Victoria's Cross (35 page)

  
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.

40
.
Lord Sydenham chaired the Central Appeal Tribunal, which administered conscription. In his later years he subscribed to the idea that there was an international Jewish conspiracy, and espoused fascism – the descent into madness probably completely unrelated to his chairing a royal commission on venereal disease from 1913 to 1916.

41
.
Hansard
, 8 March 1916, vol. 21, cc 304–12.

42
.
NAWO 32/7452. Recommended by the GOC (General Officer Commanding), 2nd Corps, on 26 September 1914; Elliott did not get the VC.

43
.
Frank Richards [real name Francis Philip Woodruff],
Old Soldiers Never Die
(Faber & Faber, 1933), pp. 53–5.

44
.
Field Punishment Number One: a humiliating and sometimes painful ordeal in which a soldier was fixed to an upright post or gun wheel for two hours a day for a maximum of twenty-one days.

45
.
‘Mark VII' [pseudonym of Max Plowman],
A Subaltern on the Somme in 1916
(Dutton, 1928), p. 90.

46
.
Douglas Haig,
War Diaries & Letters, 1914–1918
, ed. Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 84.

47
.
NA WO 32/7463. Letter from Kitchener, 26 June 1901.

48
.
Gary Mead,
The Good Soldier
(Atlantic Books, 2008), p. 109.

49
.
In the Battle of Atbara on 8 April 1898, a decisive defeat of the Dervishes in the Second Sudan War, Acting Major Haig had galloped to rescue a fallen Egyptian army soldier from possible capture – the kind of spirited effort that had gained the VC on other occasions. When the subject cropped up in later life, his wife Doris would insist that he should have got the VC for risking his life at Atbara. Haig maintained a dignified silence about the incident. (Mead, op. cit., p. 94.)

50
.
It was not gazetted until 8 September 1916, the two-month interlude implying some deliberation back at the War Office;
www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/29740/supplements/8869
.

51
.
Cather was not the only VC awarded on the first day of the Somme for rescuing wounded. Captain John Leslie Green, of the 1/5 Sherwood Foresters, who attacked near Gommecourt, went to the assistance of Captain Frank Robinson, a fellow Sherwood Foresters officer, who was wounded and entangled in barbed wire. Green was shot in the head and died; Robinson died two days later.

52
.
London Gazette
, 13 September 1918;
www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/30901/supplements/10877
.

53
.
The combined British and Dominions forces totalled 8.7 million by November 1918. The approximate chance of gaining a military gallantry decoration – excluding the VC but including the MC, MM and DCM – was thus one in fifty. By the same crude calculation the chance of winning a VC was about one in 13,765.

54
.
Ponsonby,, op. cit., p. 311.

55
.
Invented in 1901, the DSC was originally called the Conspicuous Service Cross and was for warrant and junior officers. It was renamed in October 1914 and eligibility then extended to all naval officers below the rank of lieutenant commander.

56
.
Ponsonby, op. cit., p. 311

57
.
Ponsonby,
Recollections of Three Reigns
, op. cit., p. 312.

58
.
Ibid., pp. 312–3.

59
.
Ibid. The other ranks who became eligible for the Military Medal did not much like it because it carried no gratuity – unlike the £20 annual gratuity that went with the Distinguished Conduct medal. Little wonder perhaps that the numbers of DCMs handed out slowly fell, while those of the MM rose strongly.

60
.
Gerald Gliddon, VCs
of the Somme: A Biographical Portrait
(Gliddon Books, 1991), p. vii.

61
.
www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/29740/supplements/8871
. Immediately prior to McFadzean's entry in the
London Gazette
was another, that of Private William Jackson of the Australian Infantry, who also would have been ruled out by Haig's thumbs-down for the rescue of fallen comrades. Jackson was part of a group returning from a raid when several of the group were injured by shellfire. Jackson got back
safely and handed over a prisoner and then returned to retrieve one of the injured. He returned once more, with a sergeant, and his arm was blown off. He returned, got assistance, and then went out once more, looking for two wounded comrades. Jackson may have been rewarded for bravery on more than this occasion. The citation concludes: ‘He set a splendid example of pluck and determination. His work has always been marked by the greatest coolness and bravery.'

62
.
Illustrated London News
, 25 November 1916, p. 621.

63
.
H. Montgomery Hyde and G. R. Falkiner Nuttall,
Air Defence and the Civil Population
(Cresset Press, 1937), pp. 44–5.

64
.
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire was from the start distributed with indiscriminate haste and in such vast quantities that it was instantly mocked. The first list of names for the new order (24 August 1917) occupied four densely packed small-print pages of the
London Gazette
(
www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/30250/supplements/8791
). In the first list, dignitaries such as Edmund Sebag Montefiore (Secretary of the Civilian Internment Camps Committee at the Home Office, created CBE) could be found alongside Lady Sophie Beatrix Mary Scott (Head of Gifts Department Stores, British Red Cross Society, also CBE). E. S. Turner wrote in
Dear Old Blighty
(Michael Joseph, 1980), p. 223: