Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  17.Crook, op. cit., p. 89.

  18.Saturday Review, 15 October 1859.

  19.Glasgow Herald, Friday, 24 August 1860.

  20.George Macdonald Fraser, Flashman in the Great Game (HarperCollins, 2006, paperback edn), pp. 286–7. Of course Flashman gets his VC by the end of the novel.

  21.Thomas Henry Kavanagh, How I Won the Victoria Cross (Ward & Lock, 1860), pp. vi–vii.

  22.£2,000 was then a substantial sum, equivalent to some £170,000 in 2014 values.

  23.The Times, 14 August 1859, p. 7.

  24.Frederick Roberts and Countess Roberts (ed.), Letters Written during the Indian Mutiny (Macmillan, 1924).

  25.Glanville J. Davies: ‘The Wreck of the S. S. Sarah Sands: The Victoria Cross Warrant of 1858’: The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 61, Issue 1, 1975, pp. 61–71.

  26.http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1858/jul/30/observations#S3V0151P0_18580730_HOC_62.

  27.Victoria Cross Register, vol. ii, p. 103.

  28.Crook, op. cit., pp. 143–5.

  29.Colonel Bowland Moffat, the commander of the regiment, had disgraced himself by taking to the lifeboats, along with his wife and daughters, and thus had been relieved of his command.

  30.NA WO 32/7345.

  31.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/23204/pages/22.

  32.NA WO/327370.

  33.The Times, 13 October 1881, p. 8.

  34.Heaphy’s VC is in the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

  35.Stannus, Curiosities of the Victoria Cross, op. cit., p. 5.

  36.Lieutenant General H. J. Stannus, My Reasons for Leaving the British Army (William Ridgway, 1881), p. 32.

  37.Stannus is also a vital reminder of the dangers of relying on ‘authentic’ source materials. In a letter, for example, to Broad Arrow, a military affairs journal, published on 8 January 1881, Stannus corrected the assertion that only one general had died in action since Waterloo and drew attention to:

  the ‘Illustrated London News’ of 27 February, 1849, a correct representation of the death of General Cureton . . . in which that distinguished officer is depicted slashing and hacking at his numerous opponents in a manner that would have satisfied the most ardent aspirations for military glory. When General Cureton was shot by a stray bullet, he was moving at a walk at the head of the cavalry brigade. He dismounted and caught hold of his stirrup leather. I went up to him as he fell back dead. There was no enemy within 300 yards of the spot where he fell. I do not write with the view of impugning the accuracy of the illustrated representation, which I believe is quite as nearly allied to fact as most other statements connected with military warfare and military matters generally.

  38.Stannus, My Reasons for Leaving the British Army, op. cit., pp. 2–5.

  39.Stannus, Curiosities of the Victoria Cross, op. cit., p. 5.

  40.Ibid., p. 11.

  41.Ibid., pp. 9–10.

  42.Ibid., pp. 13–14.

  43.This and the following quote are from Hansard, 30 July 1859.

  44.Colliss later had his VC status removed after being convicted of bigamy. Despite being almost sixty, Collis joined the Suffolk Regiment when the First World War broke out, and died of a heart attack in June 1918. He is buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Wandsworth Cemetery.

  45.Stannus, Curiosities of the Victoria Cross, op. cit., pp. 17–18.

  46.Immediately before the Collis case, in the definitive guide to VC citations and biographies by Sir O’Moore Creagh and E. M. Humphris (The Victoria Cross, 1856–1920), is an even flimsier case, that of Sergeant Patrick Mullane, also of the Royal Horse Artillery, who was awarded his Cross for an action the day before Collis’s. Mullane’s citation reads:

  For conspicuous bravery during the action of Maiwand, on the 27th July, 1880, in endeavouring to save the life of Driver Pickwell Istead. This non-commissioned officer, when the battery to which he belonged was on the point of retiring, and the enemy were within ten or fifteen yards, unhesitatingly ran back about two yards and picked up Driver Istead, placed him on the limber, where, unfortunately, he died almost immediately. Again, during the retreat, Sergt Mullane volunteered to procure water for the wounded, and succeeded in doing so by going into one of the villages in which so many men lost their lives.

  47.London Gazette on 26 August 1881.

  48.Stannus, Curiosities of the Victoria Cross, op. cit., pp. 22–3.

  49.T. E. Toomey, Victoria Cross and How Won, 1854–1889 (Alfred Boot and Son, 1889).

  50.London Standard, 4 November 1886.

  51.The Victoria Cross: An Official Chronicle of the Deeds of Personal Valour (no author, 1865), p. viii.

