Victoria's Cross (9 page)

The VC was therefore born out of a ghastly shambles. More positively (at least as far as the monarchy was concerned), it helped deflect public anger and dissipated the wrath of the press. It massaged that justified anger into an enhanced reverence for the Crown, thereby staving off the inevitable decline of royal authority over the armed forces. Queen Victoria saw the VC as a personal gift of the monarch, helped by Albert's astuteness in naming the decoration for his spouse. The VC publicly symbolized Victoria's gratitude to ‘her' armed forces and cemented the affectionate loyalty the military extended to her.

The Times
loftily dismissed the Victoria Cross when it first appeared as ‘a dull, heavy, tasteless affair' and ‘coarse-looking . . . mean in the extreme'. The newspaper held its nose and sneered at the VC's ugly appearance, apparently unaware that the decoration's unadorned crudity was deliberate:

Much do we suspect that if it was on sale in any town in England at a penny a-piece, hardly a dozen would be sold in a twelve-month. There is a cross, and a lion, and a scroll or two worked up into the most shapeless mass that the size admits of . . . Valour must, and doubtless will, be still its own reward in this country, for the Victoria Cross is the shabbiest of all prizes.
⁷⁹

The Cross's down-at-heel look was widely deprecated, not merely by the metropolitan press. The ‘Private Correspondent' of a regional newspaper remarked:

The ungainly Victoria Cross has already disappeared from the breasts of those who can afford to get rid of it for something smaller, and therefore less conspicuous in its ugliness. A London jeweller occupies himself in making miniature decorations, and these are worn by many commissioned officers in place of those given them by their Queen and their country.
⁸⁰

But
The Times
's rhetorical flourish was disingenuous. Valour is not and has never been its own reward; successive generations of VC winners have tried to leverage their moment of battlefield prowess, whether by arguing for more rapid promotion, publishing a book, becoming a public speaker, or maybe just advertising themselves in a pub, like Hitch.

The
New York Times
naturally saw the Cross through a different prism; democracy was on the march in Britain, and the VC was ‘a further indication that the British Government are resolved to make
some concession to the democratic principles which, steadily and surely, are in course of progress in the realm of Victoria . . . It is, in effect, an “Order of Merit” for the humblest persons in the army and navy.'
⁸¹
The deliberate eschewal of ostentation in the VC's design certainly burnished its democratic image, by distancing it from the glittery pomp of Thistles, Garters and Baths; but appearances deceive. Despite its humble appearance, the VC out-glitters a whole chest full of honours. Most of the British press concurred with the
New York Times
; rare were critical comments such as this from the republican
Reynolds's Newspaper
:

[T]he preamble of QUEEN VICTORIA'S proclamation, instituting the ‘VICTORIA CROSS,' is positively insulting to the lower ranks of the army, for she says the necessity for founding it has originated from the impossibility of conferring the Order of the Bath upon ‘any but the higher ranks of the service.' This is tantamount to saying, that not even the bravest man in the ranks of the British army, whatever services he may have rendered his country, is qualified to be placed on a level with such miserable, blundering, timid old dolts, as the SIMPSONS, RAGLANS, and DUNDASES, which the present war has turned up!
⁸²

Some contemporary newspaper coverage was remarkably level-headed.
Tinsley's Magazine
, which specialized in popular fiction, considered that:

Select though the sacred circle of Knights of the Victoria Cross be, it would be uncandid to pretend that there is universal satisfaction in the service with all to whom it has been adjudged. Nor are those wanting who rail against the institution, and hint that it has an evil effect, and creates irritating distinctions. But those are the men who have never earned it. Nobody despises pedigree so much as the knave without
a grandfather. Still, it is true that there is reasonable complaint that many who ought to have got the Cross have not got it, and that many who have deserved it less than the unsignalized have got it. All the accident of war.
⁸³

For some correspondents, the VC perpetuated a very different and deeper social division. The
Cheshire Observer
published this from an irate civilian:

Where is a class of men more deserving and unpitied than our merchant sailors, yet, what surprising and astounding feats do these poor fellows kindly and voluntarily perform to save the lives of the crews and passengers of the sinking vessel. Then there are our firemen, policemen, coalpitmen, and numbers of others . . . men who have to risk their lives by performing actions of gallantry which are appalling to reflect upon . . . Such is the class of civilians to whom the presentation of the ‘Victoria Cross for Valour,' would be but a just and graceful act of encouragement, and a royal and official acknowledgement of their truly meritorious services, and would be the means of stimulating others to the performance of perilous and heroic deeds.
⁸⁴

