Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  14.Theodore Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, (Smith, Elder, & Co, 1879), chapter lxiii.

  15.NA E9/29: Private William McGuire of the 33rd Regiment of Foot. Taken prisoner by two Russian soldiers, he took advantage of their inattention and seized one of their rifles, shooting one and beating the other to death. He then donned a Russian uniform and made his way back to his own line. The French awarded him a Médaille Militaire, but Victoria judiciously thought the action undeserving of a VC because it might lead to the putting to death of all prisoners.

  16.Up to 1871 all officers of the British army up to and including the rank of colonel usually held their rank by purchase. If an officer was deemed to have disgraced the service, he could be cashiered – i.e. stripped of his commission without being reimbursed for the money he had paid for it. The 7th Earl of Cardigan, James Brudenell, who led the charge of the Light Brigade at the Crimea, paid more than £30,000 for his commission. A recording of a British trumpeter who sounded the charge at Balaclava can be heard here: http://archive.org/details/EDIS-SWDPC-01-04

  17.The Army, the Horse-Guards and the People: ‘A Soldier’: published by the University of Liverpool, part of the Knowsley Pamphlet Collection (1860), p. 29.

  18.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/21909/pages/2699

  19.Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Recollections of Three Reigns (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), p. 178.

  20.Both the DCM and the CGM were cancelled in 1993, replaced by the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, which can be awarded for all ranks across all services. Since 1993 the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) has been restricted solely to distinguished service, i.e. leadership and command by any rank, although in the recent conflict in Afghanistan only commissioned officers have been granted a DSO – which shows how enduring is the long-standing convention that ‘orders’ are for officers and ‘medals’ for other ranks. According to the Ministry of Defence: ‘Although theoretically available to all ranks, the DSO, now awarded for distinguished leadership during active operations against the enemy, is likely to be awarded only to the more senior officer ranks.’ (www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceFor/Veterans/Medals/DistinguishedServiceOrder.htm)

  21.If a man were promoted and became an officer, he would lose the £10 annuity. The fact that the VC annuity was £10 a year less than that of the DCM was a little odd; the Treasury, however, was always keen to limit expenditure.

  22.Hansard, 23 January 1855, vol. 136, cc 899–910.

  23.Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, 20 January 1855; Vic/Main/B/16/45.

  24.Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham; NeC9, 701/2 and 701/3. This memo also includes some acerbic comments on the Légion d’Honneur: ‘I would advise no reference to the Legion of Honour, the distribution of which is entirely arbitrary and guided by no principles, which is given indiscriminately to Soldiers and Civilians, and has long been made a tool for corruption in the hands of the French Govt the Number of whose members extends to 40,000 & which has almost become a necessary appendage to the French dress.’

  25.Hansard, 29 January 1855, vol. 136, cc 1064–5.

  26.Liverpool Mercury, Friday, 8 February 1856.

  27.According to Daphne Bennett (King Without a Crown, Heinemann, 1977, p. 259), Albert’s ‘first sketch of the cross itself was made while commuting in an unheated train between Windsor and London during the freezing winter of 1854–5’. She gives no source for her claim, however.

  28.Royal Archives, E6 69–71, December 1855.

  29.Another document in the Royal Archives [EG 70] confirms Albert’s influence. This is a letter dated 30 December 1855 – shortly after the revisions were made – from Lord Panmure to Prince Albert, in which he writes: ‘Her Majesty & Your Royal Highness have greatly improved this reward for military subjects by changing its character from an “order” to a “decoration”.’

  30.Royal Archives, E6 71.

  31.Royal Archives, G 44–30.

  32.The warrant was of course later altered such that putting out a fire in a powder magazine, if not ‘at home’ then certainly far away from the enemy, did qualify for the VC.

  33.The Times, 26 February 1857, p. 8.

  34.The media have always lavished attention on ‘heroes’ yet the ordinary soldier is always shabbily treated when out of the spotlight. John Geddes (Spearhead Assault, Century, 2007, p. 31), a paratrooper corporal in the Falklands in 1982, wrote of his family’s last night together in barracks before he headed off, ‘in a damp, cold dump of a flat with no mushrooms in the fridge but plenty on the wall next to the peeling wallpaper . . . some of the 2 Para heroes who were destined to die on the Falklands spent the last night they would ever have with their loved ones in these communal shitholes, with draughty crumbling window frames, disintegrating plaster on the walls, leaking plumbing and toilets that didn’t work properly. What a disgrace.’