  52.On 16 July 1879, the Derby Mercury in its ‘Local News’ column reported that ‘Captain Allen Gardner, V.C., of the Hussars, (formerly the Derbyshire Yeomanry) arrived at Plymouth, from Cape Town, on Monday, in the Durban.’ A case of rumour going in advance of the fact.

  53.Chard’s VC is yet another example of the Cross being cloaked in rumour and veiled allegations – as so often – about money. The actor Stanley Baker played Chard in the 1964 film Zulu. Chard’s VC and another of his medals were auctioned in 1972; the VC was then described as a ‘cast copy’, to the shock of his family who had put them up for sale. Baker bought the VC for £2,700, a high price for a copy. When Baker’s family put the Chard ‘copy’ VC up for sale after Stanley Baker’s death in 1976, it sold for £5,000. It was then authenticated as the genuine VC and subsequently has become part of the Ashcroft Gallery collection. How much might a Rorke’s Drift VC fetch at auction today? Think of a number and add several zeros.

  54.Adrian Greaves, Rorke’s Drift (Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2002), pp. 178–9.

  55.Morning Post, 3 March 1879, p. 4.

  56.The question of posthumous VCs had been debated within the War Office since at least 1902, when Mrs Atkinson wrote to the Office regarding her late son, Sergeant Alfred Atkinson, 1st Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment. Kitchener, then commander in South Africa, had recommended Atkinson for the Cross in February 1901, when, under heavy fire, he left his shelter seven times to get water for the wounded, was himself wounded, and died a few days later. The Military Secretary of the commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts, strictly adhered to the prevailing rules and explained that Alfred’s death meant that his VC recommendation was invalid. Atkinson was gazetted with the VC on 8 August 1902. Roberts, however, who was always more generous in his distribution of the VC, overruled all opposition.

  57.Adrian Preston (ed.), Sir Garnet Wolseley’s South African Journal, 1879–1880 (Balkema, Cape Town, 1973), p. 70. Wolseley was equally unimpressed with the VCs bestowed on the defenders of Rorke’s Drift: ‘It is monstrous making heroes of those who shut up in buildings at Rorke’s Drift, could not bolt, and fought like rats for their lives which they could not otherwise save.’

  58.General Horace Lockwood Smith-Dorrien, Memories of Forty-Eight Years’ Service (Leonaur, 2009 edn), p. 31. Smith-Dorrien deserved his own VC for his courage at Isandlwana, but in his fine memoir displayed his customary modesty:

  I would like my boys to know that on the evidence of eye-witnesses I was recommended for the V.C. for two separate acts on that day. These recommendations drew laudatory letters from the War Office, with a regret that as the proper channels for correspondence had not been observed, the Statutes of the Victoria Cross did not admit of my receiving that distinction, and having no friends at Court the matter dropped. In view of my latest experiences I am sure that decision was right, for any trivial act of good Samaritanism I may have performed that day would not have earned a M.C., much less a V.C., amidst the deeds of real heroism performed during the Great War 1914–18.

  59.Michael Lieven, ‘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 (1998), pp. 419–38.

  60.Captain A. K. Ffrench of the 53rd Regiment, who won his VC on 16 November 1857, was elected by his fellow officers, simply for being ‘among the first to enter
’ the Secundra Bagh, at Lucknow, during the Indian Mutiny. Lieutenant H. E. Harrington of the Bengal Artillery, who was present at Lucknow in 1857, was elected by the officers of his battery. Lieutenant A. S. Heathcote, of the 60th Regiment, was elected to a VC by the officers of his regiment for his actions at the siege of Delhi.

  61.Douglas S. Russell, Winston Churchill: Soldier (Conway, 2006), p. 172.

  62.Winston Churchill, My Early Life (Reprint Society, 1944 edn), p. 192.

  63.This rescue had its farcical elements, and was the kind of individual action that Stannus (and later Douglas Haig) so deprecated. Montmorency’s horse fled; he in turn then had to be rescued by a fellow 21st Lancer, Captain Paul Kenna, who gained his own VC for rescuing Montmorency. Corporal Swabrick, also of the 21st Lancers, accompanied Kenna on his rescue mission; he got the DCM. An example of surreptitious class distinction?

  64.Churchill, op. cit., p. 257.

  65.Quoted in Russell, op. cit., p. 258.

  66.Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (William Heinemann, 1991), p. 111.

  67.Quoted in Russell, op. cit., p. 261.

  68.Churchill, op. cit., p. 174.

  69.Churchill (op. cit., p. 188) recalled his first encounter with Kitchener: ‘The heavy moustaches, the queer rolling look of the eyes, the sunburnt and almost purple cheeks and jowl, made a vivid manifestation upon the senses.’