Even the art world took notice. Louis Desanges, an English painter of French extraction, capitalized on the popularity of the VC by mounting a highly successful exhibition in London of fifty oil paintings, executed between 1859 and 1862, each taking a particular VC episode for its subject matter. Desanges's Victoria Cross Gallery was exhibited at the Crystal Palace throughout the 1860s and remained there until about 1880.
⁸⁵

The Victoria Cross has been depicted as marking ‘the moment when . . . common soldiers ceased to be regarded as cannon fodder rounded up by the likes of Lord Cardigan, but were seen to be the equals of any peer of the realm in the face of the enemy'.
⁸⁶
The reality is
that common soldiers would still be cannon fodder, and the new award merely ushered in new uncertainties, not the least of them being disgruntlement among senior officers, some of whom felt the VC would undermine discipline and order, and others who were annoyed that this new and prestigious decoration was beyond them, simply because the opportunity for displaying such courage was usually unavailable to high-ranking officers. Jostling to be considered for the new award, and complaints of having been overlooked, swiftly followed.

Sergeant William McWheeny of the 44th Foot gained his VC in part for his rescue of Private John Keane who, according to the citation, was

dangerously wounded on the Woronzoff Road, at the time the sharp-shooters were repulsed from the Quarries by overwhelming numbers . . . [he] took the wounded man on his back, and brought him to a place of safety. This was under a very heavy fire. He was also the means of saving the life of Corpl. Courtney. This man was one of the sharp-shooters, and was severely wounded in the head, 5 Dec. 1854. Sergt. McWheeny brought him in from under the fire, and dug up a slight cover with his bayonet, where the two remained until dark, when they retired.
⁸⁷

This account was disputed by William Courtney in a letter to
The Times
in March 1857. Courtney claimed that he had carried Keane on his back to a place of safety and continued:

as to Sergeant M'Wheeny [sic] having saved my life, that is also entirely untrue. I was left on one side for many hours after I was wounded; and as to the assertion that I and M'Wheeny retired after dark, anyone with common sense must see how impossible it was. I received three balls in my head at once, and my right eye was shot out, besides other injuries. Of course, I was utterly incapable of moving, and it was equally
impossible for anyone to have covered me, &c., as M'Wheeny is said to have done . . . I ask not praise; I did my duty to my Queen and country; all I request is justice.
⁸⁸

At this distance, no one can say with any certainty if Courtney was right or simply chancing his arm.

For junior officers and the other ranks, the VC was and is a grand lottery: a previously obscure nobody could achieve overnight fame. Editors quickly exploited the VC's potential as a source of colourful, dramatic copy, attractive to both readers and advertisers, and much better than the usual run-of-the-mill military reporting, such as another dull despatch from a commanding officer. The
Aberdeen Journal
, for example, ran a series from March 1857 of ‘some of the more striking incidents' which had gained the VC in the Crimea, beginning with the Naval Brigade. Even in her dotage, Victoria cultivated opportunities to promote the indissoluble link between herself, the Cross and ‘her' soldiers. In 1898 she visited the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley in Hampshire to pin the VC on the tunics of two wounded soldiers, both of whom were found sitting down.
⁸⁹
‘They were ordered to rise, but the Queen said, “Most certainly not,” and raised herself without help (a very unusual thing) and stood over them while she decorated them with the cross.'
⁹⁰

By the end of the first investiture of the VC on 26 June 1857, much had changed, although in many respects everything remained the same. Holders of the VC found themselves entitled to take precedence over the highest peer of the realm on any ceremonial occasion; but few of those peers regarded VC holders as their equal once the ceremonies and ritual obeisance were over. Of greater long-term significance was that the establishment of the VC opened the way for a subsequent rash of new distinctions, which, by trying to distinguish more finely different grades of courage, helped restore the social divisions dissolved
by the VC.
⁹¹
In novels, journalism and popular ballads, the VC winner was to be depicted as an icon of courage, on whose valiant shoulders rested the empire. Victoria could not foresee what a Pandora's Box she and Albert had opened: if merit was to be the principal means of selection in the recognition of supreme courage, why should merit not become more widespread in the armed forces, for promotion to its higher ranks? The course of the rest of the VC's history has been one in which a gradual rise in the level of courage demanded and expected, has imperceptibly taken hold. A new military aristocracy – the elite class of VC winners, no women and very few civilians allowed – was born on 26 June 1857.

