ship to ship. All of that, however, ended on 12 April 1915 when he joined Unwin in preparing the River Clyde for her important role in the V Beach landings.
Surgeon Burrowes Kelly, who accompanied Drewry aboard the River Clyde, described the young midshipman as being ‘of medium height but powerfully built … He was a very good-looking, modest and charming young man. He was devoted to his captain, and was considered by all the naval officers who knew him to have been an exceedingly brave fellow.’ It would appear, from his own account of the landings written as a letter to his father, that he was remarkably unaffected by the bloodbath at V Beach. Yet, when he toured the ruined village of Sedd el Bahr, three days after the landings, he fainted at the sight of so many Turkish and British bodies. ‘Never afterwards would he photograph anywhere near Sedd el Bahr’, recorded Surgeon Burrowes Kelly.
Drewry’s courageous exploits coupled with his tender years briefly made him a newspaper celebrity back home in Britain. By then, however, he had embarked on his second Gallipoli landing, alongside Unwin at Suvla Bay. The operation on the night of 6 August was in stark contrast to his experiences at V Beach. To his father, he wrote describing the scene at Suvla:
I stayed on various lighters until ashore and had a run on the beach but it was uncanny, the troops got ashore in record time and then came batteries and mules and munitions. I could not understand it, I stood on the beach and saw guns being landed and horses, and behind us a few yards away was the dark bush, containing what? There was little firing, now and then a sharp rattle quite close and then silence, I thought of Helles and then wondered if we had landed by mistake at Lemnos or if we were ambushed and the maxims were just going to clear the beach of living in one sweep …
During the next five days, Drewry worked ceaselessly, together with his former captain, ferrying men and stores from ship to shore. On one occasion he was compelled to make the dangerous journey across to Anzac beach before any link-up had been made with the forces at Suvla. Recalling the night run, he later wrote:
About half a mile out feeling our way in, bullets began to hit us and became thick as we got closer, overs from the trenches, almost spent that make a nasty sighing sound as they come. There was only the coxs’un [sic] and myself on deck and I had to go right forward to see where we were going. I had no cover and felt most funky, the beach itself was not so bad only a few bullets falling here and there.
Drewry returned to HMS Hussar on 11 August. He was prevented from staying on with his former captain by an order forbidding midshipmen from going ashore unless they were inoculated.
In October Drewry applied for promotion, and was confident of being made acting sub-lieutenant by November. The following September, he was promoted acting lieutenant and appointed to HMS Conqueror. Two months later, on 22 November, he was invested with his VC by George V at Buckingham Palace. As the first RNR officer to be so decorated, he was presented with a Sword of Honour by the Imperial Merchant Service Guild.
By the summer of 1918 Drewry had his own command, HMT William Jackson, a decoy trawler. It was while serving aboard this vessel in the bleak waters of Scapa Flow that the final, tragic misfortune befell the ‘Midshipman VC’. On the evening of 2 August a block fell from a derrick and struck him, fracturing his skull and breaking his left arm. He died the following day. His fellow officers in the Northern Patrol commissioned a memorial window in his honour in All Saint’s Church, Forest Gate. Drewry’s VC was later placed on display at his old school, beside a painting of the River Clyde. Today, his gallantry is recalled by a dramatic diorama of the V Beach landing in the Imperial War Museum.
During the two years that followed his VC award, the popul
ar, accident-prone war hero remained totally unaffected by his many honours. Years later his brother Ralph recalled: ‘He said he was only doing his duty and had never expected the VC. When I showed him all the newspaper cuttings about him that we had kept he told me to put them in the toilet.’
George McKenzie Samson was born on 7 January 1889, at Carnoustie, in Fife, Scotland, the second son of Mr David Samson, a shoemaker. The family lived at 63 Dundee Street, Carnoustie and Samson was educated in the town’s school, where his fellow pupils included Charles Alfred Jarvis, another future Victoria Cross winner.