  35.A. V. Dicey, An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (10th edn, 1967), p. 424.

  36.Victoria’s role in government generally was much more than merely symbolic. In her final days, when she was too ill to work, Arthur Balfour, the prime minister at the time, was ‘astounded’ at the number of boxes that had quickly piled up containing business that required the sovereign’s attention: ‘Judges, for instance, could not function without a warrant signed by her: all sorts of appointments could not be made without her sanction’ (Ponsonby, op. cit., p. 82).

  37.The 62nd suffered 50 per cent casualties among its officers and non-commissioned officers.

  38.NA WO 98/2.

  39.Michael Hargreave Mawson (ed.), Eyewitness in the Crimea (Greenhill Books, 2001), p. 165.

  40.For her services, the Queen ‘decorated’ Nightingale with a medallion of white enamel with diamonds, on which was the St George’s Cross and the Royal Cypher and the words ‘blessed are the merciful’ and ‘Crimea’.

  41.http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1854/jun/19/the-war-with-russia-the-german-powers.

  42.Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R. I. (Orion, 1998 edn), p. 241.

  43.Benson and Viscount Esher (eds), op. cit., p. 15.

  44.General Sir Ian Hamilton, The Soul and Body of an Army (Edward Arnold, 1921), pp. 86–8.

  45.Mawson, op. cit., p. 57.

  46.Ibid., p. 71.

  47.The Times, 25 January 1855, p. 6.

  48.Colonel Alex M. Tulloch, The Crimean Commission and the Chelsea Board (London, 1857). The French army initially coped much better with the local conditions. Nevertheless, out of a total of more than 300,000 French troops in the Crimea, around 200,000 required medical treatment at some point; only a quarter of those were wounded in action.

  49.Their report heavily censured Lord Lucan (who had been in command of a regiment); Lord Cardigan, Inspector of Cavalry; Sir Richard Airey, Quartermaster-General; and Colonel Gordon, Deputy Quartermaster-General. Tulloch and McNeill were offered by the government £1,000 each for their work, which they declined on principle – it was a different era. They spent fifty-five days on their investigation and examined 200 witnesses in the Crimea, each of whom was given a copy of what would be included in the report and asked to sign it.

  50.The Times, 29 December 1854, p. 5.

  51.Mawson, op. cit., p. 88. Raglan died from disease in the Crimea. Queen Victoria insisted that Raglan’s widow be voted by Parliament a pension of £1,000 a year, with a further £2,000 a year for his eldest son and successor in the title.

  52.Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 February 1855, p. 7.

  53.Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (Allen Lane, 2010), p. 147.

  54.Punch, 14 April 1855.

  55.Trevor Royle, The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (Macmillan, 2004), p. 179.

  56.Figes, op. cit., p. 468.

  57.‘As one of those who went out to the Crimea in the first winter, when things were at their worst, when the Army was rotting away through the mismanagement of the war by the authorities at home, I can say from my own personal observation and knowledge that it was the letters o
f the Times correspondent and others, but chiefly the Times, that brought about a change for the better.’ Douglas Reid, Memories of The Crimean War (St Catharine Press, 1911), p. 152.

  58.Aberdeen Journal, 11 March 1857.

  59.‘Every officer, for the discharge of his duty, holds a Royal Sign Manual [i.e. a document signed by the reigning monarch] commission under the counter-sign of a Secretary of State.’ Charles M. Clode, The Military Forces of the Crown: Their Administration and Government (London, 1869), vol. ii, p. 65.

  60.Before the Crimean War the Morning Advertiser accused Albert of treason and, absurdly enough, called for his execution. Victoria threatened to abdicate and was only slightly mollified by government ministers promising to admonish leading editors, who (naturally) refused to change their ways.

  61.Reid, op. cit. On this occasion Punch was pithier. It published a cartoon on 24 March 1885, depicting Raglan snoozing in his hut, through the window of which can be seen soldiers and horses dying in the snow. The caption was: ‘The General Fast (Asleep). Humiliating – Very.’

  62.Sir George Douglas and Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay (eds), The Panmure Papers, (Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), vol. i, p. 253.

  63.The MGSM owed its existence to Charles Gordon-Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond, who fought in the Peninsular Wars and promoted the idea of a campaign medal in Parliament. The Army (or Peninsular) Gold Medal was distributed only to officers who had been in command of a battalion or of higher rank. This latter medal came in three styles: a large and a small medal, and the third a pattée-style cross – precisely the same style later adopted for the VC. When the military Order of the Bath was created, the Army Gold Medal was discontinued.

  64.After the Battle of Dunbar on 3 September 1650, when an army led by Oliver Cromwell defeated Scottish royalist forces under General David Leslie, the House of Commons granted medals to all those who fought. Officers got small gold medals, ordinary troopers a slightly bigger silver medal. Generals occasionally distributed their own medals. After the Battle of the Nile (1 August 1798), Alexander Davidson, Nelson’s prize agent, organized at his own expense the creation and distribution of medals for all those who had fought but been given nothing – gold medals for senior officers, silver for more junior, bronze-gilt for petty officers, and bronze for ordinary seamen and marines.

  65.Christopher Hibbert, George IV: Regent and King, 1811–1830 (Prentice Hall Press, 1972), p. 310.

  66.The Times, 7 February 1856, p. 6.

  67.Figes, op. cit., p. 352.

  68.In the Crimean War, Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards wrote to his mother that he had for her a large silver cross: ‘it came off a Russian Colonel’s neck we killed, and, poor fellow, it was next to his skin’; Letters from the Crimea (London, 1855), p. 50. Stealing from the slain is always with us. John Geddes, a British paratrooper who fought in the 1982 Falklands War, mentions a ‘battlefield raven from our own ranks picking over the corpses of the Argy dead’; he used secateurs to snip off fingers to steal gold rings (Spearhead Assault, p. 247). After Waterloo everything was stripped from the thousands of corpses littering the field, including dentures which for many years afterwards were known as ‘Waterloo teeth’.

  69.The Cruisers and Convoys Act of 1708 formalized the practice of looting captured enemy naval vessels by decreeing a structured distribution of prize money, a practice that lasted until 1918.

  70.Calculated via the website http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/

  71.The Battle of Waterloo, printed for John Booth (bookseller) and T. Egerton (Military Library, Whitehall, 1817), p. 163, no author.

  72.Waterloo Medals are surprisingly cheap compared to VCs. The latest to be auctioned, in March 2013, went for a mere £7,500 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-21878827).

  73.Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 27.

  74.Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (London, 1875–6), vol. ii, p. 262.

  75.Clode, op. cit., vol. i, p. 97. Hardinge was speaking in Parliament in 1834.

  76.Clode, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 36.

  77.Sidney Lee, Queen Victoria (Smith, Elder & Co., rev. edn, 1904), p. 17.

  78.Douglas and Ramsay (eds), The Panmure Papers, op. cit., p. 200.

  79.The Times, 27 June 1857.

  80.Hull Packet and East Riding Times, Friday, 3 July 1857.

  81.New York Times, 7 March 1856.

  82.Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, 10 February 1856. The Simpson was General Sir James; the Dundas was Admiral Sir James.

  83.Tinsley’s Magazine, 3 August 1879.

  84.Cheshire Observer, 23 May 1857.

  85.The paintings were a popular hit but a commercial flop. In 1900 they were presented to Wantage Town Council by Brigadier General Robert Loyd-Lindsay, who won his own VC at the Battle of the Alma. Lord Wantage, as he became, a seminal person in the establishment of the British Red Cross, paid around £1,000 for forty-six of the collection of fifty-six paintings; some had already been sold. The collection was then open to the public until 1941 in the community room of the Wantage Corn Exchange. The Ministry of Food requisitioned the hall in 1941 and the paintings were put into storage. In 1951 they were rediscovered and some were found to be in very poor condition. Those that survived were then dispersed among many regimental museums.

  86.Michael De-la-Noy, The Honours System (Allison & Busby, 1986), p. 78.

  87.Sir O’Moore Creagh and E. M. Humphris (eds), The Victoria Cross, 1856–1920 (J. B. Hayward & Son, Polstead, Suffolk, 1985), p. 20.

  88.The Times, 6 March 1857, p. 3.