3

Small Wars

‘I have heard it said that no one could be so immodest as to ask for the Victoria Cross. Poor deluded souls!'

LIEUTENANT GENERAL H. J. STANNUS
¹

‘Christianity and thirty-two-pounders are better than swords and spears and heathenism.'

CHIEF THAKAMBAU OF FIJI
²

In the forty-five years between 1856, when the VC was first created, and Victoria's death in 1901, no challenge to the empire went unpunished. British soldiers fought 200 greater or lesser wars in Abyssinia, Africa, China, Egypt, New Zealand, Sudan and India, as Britain gobbled up land and peoples, quadrupling the size of the territory it controlled. Colonel Charles Callwell summarized in a textbook for officers the nature of these ‘small wars': ‘Small wars include . . . campaigns of conquest when a Great Power adds the territory of barbarous races to its possessions; and they include punitive expeditions against tribes bordering upon distant colonies.'
³
This extension and consolidation of empire turned the world map pink, while spattering red across jungle, desert and bush, as British rule was imposed with varying degrees of
brutality. Indigenous peoples were subjugated, while domestic British opinion developed an appetite for heroes; men were needed to police new territories, and the struggles to defeat skilled, often poorly armed yet fierce opponents, placed a steadily rising premium on military professionalism. For readers of most of Britain's newspapers and periodicals, these decades were a record of gallant armies ‘civilizing' natives, extending and deepening Britain's might against supposedly merciless barbarian hordes. To the Victorian mind, every soldier was potentially a Homeric hero, an evangelizing agent bent on imparting the values of Christianity. Over most of these campaigns were sprinkled the imparted ‘glory' of Victoria Crosses, some deserved, some undeserved, and others obtained by the kind of machination that never occurred to Victoria and Albert when they put flesh on what was, in principle, a noble ideal. One who truly deserved the VC, Winston Churchill, who in the late nineteenth century fought in four wars in as many years, was, as we will see, excluded from the club, probably the victim of a capricious senior officer whom he had offended. Leaving aside larger ethical considerations of how the empire was gained and managed, it became clear that human frailty – ambition, greed, selfishness, posturing – was to become a consistent strand in the history of the Victoria Cross, entangled with the collective tale of exceptional individual courage. Senior officers had little compunction about using the VC to reward favourites and build their own careers; individuals who wanted the Cross and thought they deserved it exploited personal connections to achieve their aim. Noble idealism and ignoble politicking are but the obverse and reverse of the same medal – of all medals, perhaps; but the higher the reward, the greater the temptation to resort to corrupt means of obtaining it.

The Indian Mutiny of 1857–8 provided the perfect opportunity to test precisely how much independence officers in the field might have over the bestowal of this relatively new decoration. The seventh
clause of the founding warrant of the VC in 1856 permitted the VC to be provisionally – and subject to confirmation by the sovereign – conferred on the spot if the deed had been performed ‘under the eye and command of an Admiral or General Officer commanding the Forces'. Immediate subordinates of the admiral or general in overall command had the same authority. Clause eight further refined the witness/proof requirement: if no commanding officer witnessed the action, then individual soldiers, sailors or marines were able to
lay claim
to the VC, so long as they were able to prove ‘to the satisfaction of the Captain or officer Commanding his Ship or to the Officer Commanding the Regiment to which the Claimant belongs' that the deed was sufficiently worthy. If one of these tests was passed, the claim was then to be passed up to the highest ranks for consideration, who ‘shall call for such description and attestation of the act as he may think requisite and on approval shall recommend that grant of the Decoration'.

On 29 October 1857, while the fighting was continuing, the Indian Mutiny gave rise to the first amendment of the VC warrant, extending eligibility to the military forces of the East India Company. On 10 August 1858 another amendment was made, stating that cases of bravery
not
before the enemy were admissible. And on 13 December 1858, civilians who had served the Crown courageously during the Mutiny were also rendered eligible, by virtue of yet another amendment. Unhelpfully, this last revision did not seem to limit the scope purely to those civilians who had fought during the Mutiny; the key ambiguous phrase merely said ‘against the mutineers at Lucknow and elsewhere'.
⁴
These
ex post facto
amendments were resisted by War Office civil servants who had the task of ensuring that all VC recommendations complied with the strictures of the warrant, but they were overruled by forceful senior officers on the ground in India, who had an entirely different view of the VC; for them, it was simply a useful tool to reward, recognize and
encourage. This tension – between civilian administrators determined to defend a strict interpretation of the grounds for awarding the VC, and senior officers who took a much more cavalier approach – endured until well into the twentieth century.

