Victoria's Cross (10 page)

Others lacked a Baronet to write to the War Office on their behalf. Private Dennis Dempsey of the 10th Foot very probably was semi-literate. Nevertheless he put forward a VC claim for himself on 14 March 1858 for his services at Lucknow, when he carried a powder keg out of a burning village. Dempsey's case was ignored by the War Office, loftily indifferent to a solicitation from a humble private. It took a strong letter of recommendation on 23 January 1860 – almost two years later – from Lieutenant Colonel (and former Lieutenant and Adjutant) Percy Beale, now in command of the 10th Foot, to gain sufficient notice for Dempsey. Beale had witnessed Dempsey's act:

Captain Alderley the Adjutant, the storming party and myself saw Pte Dempsey creep up this native street
alone
, with the powder bag, exposed to a very heavy fire from the Enemy behind loop holed walls, and an almost still greater danger from the sparks which flew in every direction from the village which was on fire. I and in fact the whole Company expected to see Pte Dempsey blown to pieces by the powder, the men were astonished at his cool bravery: and expressed their admiration of his conduct at the time.
¹⁴

Dempsey was finally gazetted VC on 17 February 1860.

Relatives, civilians, militias – all who had served in the Mutiny clamoured to be heard, despite efforts by the War Office to hold back the tide. The issue of posthumous awards was resurrected, after five individuals on whom Sir Colin Campbell had conferred VCs on the spot died before the decoration was confirmed by Queen Victoria. Campbell suggested a solution: why not send a batch of VCs to him in India for his personal distribution? Edward Pennington, the senior War Office clerk responsible for handling VC recommendations, proposed instead that a notice be published in the
London Gazette
, stating that the soldier concerned would have received the VC
if
he had survived.
¹⁵
This was backed by the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the
armed forces, and Victoria. Technically, the dead were ineligible, but this – the case of one awarded the VC but dying before confirmation by the Queen – was a grey area. The Panmure diktat against posthumous awards was inadequate in such cases, and a handful of Crosses were sent to surviving relatives, with a message from the Queen expressing the satisfaction it would have afforded her to confirm the grant of the VC, had the soldier survived – although the government, ever parsimonious, ruled that the gratuity accompanying the medal would not be paid. In the
London Gazette
of 28 December 1858, a memorandum appeared to the effect that Cornet Bankes of the 7th Hussars, deceased, would have been submitted to the Queen for confirmation of the VC had he survived; his relatives were sent the medal. In cases where the Queen had not yet received the VC recommendation for the deceased, no Cross was granted. This anomaly was clearly unjust, the consequence of long delays in communications between India and London, but the ruling – you had to be alive when recommended in order for your family to receive the Cross – was fairly consistently applied throughout the nineteenth century.

It was, perhaps, a charitable compromise; but it cracked open the door for posthumous awards. Some dead soldiers – or at least their relatives – had to wait many years to receive the VC for which they had been recommended by a senior officer. One such was Private Edward Spence of the 42nd Royal Highlanders, the Black Watch. On 15 April 1858, during the Indian Mutiny, Spence and Private Alexander Thompson volunteered to assist Captain William Martin Café, in command of the 4th Punjab Rifles, in recovering the body of a Lieutenant Willoughby from the ditch surrounding Fort Ruhya, coming under heavy fire as they did so. Thompson survived and got his VC almost immediately; Spence was severely wounded and died two days later, so was ineligible; but a decision by Edward VII in 1907 to grant posthumous VCs in a handful of cases meant that distant relatives of Spence
were tracked down and received his Cross – forty-nine years after the event.
¹⁶
Later, during the First World War, although nothing in the VC warrant permitted posthumous awards, many were given. According to Michael Crook: ‘The only authority therefore upon which the many posthumous awards of the First World War were awarded was that there was nothing in the rules that precluded it.'
¹⁷

Debate over the supposed injustices regarding the distribution of the Indian Mutiny VCs prompted widespread suspicion that for promotion and reward in the British army it was not what you did, but who you knew, as the
Saturday Review
asserted:

Merit stands a man in little stead in the British Army. The few prizes that exist are for the most part bestowed by jobbery . . . A friend at the Horse-Guards, or a long bill with a fashionable tailor may do more for an officer than all the merit and ability in the world. The power of writing self-laudatory letters has been said to go far towards obtaining a Victoria Cross; and possibly the adoption of the same method might prove the shortest road to a staff appointment.
¹⁸

Few VC winners in the nineteenth century either thought their story worth recording, or were literate enough to do so. An exception was the civilian Assistant Commissioner of Oudh, Thomas Kavanagh, who in 1860 published a rather self-serving book,
How I Won the Victoria Cross
, with a suitably romantic engraving of himself opposite the title page, bearing the title ‘Lucknow Kavanagh in his disguise', in which he was shown garbed in Indian costume, casually holding a sword across his right shoulder. Kavanagh almost failed to get his VC, not because of his civilian status but because, as the
Glasgow Herald
revealed, the directors of the East India Company, his employers, refused to back the recommendation by Lord Canning, the Governor-General of India, ‘alleging that he would have the Lucknow medal in common with the other brave men who had earned it!'
¹⁹

Lampooned and immortalized by George Macdonald Fraser in his 1975 novel
Flashman in the Great Game
, Kavanagh (or Kavanaugh as Fraser has it) is seen by Flashman – not the most reliable of narrators – as a buffoon:

It's a fact that Kavanaugh stole all the limelight when the story came out . . . he broke off the kneeling-and-praying which he was engaged in, looked up at me with his great freckled yokel face, and says anxiously:

‘D'yez think they'll give us the Victoria Cross?'

Well, in the end they did give him the V.C. for that night's work, while all I got was a shocking case of dysentery. He was a civilian, of course, so they were bound to make a fuss of him . . .
²⁰

But Kavanagh was prophetic in his judgement of British rule in India:

No government was ever actuated by better intentions, or had more talented servants. But it made the mistake (and will go on doing so till another rebellion,) of endeavouring to govern an immense empire by very few and almost irresponsible subordinates . . . the interest of the State was considered to be of greater importance than the welfare of the people, who were, almost without exception, treated as rogues and liars.
²¹

This critique sullied Kavanagh's reputation and he returned to India a profoundly bitter man. He regarded his £2,000 gratuity as insufficient,
²²
and as he wrote to
The Times
on 10 August 1859, the VC was only an honourable bauble:

I desired the Victoria Cross, and I wear it with pride where it was pinned by our good and gracious Sovereign. But it is only a badge of valour. The State has only recognized the great service rendered to it by the bestowal of a decoration no one is bound to respect . . . I am merely endeavouring to induce [my superiors] to reward me according
to my deserts. Caste prejudices are so strong in the India-office that I have hitherto failed, and I grieve to add that one of my superiors thought proper to threaten me . . .
²³

Another East India Company employee, Frederick Roberts, eclipsed all other Mutiny VC winners in later life. Born in Cawnpore in 1832, Roberts was a sickly but determined child; his sisters nicknamed him ‘Sir Timothy Valliant'. After Eton, Sandhurst and the Addiscombe Military Seminary – the training academy for young officers of the East India Company – Roberts sailed for Calcutta; apart from a brief interlude in Natal he was to spend the next forty-one years in India. In letters published in 1924,
²⁴
Roberts recounted his Indian Mutiny experiences, including the brutality on both sides. From Amritsar on 11 June 1857 he wrote:

We have come along this far, doing a little business on the road such as disarming Regiments and executing mutineers. The death that seems to have the most effect is being blown from a gun. It is rather a horrible sight, but in these times we cannot be particular . . . A man (a native) who was at Delhi during the massacre told me he saw 8 ladies let out, and shot one after the other, they nearly all had children with them, who were killed before their eyes.

Present at the capture of Delhi, Roberts gained his Cross – a classic VC action, in which he galloped off alone to retake a captured standard – while attached to the staff of Sir Colin Campbell in the build-up to the relief of Lucknow. Was his gallantry inspired by being under the eyes of Sir Colin? Might he have thought better of it had no senior officer been present? We shall never know.

