by Gary Mead
VICTORIA’S CROSS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
South Africa: A Travel Guide
The Doughboys:
America and the Great War
The Good Soldier:
The Biography of Douglas Haig
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Gary Mead, 2015
The moral right of Gary Mead to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 843 54269 8
Paperback ISBN: 978 1 843 54270 4
EBook ISBN: 978 1 782 39638 3
Text design by Richard Marston
Printed in Great Britain
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To Freya, Theodora and Odette
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Preface
1 The Price of Courage
2 A Most Grand, Gratifying Day
3 Small Wars
4 Big War
5 Go Home and Sit Still
6 Bigger War
7 The Integrity of the System
Current Military Decorations
Select Bibliography
Notes
Index
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped steer this book safely into harbour after a long journey. I wish to thank the staff of the London Library; the National Archives; and the Royal Archives. I particularly thank James Nightingale of Atlantic, who edited it; Angus MacKinnon, formerly of Atlantic, who commissioned it and courageously defended it to his own superiors; Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, my indefatigable agent and, if I may presume, friend; and finally my family.
Illustrations
1. First presentation of the Victoria Cross by Queen Victoria, in Hyde Park, 26 June, 1856. Original watercolour signed by Orlando Norie, 1832–1901 (Courtesy of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library)
2. Prince Albert, after George Baxter, 1804–67 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
3. Captain William Cecil George Pechell (standing, third from right) and men of the 77th Regiment in their winter dress in the Ukraine, during the Crimean War, c. 1855 (Roger Fenton/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
4. Thomas Henry Kavanagh being disguised during the Indian Mutiny, 1857 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
5. Ethel Grimwood, from My Three Years in Manipur, 1891
6. Winston Churchill (right) with other captured prisoners of war during the Boer War (Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
7. Lord Kitchener, depicted on a poster in 1915
8. Poster showing a flag-draped portrait of Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, 1916
9. John ‘Jack’ Travers Cornwell (© Imperial War Museum/Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans)
10. William Avery Bishop (© Photo Researchers/Mary Evans)
11. Women politicians at the House of Commons, London, 5 December, 1935 (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
12. Violette Szabo with her husband Etienne Szabo, c. 1940 (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
13. Winston Churchill shakes hands with Wing Commander Johnny Johnson during an inspection of French airfields, 30 July, 1944 (© Bettman/Corbis)
14. Dame Margot Evelyn Marguerite Turner by Hay Wrightson (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
15. Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry poses for photographs at the unveiling of a new portrait of him by Emma Wesley at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 February, 2007 (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)
Preface
I may be accused of animus toward the recipients of the Victoria Cross, to whom I have referred. To this I have only to say that they are one and all personally unknown to me, and that I believe they are as much deserving of the honour as a great many men who have not obtained it, while, on the other hand, it is an unquestionable fact that there are hundreds of officers who have not got the order, who are much more entitled to it than those who have it.1
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL H. J. STANNUS
Hundreds of books have been published about the Victoria Cross, most a mélange of train-spotting and hero worship, compendiums of deeds of derring-do about one or other of the 1,357 (to date) VC holders.2 Others focus on particular battles, branches of the armed services, regiments, or the VCs of individual Commonwealth nations. There is also clearly an appetite for arcane minutiae regarding the Cross; but is it really any longer of significance – was it ever? – that the metal used to produce a VC comes from Russian, as opposed to Chinese, cannons captured in the Crimean War?3 To some extent all these books rely upon the official citations of individual VCs as published in the London Gazette. These citations are a splendid assortment of painstaking description and creative invention, some quite lengthy and others very brief. All are carefully crafted, with a suitable veneer of authoritative objectivity, a smoothed-out uniform tone that adopts a lofty indifference to perhaps the most pertinent question: ‘Did it really happen like that?’ A degree of scepticism is called for when reading these official accounts.
The military is well accustomed to this scepticism. In an effort to demarcate between someone who has done something remarkably brave and someone who ‘merely’ fulfilled their duty, they have long had their own informal distinction between a ‘good’ VC and a lesser one in order to winnow out the authentic hero. But what is an authentic hero? Is it someone who calculates the risks and nevertheless stifles their fears; or someone who is so angered that they lose all self-regard? Is it someone who merely does their duty? Or someone who did not act very courageously at all, but to whom granting a VC was a personal or political gesture? The annals of the Victoria Cross have a fair sprinkling of all three types.
