Victoria's Cross (19 page)

Everett and Graham's acknowledgement that the VC standard implemented in the war had been ‘artificially' raised was only partly right; it was rather that the VC Committee began to reward aggression much more than selflessness. In 1915, 117 VCs were awarded, 35 per cent of them for rescuing or tending to comrades; in 1917 such acts gained 13 per cent of the 174 VCs for that year; in 1918, 203 Crosses were
gained, 6.5 per cent for rescuing the wounded.
⁷⁰
But Everett was isolated regarding his
bête noir
: none of the rest of the committee objected to including women or civilians, so long as high standards were maintained. Ponsonby read out submissions which supported the inclusion of women and civilians, including this from Major General Sir Godfrey Paine, of the Air Ministry: ‘it is only logical that they [women] should be included subject to precise definitions as to eligibility.' General Ruggles-Brise, meanwhile, who as Haig's Military Secretary at GHQ in France can be assumed to have spoken for Haig, said:

[while] it is difficult to conceive that a woman could perform services sufficient to merit an award of the V.C. at the present standard [army commanders] are generally of the opinion that there is no objection to civilians, and therefore women, being eligible for the Victoria Cross, so long as the present high standard is maintained and any tendency to forward recommendations for sentimental reasons is sternly repressed.

Ponsonby teased out the implications of including women: ‘A woman might save a life, might possibly bring a man back or anything of that sort but the idea the V.C. is now given for, exceptional service in the presence of the enemy, means that women will have in future to be considered as combatants . . . [for the VC] you have to do a bit of fighting.' Colonel More pointed out that that was not true; chaplains and medics had got the VC. Everett bluntly said it was the job of chaplains and medics to ‘go into the firing line and be in the fighting'. Chaplains and medics became temporary combatants, suggested Everett, but it was absurd to imagine women being temporary combatants. Colonel Gordon suggested they might be in the front line helping, to which Everett retorted: ‘they ought to clear out'.

What is interesting about the meeting, however, is that Ponsonby did not reveal what he must have been aware of – that King George V
was deeply opposed to the inclusion of women and civilians. In a letter dated 7 March 1919, Lord Stamfordham, the king's private secretary, wrote to Winston Churchill (by then Secretary of State for War):

As I mentioned to you in conversation, The King was averse to the inclusion of women and civilians among those eligible for the Victoria Cross. I explained to His Majesty the points which you raised in favour of allowing the terms of the Warrant to remain as recommended by the Army Council. The King has, therefore, signed the [new] Warrant, but His Majesty hopes that its publication may be deferred until we are no longer in a state of war. This would insure no question of making the Warrant retrospective.

Having granted women over the age of thirty the right to vote in November 1918, and thus enfranchising more than eight million women, it might have been politically difficult to so publically exclude women from the highest military decoration.

The committee – all save Everett – and even the king grasped the obvious fact that the events of 1914–18 had shown that the battlefield was without geographical limits; civilians and women might find themselves in positions where they could conceivably demonstrate exceptional gallantry. The most the committee could do to limit VC distribution and thus preserve its exclusivity was to hope that the military would block any attempt to award the VC to a civilian or a woman. And this hope has so far been realized. In a parting shot, Everett requested that the preamble to the committee's report should note the Admiralty's disapproval of women being eligible for the Cross; that too was overruled. The committee met again on 12 November 1918, by which date Everett had been replaced by the new Naval Secretary, Admiral Sir Rudolph Bentinck, who raised no objections to women or civilians being drawn under the VC umbrella. It dispensed with some minor points and nodded through women, civilians and the merchant
navy into a revised warrant, together with posthumous awards. Some of those present wanted to tighten the regulations by excluding non-combatant actions; but as the only two men to have won bars to their VCs were medics, and they had gained them in a non-combatant role, that was clearly indefensible.

On 22 May 1920 a new warrant, superseding all previous, was signed into being by Winston Churchill. Clause three of the 1856 warrant – ‘It is ordained that the Cross shall only be awarded to those Officers or Men who have served Us in the presence of the enemy, and shall have then performed some signal act of valour or devotion to their country' – was rewritten thus: ‘It is ordained that the Cross shall only be awarded for conspicuous bravery or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy.' ‘Conspicuous bravery', the phrase that had come to be used in the First War for all gazetted VCs, was a clear step up from ‘signal act of valour'.