When the Mutiny finally ended, Victoria reasserted in her speech to Parliament on 3 February 1859 her sense of ownership of all things military: ‘The Blessing of the Almighty on the Valour of My Troops in India, and on the Skill of their Commanders, has enabled Me to inflict signal Chastisement upon those who are still in Arms against My Authority, whenever they have ventured to encounter My Forces . . .'
⁵
Yet Victoria's unquestioned authority over ‘her' army was already waning. The Indian experience, coming so soon after the narrow victory in the Crimea, jolted British self-esteem and focused minds on the need for army reform, and led to the transfer of India's administration from the East India Company into direct British government control.
En passant
, it also undermined Victoria's personal control over military affairs, although, with a sense of something precious slipping from her grasp, she clung to what petty authority remained:

Whether the subject was the design of the gold lace sword belt worn by field marshals or the state of the barracks at Windsor or the dismissal of a particular colonel who had lost so much money gambling on horse races that he set a bad example for his troops, or the appropriateness of khaki as a uniform in which to fight battles or even the relative merits of different rifles . . . the queen invariably held and voiced an opinion.
⁶

The farther flung the fracas, the more difficult Victoria found it to exercise personal control over the armed forces – and the VC. As the supervision of the confusing and sometimes contradictory VC regulations slipped from the hands of the sovereign who created it, and seamlessly passed into the nervous fingers of War Office bureaucrats,
some senior officers seized the chance to exploit their authority to confer dubiously earned VCs.

In the early days, none was more questionable than that given to Lieutenant Henry Marsham Havelock, awarded the VC in the field by his own father, Brigadier General Henry Havelock, who died of dysentery shortly after, while besieged at Lucknow. The elder Havelock commanded a column which set forth from Allahabad on 7 July 1857, destined to relieve the garrison (eventually brutally massacred) at Cawnpore, before marching to relieve Lucknow. As it marched to Cawnpore, Havelock's force encountered a cannon in the hands of mutinous sepoys; he sent his aide-de-camp, who happened to be his son, to take command of the apparently leaderless 64th Regiment and lead an assault to destroy it. Mounted on horseback, Lieutenant Havelock failed to notice that Major Stirling, now on foot, his horse having been killed, was still in command of the 64th. Under fire from the cannon and rifles, Havelock junior duly captured the gun, along with others, and, much to the chagrin of Stirling, was granted the VC by his father on the spot.

Havelock senior justified his decision by referring to a favourable report from Major General Sir James Outram: ‘On this spontaneous statement of the Major General, the Brigadier General consents to award the Cross to this . . . officer [who]might from the near relationship Lieutenant Havelock bears to him assume the appearance of undue partiality.'
⁷
The War Office found this VC difficult to swallow; but the field bestowal of VCs was legitimate and, not wishing to undermine the authority of local commanders, it let this one pass; but it declined to concur with a second VC recommended by Havelock senior to his son in an action shortly thereafter. For that second recommendation, Sir Colin (later Lord) Campbell, commander-in-chief in India, was called on to convene a board of inquiry, which came up with an appropriately legalistic reason to deny the award: it ruled that a bar
(the second award of the same medal) to a VC could not be recommended for a first VC that had yet to be officially confirmed by the sovereign. On such legalistic cavilling rests much of the VC's history. The younger Havelock may have been denied a bar to his VC, but 182 Crosses were nevertheless sanctioned for the Indian Mutiny, 71 more than during the Crimean War. Was this a high number? No one really knew – the whole business of granting medals to individuals was too new for any sensible comparisons to be possible. Were there really 39 per cent more acts of exceptional courage during the Indian Mutiny than the Crimean War? Was it that senior commanders in India made free with the VC, with little care as to standards? Or was it that – unusually – the elective principle, with officers electing from their own number candidates for the VC, came into play on several occasions, thus inflating the number of VCs that were handed out?

The truth is that it was early days for the VC and no settled, widely agreed standard had yet been reached. That perhaps was inevitable – but it created ill-feeling and public complaints.
The Times
's letters page carried for months its own mutinous correspondence, as contributors – probably officers, as they adopted pseudonyms – complained about the unfair distribution of Crosses during the Mutiny. In January 1859 ‘Justitia' wrote:

I know full well that the officers and privates of the Delhi army consider that they have not had their due share of reward. All India depended on Delhi. The troops know it, and Delhi fell; yet in 25 engagements, in storming the walls, and six days' street fighting afterwards, only six men performed acts of bravery sufficient to make their claims to the Victoria Cross incontestable, whereas 64 of those engaged at Lucknow and in [the state of] Oude are found worthy recipients of it. All who have it deserve it doubtless; but more than the six fortunate recipients in the Delhi army deserve it also.
⁸

Some critics felt that the medal was being unfairly restricted to the rank and file, and that democracy was being carried too far. Others complained that insufficient recognition had been given to the
defenders
of Lucknow (as opposed to those who had relieved the city), for whom there was not a single VC.
⁹
The imbalance – if such it was – between the Lucknow and Delhi VCs came down to the vigour in pursuing the VC by the respective commanding officers. At the lengthy siege of Delhi, two successive generals, Barnard and Reed, were quickly struck down with cholera; the third, Major General Archdale Wilson, was weak and inept, and had failed to block the rebel sepoys' occupation of Delhi in the first place. At Lucknow the much tougher – and more politically astute – Major General Sir James Outram and Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell were in charge.
¹⁰
The highest number of VCs won on a single day – twenty-four – was given out for the second (and lasting) relief of Lucknow, on 16 November 1857, with four going to civilians. These latter went to Ross Lowis Mangles, William Fraser McDonell, Thomas Henry Kavanagh, all of the Bengal Civil Service, and George Bell Chicken – an unfortunate surname for a man deemed to be of exceptional courage – who was a civilian volunteer with the Indian Naval Brigade. At the time of their award, none of these civilians was actually eligible. Shortly after the Mutiny ended,
The Times
forcibly argued for civilians to be drawn into the VC ambit:

[T]he difference between an Englishman and a soldier is but the colour of a coat. Although not professionally trained to arms, [civilians] defended positions, concerted operations, and performed feats of individual valour which the bravest soldier in the British army might have been proud to number among his achievements. They were soldiers in all but name, and we rejoice to see that the Queen has been advised to give a soldier's reward to two men who have done a soldier's work.
¹¹

The two men
The Times
had in mind were Thomas Kavanagh, Assistant Commissioner in Oudh, who, disguised as an Indian, guided Outram in and out of the Lucknow siege, and Ross Mangles, Assistant Magistrate at Patna, who rescued a wounded soldier of the 37th Regiment.

Some who felt they had been unfairly jilted of a VC at the Crimea had better luck in the Mutiny. Evelyn Wood fought at the Crimea as a midshipman, part of the Naval Brigade. He had sufficient foresight to appreciate that a decoration created by the Queen, and for which the Queen had great personal affection, might be a useful stepping stone for a military career.
¹²
Wood had served as an aide-de-camp to Captain Peel and joined a fellow aide-de-camp, Edward St John Daniel, in rescuing Peel once he was wounded in action. For this, Daniel received the VC; Wood did not. Wood's father, Sir John Page Wood, decided to pull some strings. He wrote to Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, on 4 March 1857, pleading for his son to be awarded a VC, adding that Daniel was unscathed, while his son was wounded yet still carried on. His letter ended with a rhetorical flourish: ‘I appeal to your Lordship from the decision of the Admiralty, to do justice to this young man, who has fairly deserved this order, by his blood.'
¹³
Evelyn Wood had better luck in the Indian Mutiny. The
London Gazette
of 4 September 1860 announced that the Queen was ‘graciously pleased to signify her intention to confer the decoration of the Victoria Cross' on Lieutenant Henry Evelyn Wood of the 17th Lancers. He gained his Mutiny VC for attacking ‘almost single-handed, a body of rebels who had made a stand, whom he routed'. That ‘almost' is a nice touch. Wood's case is an example of the tendency at the time to award VCs not simply for one but for several gallant acts – and for rewarding individuals who may have, for one reason or another, been unsuccessful on previous occasions. Wood's Mutiny VC was an instance of persistence, as well as courage, being rewarded.