Capt. Hansen was evacuated to Egypt, where he learned of his VC award. The citation, published on 1 October, however, made no mention of his involvement in stemming the tide of panic-stricken reinforcements. It read:
For conspicuous bravery on the 9th August 1915 at Yilghin Burnu, Gallipoli Peninsula.
After the second capture of the ‘Green Knoll’ his battalion was forced to retire, leaving some wounded behind, owing to the intense heat from the scrub which had been set on fire.
When the retirement was effected, Captain Hansen, with three or four volunteers, on his own initiative, dashed forward several times some 300 or 400 yards over open ground into the scrub under a terrific fire, and succeeded in rescuing from inevitable death by burning no less than six wounded men.
L/Cpl. Breese, L/Cpl. Goffin and L/Cpl. Clifton (who later died of wounds) were all awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for ‘conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty’.
Before the month was out, Hansen had added a Military Cross to his VC. The citation, published on 29 October, stated:
He made a reconnaissance of the coast, stripping himself and carrying only a revolver and a blanket for disguise. He swam and scrambled over rocks, which severely cut and bruised him, and obtained some valuable information and located a gun which was causing much damage. The undertaking was hazardous. On one occasion he met a patrol of twelve Turks, who did not see him, and later a single Turk whom he killed. He returned to our lines in a state of great exhaustion.
In November, Hansen arrived in England to continue his convalescence at the Royal Free Hospital, London. He received his Victoria Cross and Military Cross from George V at Buckingham Palace the following month at an investiture attended by four Australian Gallipoli VCs, F.H. Tubb, H.V.H. Throssell, W.J. Symons and J. Hamilton. Interviewed by journalists about his gallantry at Scimitar Hill, Hansen said candidly: ‘They cut us up, but in turn we cut up four to five thousand of the enemy.’ Of his own part in the action, he said: ‘I was in the biggest funk of my life, and I hardly knew what was happening.’
Percy Howard Hansen was born in Dresden on 26 October 1890 into a successful Danish trading family with royal connections and extensive business interests across South Africa. His father, Viggo Julius Hansen, came from Naestved, a small town some 50 miles south of Copenhagen, and his mother, Elsa (née Been), belonged to a wealthy shop-owning family that held the warrant as grocer to the Royal Danish Household. Details of Viggo’s early business activities are sketchy, but he was clearly ambitious and industrious and by the late 1870s had established a thriving commercial empire in South Africa. Originally centred on Port Elizabeth, his concerns, which came to include prime property sites in Johannesburg, a sanatorium, liquor importing rights and a number of magazines for storing explosive used in the mining industry, eventually spread across the whole country. By 1886, when he married his Danish sweetheart in Copenhagen, he claimed to have become a naturalised subject of the Cape Colony. His personal fortune continued to grow, affording the couple the luxury of a peripatetic lifestyle in some of the world’s most fashionable cities. They divided their time between suites in the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, the Hotel de Paris or Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo and the spas of Germany. It was during one such trip that their first son was born, Percy’s birth certificate being issued by the Royal Saxon Registry Office.
At some point in the late 1890s or early 1900s, the Hansens moved to England and set up home, for the first time, at 39 Hyde Park Gate, London. There, during the so-called London season, they entertained lavishly, with Elsa becoming something of a darling of British high society, being noted for her ‘chic costumes and well-coiffeured hair’.
Both Percy and his younger brother Edgar were given a thoroughly British upper-class education. They attended Hazelwood, a preparatory school in Oxted, Surrey, where their contemporaries included another future VC recipient, Geoffrey St. George Shillington Cather. From there, aged thirteen, Percy entered Eton College on 20 September 1904. While his academic career continued unremarkably, he proved himself a keen sculler, a superb horseman and a great shot before leaving for Sandhurst. It was while attending the Royal Military College that his father successfully applied for British citizenship in order that Percy could take up a commission in the British army. This he duly did and, despite distinctly average academic results, he was gazetted second lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment on 4 March 1911.