That the war had indeed made exceptional courage a much tougher proposition was the view of many who fought, as expressed by Squadron Leader W. Tyrell DSO, MC, of the Royal Air Force Medical Service, when he gave evidence to the 1922 inquiry into shell shock, chaired by Lord Southborough: ‘The old Regular Army had a much fiercer way of looking upon anything approaching cowardice, because their standards were based upon wars previous to this war in which the calls made upon a man's courage were as nothing compared to this war.'
⁷¹
The minimum requirements for a VC had been surreptitiously raised during 1914–18 with scant regard to what the VC warrant actually stipulated, forcing the warrant to be revised to take account of changed circumstances.

On Saturday, 26 June 1920, King George V and Queen Mary held a garden party at Buckingham Palace for 305 surviving holders of the VC and their relatives, those who ‘stood for courage in every form,
from the sudden deed all unpremeditated that changed a whole position in action, to the patient, calculated venture that culminated at Zeebrugge'.
⁷²
As the band of the Welsh Guards played, the guests drifted through rose-filled marquees while sampling strawberries and cream, cakes and sandwiches, and glimpsing Field Marshal Earl Haig, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard and Winston Churchill. Newspaper reports of the assembly were suitably deferential:

There were about half-a-dozen babies in arms, and their fathers – proud of them as of their Crosses – gently manoeuvred that the wife should come into the line that was being followed. In no case did the Queen fail to give these little mites a distinction to be recalled to the end of their days by a pat on the cheeks, and some gracious words of enquiry to the delighted young wife.
⁷³

The physically able VC winners had marched from Wellington Barracks amid thousands of cheering onlookers, photographers and autograph-hunters. Doyen of the throng was General Sir Dighton MacNaughton Probyn, aged eighty-seven and now severely hunched. Probyn was an Indian Mutiny survivor who, as a twenty-four-year-old captain in the 2nd Punjab Cavalry, had gained his VC over several actions, including killing an enemy standard-bearer and capturing the standard.
⁷⁴
Just sixty years had passed between Probyn's VC and that of Patrick Joseph Budgen of the 31st Battalion, Australian Imperial Force (AIF), who fought at Polygon Wood from 26 to 28 September 1917.
⁷⁵
Budgen twice successfully attacked enemy pillboxes against ‘devastating fire from machine guns' and captured the defenders; had rescued a corporal who had been taken prisoner, shooting dead one German and bayoneting two others; and ‘on five occasions' rescued wounded men under ‘intense shell and machine-gun fire, showing an utter contempt and disregard for danger'. He was killed on the last such rescue mission.
⁷⁶
What linked Probyn's and Budgen's VCs was their individual
bravery, the one frenziedly slashing with his sabre at sepoys, the other equally desperately charging machine-gun posts; what separated their VCs was the requirement of death, an imposition that became more exigent in the bigger war to follow.

5

Go Home and Sit Still

‘Armies are self-evidently political institutions.'

HEW STRACHAN
¹

‘Every combatant soldier knows how chancy is the whole business of decorations.'

ANTHONY EDEN
²

The foundation stone of the VC was gender-specific; the fifth clause of the 1856 warrant stipulated that the VC would only ‘be awarded to those Officers or Men who have served Us in the presence of the Enemy'. By 1918 this stipulation was, formally at least, antiquated; uniformed women had for two years been serving king and country in many different capacities, though not in the front line, nor in any combat role. But relatively few women wore uniform during the First War – by November 1918 around 90,000 had served in the auxiliary services, mainly in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) – and even fewer were near the front line, ‘able to be injured and killed in warfare but not able to fight for their country'.
³
The very suggestion that a woman might gain a VC was anathema to the nineteenth-century military and, indeed, civilian establishment; most Victorians
or Edwardians, male or female, would have found the term ‘woman soldier' a repellent oxymoron. The prevailing assumption in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century was that women were fragile, hysterical creatures, dependent on a protective male. Yet the idea that women were incapable of exceptional courage or self-sacrifice was as nonsensical as the assumption that all soldiers were brave.