Details of Samson’s short but colourful life are at best sketchy. After leaving school, he enlisted in the Army, but bought himself out and went to sea in the Merchant Navy, travelling far and wide. Wartime newspaper articles tell of him ranching in Argentina and working aboard whalers in the Arctic Ocean. When war broke out, Samson, who had joined the Royal Naval Reserve, was working, ironically, in Turkey, on a railroad at Smyrna. He immediately left his job, driving the mail train, sailed by steamer to Malta and there joined the crew of HMS Hussar.
The next few months were uneventful as the Mediterranean Fleet guarded against the possible break-out of the cruisers Goeben and Breslau. The only drama was provided by the elements. Writing home in early 1915, Samson said:
We are having awful weather here, and the ship has been trying to stand on her head for the last fortnight, but has not managed it yet. The cold is far worse than the Germans, the only difference being that you can feel the cold and not see it, and see the Germans not feel them. We are all very anxious to have another go at them and get it finished.
He closed on a humorous note:
Do you remember that lovely old song, ‘Roaming in the gloaming on the bonnie banks of Clyde’? Well, here is what we sing to the same air, as well as the outside air and sea:
Coaling and patrolling outside the Dardanelles,
Waiting for the Goeben to come and taste our shells;
She came down to Schanac [sic], but she very soon went back;
Oh, it’s lovely coaling and patrolling!
It was not long afterwards that the Mediterranean Fleet, including HMS Hussar, turned its attentions towards breaking through the Dardanelles instead of guarding against a Turkish break-out. And Samson, as one of the Hussar’s volunteers aboard the River Clyde, found excitement aplenty to make up for the months of inactivity.
The most seriously injured of the V Beach heroes who lived to receive the Victoria Cross, Samson was said to have suffered seventeen separate wounds. Evacuated to Port Said and then on to England, where he was treated at the Haslar Naval Hospital, he still had thirteen pieces of shrapnel lodged in his body when his VC was announced. At the time he was recuperating near Aboyne, in Scotland, and the following day he attended a civic reception in his home town of Carnoustie. Flags and bunting decorated the town’s railway station as he arrived to be greeted by the provost, town councillors and burgh band. Crowds pursued Samson everywhere during the next few days. His appearance at a recruiting rally in Aberdeen resulted in more than a hundred men enlisting.
On 5 October Samson went to Buckingham Palace to receive his VC from George V. Promoted chief petty officer, he figured in the 110th anniversary celebrations marking Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. The hero-worshipping continued when he returned to Carnoustie, together with his school contemporary and fellow VC winner Charles Jarvis, who had won his award for gallantry at Mons during the first month of the war. Samson was given a smoker’s cabinet and a solid silver rose bowl. The VC winner, who was travelling out of uniform, also received an unexpected gift – a white feather!
On the last day of 1915, Samson married Catherine Glass, a farmer’s daughter, at the Huntly Arms Hotel, Aboyne. The couple were to have one son. The following June, Samson was discharged from the Navy for a year on account of his wounds. He returned to Aboyne, where his wife was living. A newspaper report described him as looking ‘bright and cheery’, despite his painful injuries. There is no record, however, of Samson returning to active service.
After the war, he rejoined the Merchant Navy and in early 1922 he sailed from Dundee aboard the SS Docina. Taken seriously ill in the Gulf of Mexico, Samson was transferred to another vessel and taken to Bermuda for urgent medical treatment. He was found to be suffering from pneumonia and nothing could save him. He died on 23 February 1923, and was buried with full military honours in the island’s military cemetery.
Wilfrid St Aubyn Malleson was the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross during the Gallipoli operations. He was born at Kirkee, in India, on 17 September 1896, the eldest son of Maj.-Gen. Wilfrid Malleson (later Sir Wilfrid Malleson, KCIE, CB), of the Indian Army.
His early years were spent in India with his parents, but he came to England with his grandmother to attend Edgeborough prep school near Guildford. In due course his younger brothers, Rupert and Hugh, followed him, the school becoming almost a second home. Holidays were spent either with relatives or the headmaster and his wife.