In sharp contrast to his scholastic achievements, Hansen’s military career prospered. He was promoted lieutenant on 3 August, 1912 and travelled with the 2nd battalion to Bermuda where he contracted blood poisoning which necessitated his return to England, lengthy spells in hospital and a period of convalescence in Denmark. Rejoining his unit two days before the declaration of war in 1914, he was promoted temporary captain on 4 September 1914, and promptly posted to the 6th (service) battalion as adjutant. Five months later, while the battalion was undergoing training at Grantham, he was given his captaincy.
Following his distinguished service in Gallipoli and nearly six months hospitalisation and convalescence, Hansen returned to duty with the 9th (reserve) battalion before taking up the first of a series of staff appointments. A spell at Halton Park camp, as brigade major ‘under instruction’, during the summer of 1916 was followed by his appointment as a general staff officer (second grade). Posted as brigade major to the 170 Infantry Brigade, part of the 57th (West Lancashire) Division, on 17 September 1916, he proceeded with them to France on Christmas Day. In August 1917, he took over the duties of GSO II for the division and three months later was posted to the headquarters of 2nd ANZAC, later designated XXII Corps. It was in this role that he added to his Gallipoli honours two mentions in despatches, a French Croix de Guerre (7 October 1918) and the Distinguished Service Order (London Gazette, 16 September 1918). The citation read:
For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He volunteered to carry out a reconnaissance, and brought back valuable information obtained under heavy artillery and machine gun fire, which had been unprocurable from other sources. Throughout he did fine work.
The action took place in the Ypres salient and, according to XXII Corps papers, the DSO recognised his ‘outstanding bravery … over a considerable period’ during which he patrolled no-man’s-land almost daily. ‘His example,’ continued the account, ‘was an inspiration to all and went far beyond that normally expected of an officer of his rank.’
Returning to England shortly before the armistice, Hansen travelled to Denmark, where his parents had spent the war and where they laid on a fabulous ‘homecoming’ ball which was attended by members of the Danish royal family, including Princess Margrethe with whom Percy developed a close and enduring friendship which became the subject of some gossip and rumour.
In February 1919, Hansen, who had been gazetted brevet major on 1 January, joined a distinguished band of officers, including Viscount Gort VC, DSO, MVO, MC, Bernard Freyberg VC, CMG, DSO and George Pearkes VC, DSO, MC on the first post-war Staff College course. As at Eton and Sandhurst, it appears that he did not shine at Camberley, though his high society connections did lead him to acquire the mock appointment of ‘Traffic Control Officer, Piccadilly’ and the nickname ‘Piccadilly Percy’.
Having graduated, Hansen was appointed brigade major of the 8th Infantry Brigade, Southern Command, a post he took up on 9 February 1920. He served in a similar capacity with the 12th Infantry Brigade before being appointed a GSO (second grade) in the Territorial Army’s 55th (West Lancashire) Division on 10 February 1925. More staff appointments followed, including one in Jamaica, before Hansen returned to his old regiment as second in command of the 2nd Battalion. He served with the unit in England, in Malta at the height of the Abyssinian crisis and in Palestine where the Lincolnshires were engaged in internal security duties. Promoted lieutenant colonel on 9 September 1937, he assumed command of the battalion the following day. Hansen’s command lasted a little under two years. On the declaration of war in 1939, h
e was required to take up a mobilisation appointment as assistant adjutant and quartermaster general of 55th Division.
His Second World War career was marked by a succession of staff posts. Promoted acting and then temporary brigadier in 1941, he commanded the Belfast area in 1942–3 before being made head of the Civil Affairs unit for Norway. Given his Scandinavian roots it was a peculiarly apt appointment and brought him fresh honours in the form of the United States’ Legion of Merit (10 May, 1946) and the Norwegian Royal Order of St Olav (30 October, 1945). Hansen retired from the army on 18 January 1946 and was granted the honorary rank of brigadier.