In 1869 Elizabeth Desborough Harris, wife of Lieutenant Colonel Webber Desborough Harris of the Peshawar-based 104th Bengal Fusiliers, found herself in the midst of a devastating and, for many of the soldiers, fatal outbreak of cholera. She nursed the sick and dying with complete indifference to her own safety, and the grateful band of officers clubbed together to have a gold replica of the VC manufactured for her. On the reverse of the medal the officers had inscribed that it was in recognition of her ‘indomitable pluck'. No one thought Mrs Desborough Harris a serious candidate for the real VC, but twenty-two years later London's newspapers were briefly full of the stirring tale of intrepid courage shown by Ethel Grimwood, who
was
seriously spoken of as meriting a VC.

Ethel was married to Frank St Clair Grimwood, the British political agent in Manipur, a highly sensitive posting in a remote, mountainous region on India's north-east frontier. Such agents were intended to be the eyes and ears of the Indian government, keeping Calcutta apprised of all relevant developments in those princedoms and regions where local
rajas
nominally ruled with a degree of independence, pledging submission to Calcutta in return for financial support. Apart from a nine-month interval in another district, the Grimwoods were based in Imphal, Manipur's capital, from 1888 to 1891. They were turbulent years, during which the ruling
raja
and his seven brothers jostled for power, their continual internecine intrigues playing out against a background of deceptive tranquillity. Handling this viper's nest called
for all of Grimwood's tactful sensitivity; he learned Meitei, the local language, and befriended all of the squabbling brothers while favouring none. This scrupulous diplomacy was wrecked when a simmering dispute between Tikendrajit – the
Senaputti
or commander-in-chief of the Manipuri troops – and another brother, over who would have the right to take as a bride a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, turned violent. Tikendrajit orchestrated the removal from his throne of Surachandra, the
raja
, in September 1890 and installed another brother, Kulachandra; Tikendrajit was named the
jubraj
, or heir. Surachandra temporarily took refuge with Grimwood in the residency before subsequently fleeing to Calcutta, from where he lobbied the viceroy, Lord Lytton, son of the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, to restore him to a tawdry throne. The British authorities opted to accept Kulachandra as
raja
, but – unbeknown to the Grimwoods, who accepted the
fait accompli
and maintained good terms with Tikendrajit – they decided to punish Tikendrajit by arresting and banishing him.

In late March 1891, Grimwood's superior, James Wallace Quinton, Chief Commissioner in Assam, along with 400 Gurkhas under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Skene, arrived unannounced in Manipur. Quinton was an old Indian government hand – he had been with the Indian civil service for thirty-three years – but all his time had been spent on the north-west frontier; he knew nothing of the local language and little of the complexities of Manipuran politics. Quinton's plan was based on treachery. He proposed to invite Tikendrajit and his general Thangal to a
durbar
in an Imphal building, lock all the exits, and arrest them at bayonet point. Quinton informed Grimwood of this underhand trap the day before it was to be sprung; the man on the spot, in other words, was not consulted until too late. According to Ethel: ‘To be obliged to arrest a man himself with whom he [Grimwood] had been on friendly terms for nearly three years, and see him treated like a common felon, without being able to defend
himself, was naturally a hard task, and my husband felt it bitterly.' In one of his final letters Grimwood lamented that ‘a native Administration is a dreadful thing to have to do with. It seems impossible to improve it.' The same might have been said of the white authorities in Calcutta whose ineptitude, as much as Tikendrajit's cannon, did for Grimwood.