In 1908, Wilfrid Malleson went to Marlborough and four years later joined the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, as a cadet. He was promoted midshipman three days after the outbreak of war, and posted to HMS Cornwallis, a pre-dreadnought battleship. The Cornwallis sailed from Britain to join the Mediterranean Fleet in January 1915, and to her fell the honour of firing the first British shot in the naval attempt to force a passage through the Dardanelles. Having survived the ill-starred naval assault of 18 March, the Cornwallis was assigned to cover the landings at S Beach, east of Cape Helles, on 25 April. Members of her crew, however, were detailed as beach parties with the task of ferrying troops ashore at V Beach, after the initial waves had, in theory, secured the shoreline.
Malleson was one of thirty-eight officers and men from the Cornwallis who were to operate the third tow of six lifeboats. Transported to the fleet sweeper Newmarket, lying off Tenedos, Malleson slept until 3.30 a.m. on 25 April, when he awoke to find the vessel within five miles of the straits.
During the action which followed, Malleson was the only one of the six V Beach landing VCs to survive entirely unscathed. Given the length of time he was exposed to the Turkish fire, that in itself was little short of miraculous. He returned to the Cornwallis on the evening of 25 April to fetch some ‘fresh gear’, having spent a long period sheltering on the River Clyde. In his account of the landings, which was written eleven months later, he recounted:
The next boat ashore was not until about 3.00 p.m. on the 26th. Accordingly, I returned ashore then with Mr Forbes [a midshipman from the Cornwallis] who had volunteered for the now somewhat thinned-out beach party. We spent all the afternoon unloading water and ammunition lighters, interrupted slightly by 4.7-in or 5-in common [sic] from Asia. The Zion Mule Corps had just arrived and proved very useful. That night the beach party and beach guard [two companies of Anson Batt. RND] entrenched themselves on the beach. We heard scattered rifle shots, probably from snipers. About 12.30 a.m., I was sent out in the whaler to direct tows to the landing place. These were the French from Kum Kali [sic], due at 1.00 a.m. At dawn, I returned to the beach. For the next 5 days the French landing went on uninterruptedly. On the 3rd day, we had a French NTO and beach party, who were a great help. After the 5th day the pace slackened off a little and we were given some French steam and motor boats which slackened off the pace also. On the 6th day I was transferred to a steamboat and so left the beach.
The strain of those arduous days, following immediately after his exertions at the landings, took their toll. Malleson was evacuated to Malta’s Bighi Naval Hospital suffering from rheumatic fever. According to his brother Rupert, then serving as a 15-year-old midshipman aboard the Lord Nelson in support of the operations at Gallipoli, it was the direct result of Wilfrid’s ‘long immersion and physical exhaustion off V Beach’. He made a full recovery and was promoted acting sub-lieutenant on 15 May 1916, joining his brother aboard the Lord Nelson in October. His rank of sub-lieutenant was
confirmed on 30 December and in the following October he left to undergo submarine training.
On 2 January 1918 Malleson went to Buckingham Palace to receive his VC from George V. Two months later he was promoted lieutenant and he saw out the war aboard the submarine depot ship Lucia, commanded by another Dardanelles VC, Martin Nasmith.
After the war Malleson served in the submarines L7 and L19, the latter as first lieutenant, before gaining his first command, H50, in 1923. His submarine service was interrupted by a two-year spell on battleship duties. He returned, however, to take command of L69 in August 1927.
Six months earlier he had married Cecil Mary Collinson at St Mark’s, Hamilton Terrace, St Marylebone, London. They had met and become engaged while he was serving in Malta. The couple had a daughter, Jane, born in 1928. Malleson was based at the time in Gosport and they settled near Plymouth.
After a short spell on the staff at Devonport, Malleson was posted to the cruiser HMS Berwick, on the China Station. By then in his mid-thirties, he had acquired, according to a fellow officer, a fierce reputation. Cdr. J.P. Macintyre (retd.) remembered:
He had rather definite views, though he didn’t talk much. He used to look like a pirate. He had a slightly hooked nose which appeared more hooked in those days than when he grew older … He was known as ‘Mad Malleson’, that is not meant to be pejorative mad, but a chap who is a bit unpredictable. He was fiercely forgetful, abnormally so.
VCs of the First World War Gallipoli Page 8