Percy Hansen’s private life was a complicated one. Aside from his friendship with Princess Margrethe, he had a long-standing relationship with Sylvia Poulett, a former member of the Gaiety Girls, a famous London chorus line, whose husband, the 7th Earl Poulett, died in 1918. Percy and Sylvia were engaged in 1921 and had an illegitimate daughter, Phoebe, who was born in October 1923, six months before the couple announced that their engagement was cancelled on the grounds that by remarrying the countess would have forfeited the bulk of her income under the terms of her late husband’s will. Four years later, on 12 June 1928, Percy married divorcee Marie Rosa (Rosie) Emsell, who already had an eight-year-old daughter, June. They had a daughter, Kinsa, who was born in 1930 and whose godparents included Percy’s friend, Prince Aage of Denmark, and the distinguished Irish guardsman, Harold Alexander, later Earl Alexander of Tunis.
Years later, Kinsa would remember her chain-smoking father’s ‘fabulous sense of humour’ and the good looks that earned him the newspaper nickname of ‘Handsome Hansen’. ‘Percy loved good food, particularly Danish or French,’ she wrote. ‘He liked rich dishes which was probably why he became diabetic! He ‘pinched’ our Danish cook … from the household of Prince Frederick of Denmark …’.
A keen sportsman and a fine long-distance swimmer, Hansen also kept a string of polo ponies, both in Jamaica, when he was serving there in the 1930s, and in Spain. His greatest passion, however, was for cinematography and he proved himself a talented amateur filmmaker, producing impressive colour films that chart his time in the West Indies, Malta and Palestine. These were shot with a sophisticated Kodak camera bought during a trip to New York. Kinsa recalled: ‘Percy always filmed and after leaving the army made his living out of his films.’
Between 1946 and 1950, he conducted film lecture tours around Britain, Canada and the United States, screening such home produced movies as ‘Britain in Ceremonial’, ‘English Heritage’ and another about Norway. A gifted raconteur, he was comfortable speaking on most topics save his own wartime exploits. ‘He was very reticent about mentioning his medals,’ observed Kinsa, ‘I was brought up not to talk about them.’
Echoes of his fame resounded briefly again in 1950 when he was invited to join a guard of honour in Copenhagen to mark the visit of Winston Churchill. Later that same year, while on another lecture tour, his health gave way. Shortly afterwards, he caught pneumonia. Complications set in and, on 12 February 1951, Percy Howard Hansen, war hero and filmmaker, died.
W.T. FORSHAW
The Vineyard, Helles sector, 7–9 August 1915
Lt. W. Forshaw
It had been a quiet day on the Helles front; ominously so, in the opinion of 25-year-old William Forshaw, a subaltern serving with the 9th Manchesters. A schoolteacher by profession, the young Territorial officer had been on the peninsula for barely a fortnight. Yet already the spirit of optimism was beginning to fade. As far as 2nd Lt. Forshaw was concerned the portents did not appear good. Writing to his former headmaster on 21 May, he confided:
I think I can safely say that it is a much stiffer proposition than was first anticipated. This country was made for defence – every inch of it – and the enemy are exceedingly well led. They are making the most of their natural advantages. Man for man, or even regimentally, they cannot compare with us, but their generals are good… . They are giving nothing away.
Over the succeeding weeks, the experience of the British forces at Helles would bear out his words. Three large-scale attacks, launched on 4 June, 28 June and 12 July, advanced the Allied lines by the merest of margins at a cost in lives which was impossible to sustain without far greater reinforcements. Trenches criss-crossed the southern neck of the peninsula, turning the Turkish position into a veritable stronghold. Such was the stalemate at Helles by the first week in August, the southern sector had become a virtual sideshow. Attention had swung north to Suvla Bay for the opening of a new front and a fresh effort to outflank the Turks.
It was in an attempt to ensure the success of the northern operations that the 42nd East Lancashire Division, which included among its units the 9th Manchesters, undertook the last major British offensive to be mounted south of Achi Baba. What was conceived as a diversionary attack, designed to draw Turkish reserves away from the main thrust, began at 3.50 p.m. on 6 August, some seven hours before transports began disgorging men and materials on to the darkened beaches of Suvla Bay. The Helles feint, launched by the reconstructed 88th Brigade of the 29th Division and continued by the 125th and 127th Brigades of the 42nd East Lancashire Division, was directed at a small kink in the Turkish lines straddling the two forks of the Kirte Dere. According to the optimistic and frighteningly simplistic plan, the assault battalions would slice through the northern face of the salient, capturing the frontline trench known as H13, leaving the Lancastrians to follow up the next day with an attack on the southern half of the Turkish lines, where they bisected a small vineyard to the west of the Krithia road.
