Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  King, Anthony, ‘Women in Combat’, RUSI Journal, vol. 158, no. 1 (February/March 2013), pp. 4–11

  Lalumia, Matthew, ‘Realism and Anti-Aristocratic Sentiment in Victorian Depictions of the Crimean War’, Victorian Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (autumn 1983), pp. 25–51

  Lieven, Michael, ‘Heroism, Heroics and the Making of Heroes: The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 30, no. 3 (autumn 1998), pp. 419–38

  Markesinis, B. S., ‘The Royal Prerogative Re-Visited’, Cambridge Law Journal, vol. 32, no. 2 (November 1973), pp. 287–309

  Markovits, Stefanie, ‘Rushing into Print: “Participatory Journalism” during the Crimean War’, Victorian Studies, vol. 50, no. 4 (summer 2008), pp. 559–86

  Rachman, Stanley J., ‘Fear and Courage: A Psychological Perspective’, Social Research, vol. 71, no. 1 (spring 2004), pp. 149–76

  Sweetman, John, ‘“Ad Hoc” Support Services during the Crimean War, 1854–6: Temporary, Ill-Planned and Largely Unsuccessful’, Military Affairs, vol. 52, no. 3 (June 1988), pp. 135–40

  Notes

  Preface

  1.Curiosities of the Victoria Cross (William Ridgway, 1881), p. 34.

  2.The New York Times Saturday Review of Books calculated in its edition of 7 January 1909 that ‘in the intervening half century [since the establishment of the VC] something like 55,000 books of fiction have been published in the United Kingdom and colonies, and in 8 percent of these the hero, or some other chap, is the envied possessor of the VC’.

  3.This arcane dispute seems to have been cleared up by an absorbing account from what is likely to be a definitive source, the curator of the Royal Artillery Museum (see www.westernfrontassociation.com/video/1252-wfa-agm-2010-presentations.html). Hancocks, the London jeweller given the job of making the first VCs (a task it still has today), has no record of where the original metal came from. The first few hundred VCs were thus probably made from metal held in stock. When in 1914 that ran out, the War Office called for the Royal Arsenal to choose some old guns as a metal source. The Arsenal selected two Chinese cannon, from which the cascabels (each weighing about sixty-four kilograms) were cut. These cannons, on display at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, have plenty of metal left. In 2005 John Glanfield estimated that 360 pounds of metal ‘from all sources’ had been used to manufacture the 1,352 VCs, three bars, and replacement or duplicate VCs that had been made up to that date. See Glanfield, Bravest of the Brave: The Story of the Victoria Cross (Sutton Publishing, 2005), p. 35. Two books stand against the ‘blood-and-guts’ tide that passes for history vis-à-vis the VC: M. J. Crook, The Evolution of the Victoria Cross (Midas Books, 1975) and Melvin Charles Smith, Awarded for Valour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  4.In January 1922 the London and North Western Railway decided that three of their Claughton locomotives were to carry nameplates dedicated to the three employees who had won the VC: Lance Corporal J. A. Christie, Private E. Sykes and Private W. Wood. Edward VII wanted a bunker in the shape of the VC to be constructed for the golf course in the private park at Windsor; the VC even had a cameo role in Walt Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book.

  5.The idea of a Military Covenant feels as though it should be positively ancient but it was only invented in 2000. Nevertheless there is a new spirit abroad regarding the relationship between society and soldiery, in which the military is held today in higher regard than for many years – partly because there is a general sense that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disastrous mistakes, started by politicians and handled badly by politicians. As distrust of conventional politics has slumped, respect for and trust of the military has risen. See Sarah Ingham, The Military Covenant – Its Impact on Civil–Military Relations in Britain, (Ashgate, 2014).

  CHAPTER 1 The Price of Courage

  1.William I. Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Harvard University Press, 2000).

  2.Max Hastings, The Spectator, 16 April 2005.