Certainly, Roberts could hardly contain his delight when he wrote to his mother on 11 February 1858, ‘My own Mother, I have such a piece of news for you, I have been recommended for the
“Victoria Cross”
. . .
Is this not glorious? How pleased it will make the General [his father].
Such a Medal
to wear with
“For Valour”
scrolled on it.' Under the watchful eye of generals such as Sir Colin Campbell, who groomed talented and dedicated officers such as Roberts, imperial VCs went to those who showed themselves unafraid, dashing and plucky. As a man who rose to be perhaps the most powerful, and certainly the most popular soldier of his day, feted by Kipling in several ballads, Roberts sealed his public fame in September 1880 when, as commander of a field force of 10,000 troops, he marched across 300 miles of harsh terrain to relieve Kandahar. Five years later, he was appointed commander-in-chief in India, his imperial prowess owing much to those two initials, VC.

As the Indian Mutiny dragged on, more minor incidents elsewhere prompted some remarkable revisions to the original VC warrant, revealing the extent to which luck played its part in gaining the Cross in its early days. On 11 November 1857, the coal-fired steamship
Sarah Sands
was carrying reinforcements to India in the form of the 54th Foot – and a lot of gunpowder – when she caught fire 800 miles off the Indian coast and the crew abandoned ship. Despite a severe squall, the soldiers who remained on board threw most of the gunpowder kegs into the water, preventing the fire reaching either the explosive or the coal stores, and the ship managed to limp into Port Louis, Mauritius, ten days later. Although there was an imminent threat to life, the soldiers did no more than their duty and were, no doubt, guided as much by self-preservation as any heroic instinct; there were not enough lifeboats on the
Sarah Sands
to ferry everyone out of danger, and those who managed to escape might not have been able to row fast enough to avoid death or injury if the
Sarah Sands
had blown up. Those who stayed to toss the powder kegs overboard made the only rational decision; it took nerve and discipline, certainly, and fulfilled one definition of courage – the overcoming of fear – but the alternatives were
unattractive. As matters stood in November 1857, none of the 54th who fought the blaze or prevented an explosion was eligible for the VC; the fifth clause of the 1856 warrant stated that it ‘shall only be awarded to those Officers or Men who have served Us
in the presence of the Enemy
and shall then have performed some signal act of valour or devotion to their Country . . .' [author's emphasis]. No enemy was present; the case should therefore have been cut and dried, and in this instance bravery should have been truly its own reward.

But public opinion – which so often has influenced the course of the VC's history – swayed events. When the
Sarah Sands
arrived in Port Louis, the soldiers of the 54th were treated to a sumptuous banquet, and the general stationed at Mauritius issued an order praising the soldiers as heroes. In London, the Duke of Cambridge issued an order to be read before every regiment in the army, recording ‘the remarkable gallantry and resolution displayed by the Officers and soldiers of the 54th Regiment, on board the ship
Sarah Sands
, under circumstances of a most trying nature, namely, when the vessel took fire at sea, having at the time a large quantity of ammunition on board'. The British press lapped up the story, and the swell of public acclaim eventually washed across the desk of General Sir Colin Campbell in India.
²⁵
On 29 January 1858 he wrote to the Duke of Cambridge, wondering if the VC might be suitable for the 54th on this occasion. The Duke agreed that a relaxation of the statutes seemed justified in this case, as did General Jonathan Peel, Secretary of State for War. Peel went so far as to say in the House of Commons on 30 July 1858 that the Queen supported bending the rules in this instance:

At present it was requisite that some extraordinary proof of valour [for gaining the VC] should be given in the presence of the enemy. There were, however, instances of valour exhibited not in the presence of an enemy that ought to be rewarded, such for example, as the case
of the men on board the
Sarah Sands
. He was happy to say that he had received the sanction of Her Majesty to such an extension of that order as would include them and persons in similar situations.
²⁶

Thus an amended warrant, signed by General Peel and dated 10 August 1858, extended VC eligibility to officers and men of the naval and military services who displayed ‘instances of conspicuous courage and bravery under circumstances of extreme danger, such as the occurrence of a fire on board Ship, or of the foundering of a vessel at Sea, or under any other circumstances in which through the courage and devotion displayed, life or public property may be saved'. The lone defender of rules being rules, Edward Pennington, the civil servant responsible for the VC at the War Office, counselled that this revised warrant should not be published in the
London Gazette
. It was therefore left in limbo, its existence widely known but not officially acknowledged.