There has always existed a written royal warrant, which sets out the terms on which VCs are to be awarded – the rules. But, in a very British fashion, rules are one thing, behaviour often quite different. In the nineteenth century the VC rules were regularly adjusted to accommodate recipients that some establishment figure believed should be recognized by the award of a VC, but who, strictly speaking, were ineligible. Equally important was the need for that figure to possess the clout to push home a revision to the warrant. Senior military officers pushed through some extremely dubious VCs, motivated by personal or political reasons. In the twentieth century this trend for ignoring the terms of the royal warrant, and implementing informal rules of eligibility, was carried even further and given more systematic force, not through a conspiracy but instead by that very British tendency, the following of custom-and-practice. This served to warp still further the definition of exceptional courage, bending it to serve a broad political purpose: that of boosting national morale and encouraging others to emulate the selected act, while simultaneously tightening distribution of the VC significantly, and in ways that utterly diverged from what was laid down in the royal warrant. This book asks how it is that, over more than a century and a half, the VC has mutated from its no doubt flawed
but remarkably open and democratic origins, to become the tightly controlled, rather secretive, and undemocratic honour it has become today.
The kind of behaviour that is necessary to gain a VC today is not so much courage as madness; how else to describe a situation where those put forward for a VC are required to have risked a 90 per cent chance of death? When it was first created, the VC went to (usually) brave men. Today it still goes to brave men, but men who are carefully scrutinized for how their story will be judged by the media, assessed to determine if they are the ‘right’ character, and who are generally investigated far beyond their deeds in battle. Today, men are never chosen for a VC nomination by their fellows, even though they still have the right to do so. Women and civilians are also excluded, even though their eligibility is clearly stipulated in the most recent (1961) royal warrant. This book explores the anomalies, contradictions, injustices and absurdities that infuse the history of this deeply important symbol of British courage, national stoicism and patriotic pride. Ultimately, the distribution of the Victoria Cross is shaped by subjective decisions that intrude all along the route between the act of courage and the final pinning of the honour to a tunic. Courage possibly was never enough; it certainly is not today.
That the VC has deep symbolic meaning for British society cannot be doubted. Not only has the VC played a bit part in thousands of memoirs, novels, plays and poems, featured on postage stamps, in a nineteenth-century board game, in musical compositions, and even on railway engines.4 It is also, arguably, one of the two most instantly associative icons in the British mind that is attached to war – this cheap little cross represents ultimate courage, as the poppy stands for ultimate sacrifice. The VC, as with the poppy, has thoroughly embedded itself in the psyche, not just of Britain but also that of Commonwealth nations.
To win a VC today is an astonishing rarity which, given we have just been engaged in a war of considerable ferocity lasting thirteen years, is remarkable. You need first of all to be ‘lucky’ enough to find yourself in a situation where extreme courage is required, and prove yourself capable of demonstrating that degree of courage. Then you need to have the good fortune that your courageous act is noticed by a superior – even better, two superiors. After that, you must hope that your superiors are capable of writing up your brave deed in compelling prose – neither too simple nor too flowery, as the first will attract indifference and the second suspicion. It gets more difficult beyond that stage. You then need to be lucky enough that the write-up of your action gets passed upwards, and is not rejected by one or other higher officers through a chain of ever-more stringent oversight. If you are exceptionally lucky, your recommendation for a VC will reach the highest pinnacle, a special committee of very senior armed forces officers. They will then proceed to judge not just your action, your courage, your heroism, but also whether you are the right sort of person to be given a VC, whether the campaign in which you fought was significant enough, whether the quota of operational (battle) decorations justifies a VC in this case, and much else besides. Bravery – even exceptional bravery – is not enough.
Greater transparency is needed regarding the way that VCs are decided. In this day and age, when much is being made of the ‘Military Covenant’,5 the ‘assertion of an unbreakable bond of identity between soldier, Army and nation’, in which armed forces’ personnel are being treated with a greater maturity, it is no longer acceptable that the distribution of such a prestigious decoration – the foremost in the land – is arranged by a cabal of faceless uniformed men meeting in secret. A wholesale revision of the intricate system of military decorations and awards is also needed, drastically reducing their number simply because it attempts the impossible – the over-fine gradation of levels of courage. More VCs need to start being awarded, giving them where they are truly merited, and not restricting the numbers artificially, according to some pre-determined quota system that is poorly understood, even by the military. Distributing the VC according to rationing rather than purely on merit was not Queen Victoria’s intention and was never done in Victoria’s time. They were once freely given out to the brave; today they are as rare as rain in the Sahara, the supply artificially constricted by informal ‘rules’ of recent invention and unsanctioned by royal warrant. This is an absurd situation for our highest national decoration. For it is a certainty that Britain’s armed forces will, one day, again fight a war.
VICTORIA’S
CROSS
1
The Price of Courage
‘Courage is the stuff of good stories.’
WILLIAM MILLER1
‘The award of decorations, even Victoria Crosses, is an arbitrary business.’