  3.Although it might have been a scarf, hand-crocheted by Queen Victoria during the Second Boer War. Nine inches wide by five feet long, these khaki-coloured scarves had the royal cipher VRI, Victoria Regina Et Imperatrix, woven into them. Only eight are thought to have been finished and they became highly prized The recipients had to be selected by a vote of the NCOs and men of each unit, and approved by Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief, who stipulated that ‘gallant conduct in the field was to be considered the primary qualification’. Four scarves awarded to British army regular soldiers went to men of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Division: Sergeant Henry George Clay, DCM, 2nd Battalion, the East Surrey Regiment; Sergeant William Colclough, 2nd Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment; Sergeant Thomas Ferrett, DCM, 2nd Battalion, the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment; and Sergeant Frank Kingsley, DCM, 2nd Battalion, the West Yorkshire Regiment. In 1902 the New Zealand government requested that the title ‘Queen’s Scarf’ be used in the Army List and other official documents, but this was refused by London. The question of precedence cropped up again in 1956, when a descendant of one of the holders of a scarf requested permission to attend the VC centenary celebrations. The official reply laid to rest the ‘VC competitor’ myth: ‘While the Queen’s Scarf is regarded as a unique and most distinguished award, relatives of those who received it are not being included in the present ceremony as it does not carry equal status with the Victoria Cross.’

  4.Miller, op. cit., p. 12.

  5.Posthumous awards for all levels of military decoration were not introduced until 1977.

  6.They do things differently elsewhere. On 18 March 2014, following an initiative from Congress, President Barack Obama awarded retrospective Medals of Honor to twenty-four US Army veterans who had fought in the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and who had been denied the award on the basis of their ethnicity. On the other hand, skin colour or religion has never been used to deny the VC; at least, not explicitly.

  7.Colonel H. C. B. Cook, ‘British Battle Honours’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, vol. 57, no. 231, autumn 1979, pp. 154–66. Battle honours have long been distributed without any apparent methodology. According to Cook, ‘the whole system of awarding these much prized distinctions has been rather haphazard and sometimes quite illogical . . . Deserving cases may go unrecognized while others receive acknowledgement they have not really merited.’

  8.The inquiry, Unresolved Recognition for Past Acts of Naval and Military Gallantry and Valour, received 166 submissions put forward by the Australian government relating to the thirteen names, and another 174 nominating an additional 140 individuals and groups.

  9.A copy of the report can be found here: http://defence-honours-tribunal.gov.au/inquiries/completed-inquiries/valour.

  10.Spencer Fitz-Gibbon, Not Mentioned in Despatches: The History and Mythology of the Battle of Goose Green (Lutterworth Press, 2001), p. 130.

  11.S. O. Beeton, Our Soldiers and the Victoria Cross (Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1867), pp. iii–iv. Samuel Beeton was the husband of the more famous Isabella, the author of domestic handbooks.

  12.Macdonald Hastings, Men of Glory (Hulton Press, 1959). Worth a glance, not least for the no doubt inadvertent humour of passages such as this, from chapter 2, ‘The VC I Went To School With’, which features Captain H. M. Ervine Andrews, who won his VC at Dunkirk: ‘The reason that I know the story is because I was at the same school, too. “Bummy” Andrews, as we used to call him, and I were in the same class at Stonyhurst together. I suppose we called him “Bummy” because he was well built around the middle. But we might easily have called him “Carrots” because he had a thick thatch of curly red hair.’

  13.Beeton, op. cit., pp. 7–8.

  14.John Keegan, Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2002.

  15.The requirement that a person recommended for the VC should have barely escaped with their life has spread to those Commonwealth countries that now give their own version of the VC. The New Zealand military press kit accompanying the announcement
of the VC awarded to Corporal Bill (Willy) Apiata of the NZ Special Air Service in July 2007 stated: ‘Nominations which do not involve risk to the nominee’s life are not usually successful.’

  16.NA WO 98/10.

  17.One British soldier managed to win both the VC and an Iron Cross – the only person to have this peculiar distinction. William George Nicholas Manley, an assistant surgeon in the Royal Artillery, gained the VC on 29 April 1864 for risking his life in an attempt to save a Royal Navy commander, during the Maori Wars in New Zealand. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 he was awarded an Iron Cross, 2nd class, for tending to Prussian soldiers when he was part of the British Ambulance Corps.

  18.As recently as the 1960s, VCs could be bought for considerably less than £1,000. By the 1970s the benchmark price had more than doubled. See Journal of the Victoria Cross Society, March 2004, pp. 23–4.

  19.The annuity is increased each year in line with other pension increases and in 2014 was £2,129.