The Turks, however, had long suspected a British attack at this point and were well prepared. When the woefully inadequate British bombardment subsided, they were ready and waiting for the assault. In the furious battle which followed, the leading waves were all but annihilated. A few parties bludgeoned their way into the Turkish trenches only to be slaughtered or compelled to retreat. In the confusion, orders for further attacks were given and then countermanded. Of the 3,000 British engaged, approximately 2,000 had become casualties and the 88th Brigade had almost ceased to exist as a fighting entity. The frontline trenches were clogged with wounded and shocked survivors. It had been a day of unmitigated disaster.
Yet despite the failure of the northern assault and the realization that the Turkish defences had been fatally under-estimated, the attack on the southern portion of the salient was not cancelled. The two-brigade attack, launched at 9.40 a.m. on 7 August, was made on a frontage of 800 yds with the objective of capturing and securing the main Turkish support line, F13–H11b. To reach it, the men of the 42nd East Lancashire Division would have to struggle through a labyrinth of trenches in one of the most intricately fortified sectors of the Turkish lines. It was scarcely a surprise, in view of the events of the preceding day, that the attack was bloodily repulsed at every point, save for the small vineyard on the right of the salient. Here fragments of the 6th and 7th Lancashire Fusiliers clung to their hard-won gains. By midday this pocket of resistance, a salient within a salient, was all the 42nd Division had to show for its endeavours. Military logic dictated a withdrawal from what appeared an untenable position. However, it was held not for reasons of strategic importance but on a point of principle. The Vineyard had become a symbol of stubborn pride.
During the afternoon, the remnants of the Lancashire Fusiliers were bolstered by the arrival of two platoons from A Company, the 9th Manchesters, otherwise known as ‘Ashton’s Own’. They were led by the same William Forshaw, who ten weeks earlier had so perceptively judged the Turkish powers of resistance. Now his own resolve would be put to the test.
Since arriving on the peninsula, the 9th Manchesters had escaped the worst of the fighting and their losses were correspondingly light. Forshaw had been promoted from quartermaster to the command of A Company, with the temporary rank of captain, shortly before the battle in which the 9th were held in reserve. His second in command was 2nd Lt. C.E. Cooke. For them, and for most of their me
n, the advance into the Vineyard represented a violent introduction to trench warfare.
Passing over the newly captured ground, they were guided to the north-western corner of the position, at the vital junction of the former Turkish trench, G12. Both sides knew it to be the key to the precarious British incursion. All that separated Briton from Turk at this point were hastily constructed barricades. To hold his post Forshaw had approximately twenty men armed with rifles and a plentiful supply of jam-tin bombs. Forshaw put the number of bombs at around 800 and, in the absence of machine-guns, saw in them his best chance of salvation. He later recalled:
We decided that we would hold on to the position whatever it cost us, for we knew what it meant to us. If we had lost it the whole of the trench would have fallen into the hands of the enemy. I had half of the men with me, and the other half I placed along the trench with a subaltern [2nd Lt. Cooke].
Three Turkish-held saps converged on Forshaw’s post, and it was from these that the Turks hurled themselves in a series of frenzied assaults beginning on the night of 7 August and continuing until the morning of 9 August. The close-quarter fighting was of almost medieval savagery. Seventy years later, Godfrey Clay, a member of Forshaw’s force, remembered: ‘We hadn’t been in above half an hour when the Turks got out over the top and came at us … We kept them out … How I don’t know. Mostly with rifle fire … I got a bullet through my hair that day.’ Another of the defenders, Sgt. Harry Grantham, who had earned a DCM a month earlier, stated: ‘We could see the Turks coming on at us, great big fellows they were, and we dropped our bombs right amidst them.’ Forshaw was the life and soul of the defence. Wherever the fighting was most intense he was to be found, hurling bombs and shouting encouragement to his men. According to Sgt. Grantham:
VCs of the First World War Gallipoli Page 26