SIR MAX HASTINGS2
The Victoria Cross has gripped the public imagination in Britain and the Commonwealth unlike any other military or civil honour. It is an emotionally charged emblem, one that reverberates far beyond the ranks of the armed forces. In today’s Britain, with public esteem for many institutions at an all-time low, Britain’s armed forces are a pillar of national pride, the pinnacle of which is the Victoria Cross.3 To be a ‘hero’ today is not what it was, thanks to reckless overuse of the word in the mass media:
contemporary gender, sexual, and ethnic politics argues that all are entitled to their stories of courage . . . the modern movement has gone farther to ‘dephysicalize’ courage . . . by using it loosely to congratulate anyone who by his own estimation undertakes some struggle for self-realization . . . Merely being all you can be need hardly involve courage; more likely it is a less glorious matter of plain hard work.4
Yet there remains one national symbol that is untarnished, one universally admired honour that has not been debauched by being lavished on all and sundry: the Victoria Cross. But the VC’s survival beyond its current status as an almost impossible aspiration for a gallant person is under threat; the paradox is that, in the effort to preserve its status, the extremely high standard now required to win a VC threatens to turn it into an exclusive graveyard. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the civil servants responsible for the VC in the War Office occasionally worried that it had been distributed with a degree of abandon by senior military officers and was being given away too freely. Since the Second World War, Britain’s senior military figures have consistently tried to prevent the VC from becoming devalued by giving it away too easily. That admirable desire, however, ignores a core principle of one of the VC’s originators, Prince Albert, who specified that he wanted the Cross to be ‘unlimited in number’. This tension – give the VC away too freely and risk devaluing it, or restrict it too tightly and make it almost impossible to win – remains at the heart of the decoration. Prince Albert’s thoroughly democratic view of the Cross, with a clear process of adjudication, has been lost; instead, the VC has become a remote symbol, entangled in bureaucracy and subject to all manner of political considerations, none of which are ever made explicit.
On the contemporary battlefield, where death is often by remote control, and hand-to-hand combat increasingly rare, the likelihood is that very few VCs will be won in the future, for the simple reason that individual combatants will have a diminishing chance of demonstrating astonishing gallantry. The understandable concern to preserve the status of Britain’s most prestigious decoration has led to an inexorable rise in the human price of winning the Cross; for years there has been an informal stipulation that, to be eligible for a VC, a candidate must have incurred a 90 per cent risk of death. This is the first of several puzzles that will crop up in this book. The 1856 royal warrant which established the VC made no reference to the level of risk that needed to be incurred; nor is there anything about the level of personal risk in the most recent revision to the warrant, that of 1961. Only custom and practice – both notoriously amorphous – dictates the 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement. Moreover, there is no objective means of assessing this percentage; nor could there be. It comes down to a subjective rule of thumb – did so-and-so almost die? How
close to death is ‘almost’? If we place the VC within a broad historical context, it becomes clear that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. Over more than 150 years, the VC has mutated from being available for a brave but relatively innocuous act, to a position where it is almost synonymous with death.
In 1856 the VC statutes were thought to have been set in stone, but the granite turned out to be jelly. A flurry of adjustments and amendments were made to those statutes in the years following 1856, making room for cases that were strictly ineligible. Some of the changes were not even formally embodied in statute until long after they were implemented, perhaps the most profound being in 1907, when Edward VII, under private, military and media pressure, abruptly changed his mind and ruled that the VC could, after all, be awarded posthumously. At the stroke of a pen he granted permission for the relatives of six dead soldiers to receive the Cross, even though he feared this would open the floodgates and encourage lobbying by families anxiously seeking a Cross for a dead relative. The entire First World War was fought in a state of uncertainty as to whether VCs could be bestowed posthumously; many were, but only because there was nothing precise in the statutes preventing it. In 1920 posthumous VCs were formally accepted in a thoroughgoing revision of the VC statutes.5
This kind of muddle recurs throughout the VC’s history. Confusion concerning the rules and regulations of the VC is one thing, injustice another. Families who believe that justice has not been done for courageous but long-dead relatives have in some cases pursued the VC for many years. This kind of pressure usually meets with stiff resistance from government and military. There is great institutional reluctance to reopen cases where a VC might have been justified, but was not awarded; the VC’s statutes are silent on retrospective posthumous VC awards. The authorities understandably fear opening up old cases, as incontrovertibly convincing evidence of exceptional courage may be lacking after the passage of time, and setting a precedent is always a concern. Yet the number of obvious cases of exceptional gallantry that, for whatever reason, were not considered for a VC at the time are very few, and to reconsider them today would not usher in a rush of similar claims. There are very few outstanding cases where a retrospective VC might be considered not only reasonable, but an instance of justice delayed.6