  20.When Gunner James Collis, sixty-two, died a pauper on 28 June 1918, his sister appealed to George V to restore his name, and the king granted her wish. George V supposedly decreed, as expressed in a letter from Lord Stamfordham, his private secretary, that: ‘The King feels so strongly that, no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear the VC on the scaffold.’ The source of this is M. J. Crook’s book, The Evolution of the Victoria Cross (p. 64). Crook cites a 1956 issue of Soldier magazine as his source, which in turn cited the VC Register. But the original is missing. The last example of a VC recipient being forced out of the VC Register was that of Private George Ravenhill of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He won his medal at the Battle of Colenso on 15 December 1899. In 1908 he was found guilty of stealing some iron and could not afford to pay the ten shillings fine. He died in poverty at the age of forty-nine.

  21.The record price for an individual VC is believed to be £1.5 million paid to St Peter’s College, Oxford, in a private sale in November 2009, for the VC and bar – one of only three – of Captain Noel Chavasse, a medic who died of wounds on 4 August 1917. This Cross and bar is in the Ashcroft Gallery at the Imperial War Museum.

  22.Shout was the most highly decorated soldier to serve with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) at Gallipoli, gaining a Military Cross and promoted to captain after leading a bayonet charge against Turkish machine guns on 8 April 1915. During a subsequent charge against Turkish lines at Lone Pine he was fatally wounded. His VC and other medals were sold by his grandson.

  23.The Daily Telegraph of 1 May 2004 reported that Jackson’s surviving family planned to give his VC and other medals to the RAF Museum at Hendon but were prevented from doing so by the terms of the will of Jackson’s wife, Alma. The report quoted Jackson’s son David as saying: ‘The whole thing is shameful and should never have happened. We intended to give them to the museum but our solicitor’s advice was we could not do this.’

  24.Michael Ashcroft, Victoria Cross Heroes (Headline Review, 2006), p. 26. According to the gallery’s website, Ashcroft’s collection numbers more than 160 VCs, which puts the total estimated value at ‘some £30 million’. Ashcroft – ‘an international businessman and a philanthropist’, according to the website – has loaned, not donated, the collection, which remains in the hands of a trust, the ultimate beneficiaries of which remain, by definition, a closely guarded secret.

  25.Byrne’s VC was stolen in South Africa when the Anglo-Boer broke out in 1899; it has never been traced. Byrne died in 1944.

  26.Quoted in the Journal of the Victoria Cross Society, October 2003, p. 51.

  27.A company called H. L. I. Lordship Industries produced the Medal of Honor. In 1996 the company pleaded guilty to illegally manufacturing and selling at least 300 Medals of Honor between 1991 and 1994.

  28.The Times, Saturday, 30 March 1895.

  29.A much repeated myth is that Rorke’s Drift saw the highest number of VCs won on a single day or for a single action. At the Battle of Inkerman on 5 November 1854, sixteen were awarded; for the Second Relief of Lucknow, 14–22 November 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, twenty-eight VCs were awarded.

  30.NA: DEFE 13/789.

  31.On restriction of use of the George Cross, see www.justiceservices.gov.mt/DownloadDocument.aspx?app=lom&itemid=8651.

  32.Hansard, 4 March 1993.

  33.More than 115,000 Military Medals and over 37,000 Military Crosses were awarded during the First World War.

  34.The Conspicuous Gallantry Cross replaced the Distinguished Conduct Medal (Army) and the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal (Air Force and Navy), which had been the second-level award to other ranks and ratings. It also substituted for the Distinguished Service Order, which hitherto had been awarded solely to officers for gallantry. The DSO was retained as an award for ‘outstanding leadership’. The CGC is awarded ‘in recognition of an act or acts of conspicuous gallantry during active operations against the enemy’, and all ranks of the army, air force, navy and marines are eligible. In 2012, during Operation ‘Herrick’, Sergeant Deacon Cutterham of The Rifles was on patrol with his unit when a grenade, thrown at them over a high wall by Taliban forces, landed in a ditch full of water. He threw it back over the wall moments before it exploded. In the nineteenth century, Cutterham could justifiably have expected a VC.

  35.Major R. Clark, ‘Medals, Decorations and Anomalies’, British Army Review, August 1969.

  36.Miller, op. cit., p. 9.