Tikendrajit was no fool; the arrival of a senior figure such as Quinton and a contingent of Gurkhas inevitably aroused his suspicions. On 24 March 1891 Tikendrajit and Thangal feigned illness and stayed away from the
durbar
, and when Quinton tried to force their arrest, a mêlée broke out. Quinton, who had foolishly brought no artillery with him, found himself facing cannon and rifle fire from several thousand Manipuri troops, safe within an impregnable citadel. The bombardment quickly reduced Grimwood's residency – converted to a makeshift hospital where Ethel helped tend the wounded – to a dismembered shack. Grimwood, Quinton, Skene, a Mr Cossins and a Lieutenant Simpson went unarmed to the palace to see if they could negotiate a ceasefire, under which they might withdraw from Imphal. In the confusing ruckus outside the palace, Grimwood was speared and died immediately; the other four were seized and clapped in irons. That same evening, after a brief deliberation, they were taken outside the palace and beheaded, their blood ‘sprinkled over the mouths of two idols, which stand in the shape of dragons in front of the Royal Palace'.
⁴
To recover the shackles from the corpses their feet were hacked off.

Seven Gurkha officers and 150 troops thereupon fled, taking Ethel Grimwood with them. Where other trussed-up pampered Victorian women might have succumbed to despair on their flight to safety, Ethel was fearful but steadfast. Her footwear was quickly torn to shreds, as for a week she and the raggle-taggle band trekked, with little food or water and covered in leeches, until they reached safety at Lakhipur
on 1 April. The local correspondent of
The Times
reported that ‘Mrs Grimwood displayed the greatest heroism, attending the wounded under heavy fire. After the Residency was evacuated she acted as guide, her knowledge of the country proving invaluable.'
⁵

In the House of Commons on 5 June, Sir John Eldon Gorst, Under-Secretary of State for India, was asked if there was an appropriate Indian order for Mrs Grimwood; to loud cheers, Sir John replied that, when he had reviewed the full official reports, he would ‘gladly consider whether it is open to him to make any recommendation on Mrs Grimwood's behalf'. Three days after Gorst addressed the Commons, Queen Victoria – or more likely, as Victoria, now seventy-two, was ailing, her advisers – pre-empted Gorst by awarding Ethel the Royal Red Cross, ‘in recognition of her devotion to the wounded under most trying circumstances'.
⁶
This medal was then so little known that
The Times
thought it necessary to publish an explanatory note from
Burke's Peerage
, pointing out that it was worn by the Queen herself, Florence Nightingale and more than fifty ‘other ladies'.
⁷
The award of the Royal Red Cross to Ethel did not placate
The Times
, which intoned on 12 June:

The fact that the Order of the Royal Red Cross has been conferred upon Mrs Grimwood must not be taken as an indication that her case is finally disposed of. If it is found that the official despatches confirm the reports cabled to the English newspapers as to the lady's bravery during the attack on the residency and the subsequent retreat, it is probable that Lord Cross [Secretary of State for India] will recommend her Majesty to confer upon her the Victoria Cross.
⁸

The Times
evidently based this assertion on a well-placed leak – but the source was inaccurate. Sir John would not have dared to create such a precedent, even though the official reports supported the account of Ethel's courage.

The subsequent tale of the indomitable twenty-four-year-old Ethel Grimwood is an example of how the press in Victorian England could conjure a celebrity out of the ashes of a disaster, only to drop them at the first whiff of scandal. Any remote chance that Ethel might be the first female winner of the VC was ruined by the ill-judged decision of her sister to send to
The Times
a letter of Ethel's, published on 29 April, which criticized Quinton and by implication Calcutta. Ethel's bald statement that Quinton ‘kept us in the dark as to the real reasons for coming until they arrived on 22 of March' deeply embarrassed the establishment by diverting attention from Tikendrajit's wickedness.
⁹
By no coincidence at all, rumours soon circulated of the Grimwoods' extra-marital activities, about which nothing had been heard prior to the Manipur debacle.
¹⁰
The only Manipur VC to be awarded was the entirely conventional – and, by conventional standards, thoroughly deserved – one given to Lieutenant Charles Grant, a twenty-nine-year-old Scot with the Madras Staff Corps. On learning of the Manipur shambles, Grant had volunteered to lead a tiny force of eighty Punjabi and Gurkha troops from his base at Tamu, and this small force held at bay a much superior advance army of Tikendrajit's until reinforcements arrived.
¹¹