  89.Victoria laid the foundation stone of the Royal Victoria Hospital on 19 May 1856, beneath which was laid the first Victoria Cross, now in the hands of the Army Services Museum at Aldershot. Victoria arrived at the hospital by the royal yacht. Artillery fired a royal salute; unfortunately one gun fired prematurely, killing two soldiers and injuring several others.

  90.James Lees-Milne, The Enigmatic Edward (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986), pp. 116–17; from Reginald Brett’s journal, 16 May 1898.

  91.Senior officers were now naturally eligible for the Order of the Bath as well as the VC. Commissioned officers pressed for their own, officers-only, medal, which led to the introduction of the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in 1886. The word ‘order’ was seen as elevating this award, as it echoed the ‘order’ in Order of the Bath.

  CHAPTER 3 Small Wars

  1.Lieutenant General H. J. Stannus, Curiosities of the Victoria Cross (William Ridgway, 1881).

  2.Quoted in C. I. Hamilton, ‘Naval Hagiography and the Victorian Hero’, Historical Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, June 1980, pp. 381–98.

  3.Colonel Charles Edward Callwell, Small Wars: The Principles and Practice (HMSO, 1906), p. 21.

  4.From 1858 to 1881 the VC could also be won for acts of bravery not in the presence of the enemy. Despite the creation of the Albert Medal on 7 March 1866, awarded for the saving of life, six such VCs were granted: Private Timothy O’Hea, Rifle Brigade, for suppressing a fire in a railway truck containing ammunition in Quebec on 19 June 1866; and Assistant-Surgeon Campbell Millis Douglas, Private Thomas Murphy, Private James Cooper, Private David Bell and Private William Griffiths, all of the 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment, for saving the lives of comrades in a storm at sea at the Andaman Islands on 7 May 1867. It was also the period when both the youngest and the oldest VC winners were gazetted: Thomas Flinn was believed to be fifteen when he received his VC as a drummer boy with the 64th Regiment during the Indian Mutiny of 1857; William Raynor was sixty-two when, as a lieutenant with the Bengal army during the Indian Mutiny, he gained the VC for being one of nine who defended the arsenal during the siege of Delhi. Two others survived – John Buckley and George Forrest – and they too gained the VC.

  5.http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1859/feb/03/the-queens-speech.

  6.Walter L. Arnstein, ‘The Warrior Queen’, Albion, vol. xxx, no. 1 (spring 1998), pp. 1–28.

 
; 7.NA WO/32/7317.

  8.The Times, 8 January 1859, p. 12.

  9.In a letter to the Daily News published on 22 November 1858, ‘One of the Defenders of Lucknow’ crossly wrote: ‘The Victoria Cross has not been awarded to any member of the Lucknow garrison because it is said that their numbers were large, and that they all behaved equally nobly. But how is that a reason why they should remain unrewarded and undistinguished?’

  10.During the Mutiny, Outram led a volunteer force of cavalry, which voted to recommend him for the Victoria Cross, but he declined on the basis that he did not deserve it more than they did.

  11.The Times, 11 July 1859.

  12.He was right. His VC helped Wood’s own career and he ultimately held the highest rank in the British army, that of field marshal, from which position he wielded considerable power over the careers of future senior officers, such as Sir Douglas Haig.

  13.NA WO 32/7307.

  14.NA WO 98/2.

  15.Pennington transferred to the War Office from the Colonial Office as Clerk on 5 December 1854. He was one of those obscure but key civil servants who oiled the wheels of empire, exercising considerable power by providing policy advice and recommendations. His main job when he first arrived at the War Office was to monitor recommendations for the Order of the Bath, but after 1856 his desk quickly became the sole conduit for VC recommendations.

  16.Brigadier Stuart Ryder, ‘The British Gallantry System’, RUSI Journal (August 2000). According to Ryder, finding Spence’s relatives almost five decades after he died was a major task. It was known that Spence was born in the parish of Dumfries, Scotland. The Black Watch could not provide further information regarding next of kin and the Under Secretary for Scotland was asked for help, along with local police and newspapers. Months later a Mr Richard Lynn of Hawick claimed the VC and finally the Provost of Hawick produced a family tree proving that Lynn’s father’s mother was Isabelle Ogilvie, Spence’s nearest relative. Mr Lynn received Spence’s medal, which is now in the Regimental Museum of the Black Watch in Balhousie Castle, Perth.