  37.Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 323.

  38.Sylvester’s VC is held by the Army Medical Services Museum at Mytchett, Surrey.

  39.Rescuing a comrade seems to be the current standard set for winning an MC. Private Alex Robert Kennedy of the Mercian Regiment was gazetted on 19 March 2010 with the MC for running to the rescue of his injured platoon commander while under intense and close-range fire from Taliban insurgents in Helmand province in June 2009.

  40.www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/news/HERO-KATE-MC/article-1558296-detail/article.html.

  41.That same day, Lance Corporal Colin Spooner, of the 2nd Battalion, the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, also received the MC at the hands of Prince Charles. Spooner’s contingent had been engaged in a gun battle with Taliban fighters in October 2008, during which the fighting was so intensely noisy that it became impossible to hear orders being communicated over the radio. Spooner took it upon himself to dash to and fro between various members of his unit, carrying instructions until eventually he was hit by a shell, thirty-two pieces of which lodged in his body. But he continued to issue orders and refused to be carried off on a stretcher because, he said: ‘It would have taken four blokes to carry me out but I knew we were still engaged so I walked. That’s what did most of the damage, but I’d do the same again.’

  42.Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 6 November 2010.

  43.Crook, The Evolution of the Victoria Cross, op. cit., pp. 100–101.

  44.Bury & Norwich Post, Wednesday 13 February 1856.

  CHAPTER 2 A Most Grand, Gratifying Day

  1.Quoted in Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, (Pimlico, 1994), p. 325.

  2.Lloyd’s Weekly, 1 March 1857.

  3.The Times, 29 June 1857, p. 12.

  4.Victoria’s journal entry, 26 June 1857, Royal Archive, Windsor Castle.

  5.The Times, 27 June 1857, p. 9.

  6.Illustrated London News, 4 July 1857. In the entry for her journal for this day Victoria mistakenly put the number at forty-seven, not sixty-two.

  7.The whereabouts of Lucas’s original VC is a mystery. He left his medals, including his Victoria Cross, on a train and they were never recovered. His duplicate medals are on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London.

  8.Stanlack was evidently brave – he also gained the DCM – but a bit of a black sheep. He was later jailed for being drunk on duty, and later still for assaul
t, and compulsorily discharged in 1863. His VC is in the hands of the Coldstream Guards in the Wellington Barracks, London.

  9.The actual medal was legally the property of the recipient and so could not be forfeited.

  10.Eight men suffered this humiliation. Midshipman Edward St John Daniel, a Crimean VC, rose to the rank of lieutenant, but in September 1861 was convicted of desertion and evading court martial. Sergeant James McGuire of the 1st Bengal European Fusiliers won his VC during the Indian Mutiny and forfeited it in 1862, after being convicted of stealing a cow. Private Valentine Bambrick was in the 60th Rifles when he won his VC during the Indian Mutiny. After his discharge in 1863 he was accused of stealing another man’s medals, found guilty and sentenced to a prison term. Deeply depressed and protesting his innocence, Bambrick hanged himself in Pentonville prison on 1 April 1864. Private Michael Murphy, of the 2nd Battalion Military Train, gained his VC during the Indian Mutiny; he forfeited it as a result of being found guilty of theft and was sentenced to nine months hard labour. Private Thomas Lane of the 67th Regiment won his VC at the Taku Forts, China, on 21 August 1860; he was convicted of theft in 1881. Private Frederick Corbett of the King’s Own Rifle Corps was awarded his VC on 5 August 1882 for tending an officer during the Anglo-Egyptian War, but a conviction for embezzlement in July 1884 saw him stripped of his VC status. Gunner James Collis of the Royal Horse Artillery gained his VC during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, but was convicted of bigamy in 1895. Private George Ravenhill of the 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers gained his VC during the Second Boer War. He was convicted of theft in 1908, could not afford the fine and was sent to prison. He lost his VC pension, died in poverty aged forty-nine and is buried in an unmarked grave at Witton cemetery in Birmingham.

  11.Crook, op. cit., p. 69.

  12.NA WO 32/7300, letter dated April 1856.

  13.Queen Victoria in A. C. Benson and Viscount Esher (eds), The Letters of Queen Victoria (John Murray, 1907), vol. iii, p. 72.