  70.Hamilton, The Soul and Body of an Arm, op. cit., p. 47.

  71.Churchill, op. cit., p. 241.

  72.For his military services in South Africa, Churchill received, along with 176,999 others, the Queen’s South Africa Medal with six clasps, one for each battle in which he was involved. Cheated of the VC he so richly deserved, he was nevertheless loyal to those who helped him – and he had a long memory. In May 1910, when Home Secretary, he ensured that the driver of the train, Charles Wagner, received the Albert Medal, First Class, and the fireman, Alexander James Stewart, the Albert Medal, Second Class.

  73.In a letter to Lord Lansdowne, Secretary of State for War, on 8 December 1899, Roberts put himself up for overall command in South Africa. He wrote of General Buller that ‘he seems to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task imposed upon him’ and that ‘nothing but the gravity of the situation and the strongest sense of duty would induce me to do it, or to offer – as I now do – to place my services and my experience at the disposal of the government. The difficulty of making this offer is greatly increased by the fact that, if it is accepted, I must necessarily be placed in supreme command . . .’ Queen Victoria thought Roberts was rather old for the post and she was irked that he was appointed without her being consulted; see André Wessels (ed.), Lord Roberts and the War in South Africa, 1899–1902 (Army Records Society, 2000), pp. 14–19. On his return from South Africa, Roberts was voted the astonishing sum of £100,000 (more than £36 million in 2014 terms) by Parliament.

  74.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/27157/pages/506.

  75.Warren was formerly Metropolitan Police Commissioner in charge of finding Jack the Ripper. Unfairly pilloried for the police’s failure to find the murderer, he resigned in November 1888.

  76.Reported in The Times, 15 November 1900, p. 8.

  77.The Times, 26 November 1900, p. 15.

  78.Spokane Daily Chronicle, 2 January 1901, front page.

  79.The three elected were Gunner Isaac Hodge, Driver Horace Henry Glasock and Sergeant Charles Edward Haydon.

  80.NA WO/32 7878.

  81.Rather cheekily, the Assistant Adjutant General of the Royal Horse Artillery, Colonel Edward Owen Hay, requested in 1901 that the VCs granted at Sanna’s Post should be accepted as a collective award and that all current and future members of the RHA should be allowed to wear a permanent badge on their uniform in recognition of this deed. This was denied. NA WO/32 7474.

  82.Ponsonby, op. cit., pp. 75–9.

  CHAPTER 4 Big War

  1.Brigadier General F. P. Crozier, A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land (Jonathan Cape, 1930), pp. 187–8.

  2.De-la-Noy, The Honours System, op. cit., p. 37.

  3.The Times, 6 August 1902, p. 10.

  4.Sir Neville Bowles Chamberlain, 1820–1902, promoted to field marshal in 1900.

  5.Field Marshal Sir Charles H. Brownlow, Stray Notes on Military Training and Khaki Warfare (Women’s Printing Society, 1912), pp. 105–7.

  6.The Times 3 September 1902.

  7.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/30228/supplements/8211.

  8.Brereton Greenhous, ‘Billy Bishop: Brave Flyer, Bold Liar’, Canadian Military Journal, autumn 2002, pp. 61–4.

  9.Lieutenant Colonel David Bashow, ‘The Incomparable Billy Bishop: The Man and the Myth’, Canadian Military Journal, autumn 2002. Woken by Bishop at 3.00 a.m., Fry turned over and went back to sleep, according to Bashow.

  10.The publicity machine brought to bear on Bishop’s case had a deeper motivation. Lieutenant General Sir Richard Turner, who had gained his VC during the Boer War, and Sir George Perley, US-born but the Canadian High Commissioner in London and Minister of the Overseas Military Forces between 31 October 1916 and 11 October 1917, wanted a separate Canadian air force. The idea of splitting the RFC along national lines was anathema to the British government, not least because almost a third of RFC aircrew were Canadian. The devil creates work for incompetent (if not idle) hands: Turner had been relieved of command of the Canadian 2nd Division in December 1916, following a disastrous outcome of the Battle of St Eloi in September 1916, when badly handled communications saw 1,600 Canadian casualties, the result of being shelled by their own artillery. Turner managed to retain the support of the Canadian government and thus was handed the sinecure of command of the Canadian forces in London.

  11.W. A. Bishop, Winged Warfare (Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), pp. 299–300.

  12.According to Lieutenant Colonel David Bashow (op. cit., p. 58), on 12 September 1956, two days after Bishop’s death, the Globe & Mail newspaper published an interview with him in which he said: ‘It is so terrible that I cannot read it today. It turns my stomach. It was headline stuff, whoop-de-doop, red hot, hurray-for-our-side stuff. Yet the public loved it.’

  13.Greenhous (op. cit.) incorrectly asserts that ‘the award of the VC has always been, except in this one unique case, based on irreproachable evidence from two or more witnesses’.

  14.www.nfb.ca/film/the-kid-who-couldnt-miss.

  15.Commander (later Rear Admiral) Edward Bingham, in charge of a group of destroyers, led his own, HMS Nestor, to close to within 3,000 yards of German cruisers, bringing his torpedoes in range; Nestor was sunk but Bingham survived. The other two VCs were posthumous: Major Francis Harvey of the Royal Marines was a gunnery officer on HMS Lion and, although mortally wounded, ordered and supervised the flooding of Q turret, preventing tons of cordite from exploding and thus saving the ship and many lives; HMS Shark was badly damaged and its commanding officer, Commander Loftus Jones, lost a leg but continued to direct fire from the last gun in action. Shark was torpedoed and sank; Jones’s body was later found on a beach in Sweden.

  16.The Times, 11 July 1916.

  17.The Times, 31 July 1916.

  18.Alice Cornwell’s remaining days overflowed with grief. Her husband Eli, who was with the Royal Defence Corps, garrisoned by men too old or ill to serve at the front, died shortly before she received Jack’s VC at Buckingham Palace; her stepson Arthur was killed in action in France in August 1918; and she ran out of money and died in poverty at the age of forty-eight in October 1919. Cornwell’s sister, Alice Payne, survived to witness the loan of his VC to the Imperial War Museum in 1968.

  19.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/29752/supplements/9085.

  20.George Coppard, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai (Imperial War Museum, revised edn, 1980), pp. 172–3.

  21.Captain A. O. Pollard, VC, MC, DCM, Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a V.C. (reprinted by the Naval & Military Press, 2005).

  22.Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (Penguin Books, 1948), pp. 124–36.

  23.Pollard
, op. cit., p. 143.

  24.Ibid., p. 200.

  25.Ibid., pp. 235–6.

  26.General George S. Patton, War As I Knew It (Bantam Books, 1980), p. 322.

  27.Miller, op. cit., p. 168.

  28.John Percival, For Valour (Methuen, 1985), p. 82.

  29.Michael Ashcroft (Victoria Cross Heroes, p. 150) puts the total number of First War VCs at 626. The Victorian Cross Centenary Exhibition Catalogue, published in 1956, gives a figure of 633, including two bars: one to Surgeon Captain Martin Leake, who gained his first VC in South Africa in February 1902 and the bar in 1914; the other to Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, who won his first VC at Guillemont in August 1916 and his second at Wieltje in August 1917.

  30.NA WO 32/5653. Minute dated 18 July 1924.

  31.Sir Martin Lindsay, ‘Gallantry Awards’, British Army Review, 59, pp. 30–2.

  32.Hamilton, The Soul and Body of an Army, op. cit., p. 175.

  33.Byron Farwell, Mr. Kipling’s Army (W. W. Norton, 1987, paperback edn), p. 110.

  34.Lord Southborough (chairman), Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock’, (HMSO, 1922).

  35.Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–18 (Macmillan, abridged edn), pp. 296–7.

  36.Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (Headline, 2001), p. 111.

  37.The London Gazette had on 15 January 1907 unexpectedly announced that Edward VII had finally relented on the posthumous issue, agreeing that it could be sent to surviving relatives of those who had formerly been simply gazetted as ‘would have been recommended’ had they survived. He did so after receiving a letter dated 1 December 1906 from Sarah Melvill, wife of the late Teignmouth Melvill, pleading for the Cross.

  38.There were thus four Albert Medals in all: Sea First and Second Class, and Land First and Second Class. On 28 August 1917 the titles changed to Albert Medal in Gold and Albert Medal, replacing the old First and Second Class.

  39.The Edward Medal, initially to recognize bravery and self-sacrifice when rescuing mineworkers and later extended to industry generally, was established in 1907. The Albert and Edward Medals were discontinued in 1971, and all living recipients were deemed to be holders of the George Cross; holders of the two were asked to return them and receive in exchange a GC. Some people declined to do so. This change absurdly led to an unearned ‘promotion’ of those individuals who exchanged their Albert/Edward Medals for the GC, since the GC was supposedly on a par with the VC, while the Albert and Edward Medals were always second-order decorations. Although lesser in status, the Albert Medal is much rarer than the VC; in the 105 years of its existence only sixty-nine of the gold (first class) versions were awarded and 491 of the bronze (second class). Yet Gold Albert Medals sold at auction in 2013 for between £15,000 and £20,000, far below the price of a VC. Scarcity alone is not enough to push up prices; publicity is needed too.