This long-forgotten incident on the outskirts of the empire trundled inexorably to its destined conclusion; the rebellion was put down and in London there were demands to find a scapegoat. Dissembling, squirming and fudge helpfully obscured matters. The only persons punished – apart from Tikendrajit, Thangal and others of the Manipur elite, who were captured, tried and hanged – were the officers who fled the scene. These were disgraced and cashiered, although without ammunition and facing overwhelming odds their only alternative was to have stood their ground until they too were slaughtered.
¹²
In November 1891 Ethel published an account of her Manipur days, in which she wrote:

I think that the honour of England is as dear to us women as it is to the men; and though it is not our vocation in life to be soldiers, and to fight for our country, yet, when occasion offers, I have little doubt that the women of England have that in them which would enable them to come out of any dilemma as nobly and honourably as the men, and with just as much disregard for their own lives as the bravest soldier concerned.
¹³

A finer statement of why women might sometimes deserve a VC would be difficult to imagine.

Valiant women were not, therefore, to be subject to the erratically applied slide-rule used to gauge VC worthiness in the nineteenth century. This exclusion was perhaps understandable in an era when usually brief military campaigns were waged far from Britain, with armies numbered in thousands, the dead in tens or hundreds, and women kept far distant from the battlefield, restricted to tending for the sick or wounded. But Zeppelin raids on London and elsewhere in Britain dragged women and civilians into a front line that now existed everywhere in reach of long-range attack by air. Men were conscripted in 1916, and there were numerous calls for the same for women: ‘Official attitudes appeared to have come full circle: from rejecting women's offers of voluntary labour in 1914, the War Office was actively considering their conscription by 1916.'
¹⁴
But no one seriously contemplated giving a rifle and bayonet to a woman; any conscription for women would be for auxiliary duties, and the creation of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in March 1917 was represented as an organization that was essentially feminine rather than military.

The hope in August 1914 that the fighting in Flanders would be brief had faded by Christmas that same year. Very few politicians or soldiers – with the notable exceptions of Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for
War, and General Sir Douglas Haig – had believed that it would last more than a few months. While men rushed to join up, eager to see some action before the war was over, women who early volunteered their services usually encountered the kind of patronizing attitude Elsie Inglis, a medical doctor, experienced when she put herself forward in August 1914. A War Office official told her: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.'
¹⁵
Little had changed in more than 2,500 years, when Homer had Hector, about to go off to fight with Achilles, instruct his wife Andromache to ‘Go home, attend to your own handiwork/At loom and spindle/As for the war, that is for men.'

Women were not seen as fighters: their role in war ‘was to symbolise the society for which the men were fighting'.
¹⁶
By 1916 the war gripped almost every British home and, over the next two years, the British army reached its maximum strength of four million, pulling large numbers of women into jobs previously done by men, including roles close to the fighting. With a sprawling front line extending from the Channel coast to Switzerland, and territory gained or lost measured in yards rather than miles, individual supererogatory acts of courage became much more difficult to easily identify and almost too numerous to mention. Eyewitness accounts of supremely gallant acts by senior officers were infinitely more problematic on battlefields of such vast scale, while the scope for creative hyperbole in the writing-up of VC recommendations created even more uncertainty about their reliability than in the past. The ascending hierarchy of committees engaged in adjudicating VC recommendations faced many more such recommendations than in the past, giving them a difficult choice: either give the VC in quantities proportionate to the numbers engaged and the duration of the conflict, even though it was much larger and longer than anything seen before; or dismiss all but truly exceptional acts, in which case to gain a VC meant the risk of almost certain death. In choosing the second course, not just for the First World War but also for the Second, one category of
potential VC candidates would become inescapably excluded: women. Partly this was because, even when the war ended in November 1918, women who donned uniforms were still widely regarded, by men
and
women, as merely
playing
soldiers.
¹⁷
It was only with the deepest reluctance that the military hierarchy accepted women; women medics – nurses and doctors – working alongside the Royal Army Medical Corps were graded and paid according to army rank, but could not be commissioned and were denied badges of rank. In 1919 Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War, refused to grant commissions to women doctors, primarily to avoid setting precedents.
¹⁸