Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  Whitehall resisted giving the VC to Adams, not because of the possible absurdity of the citation but because he was strictly speaking a civilian. In the view of the Military Secretary of the time, Lieutenant General Sir Edmund Augustus Whitmore, the 1858 extension of the warrant was to be strictly interpreted. But by 1879 General Roberts was Britain’s most successful soldier; he brooked no opposition from War Office desk wallahs. His imperial military success – avenging the murder of Sir Louis Cavagnari, British envoy in Kabul, and his victory at the Battle of Kandahar on 1 September 1880 – made him a darling at court; the Queen created him Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) on 21 September 1880. He was lionized as a national hero, and his own VC status suggested he knew what courage was. Roberts could, more or less, do what he wanted. Against this the pen-pushing Whitmore was powerless.

  Roberts wrote to Whitmore and suggested that, as had happened after the Indian Mutiny, an amended warrant should be drawn up, specifically to accommodate Adams. The Duke of Cambridge – as impatient with bureaucracy as Roberts – saw no real need for a new warrant but inevitably backed Roberts. Whitmore was correct in his strict interpretation of the VC rules; but the rules had stacked against them the two most important military officers in the land. The result was inevitable – just rewrite the rules to accommodate all concerned. Thus on 24 August 1881 the London Gazette notified that the Queen had altered the VC warrant to include ‘members of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishments’; just two days later, and almost two years after the event took place for which he was being decorated, Adams’s VC was gazetted.

  The strong bond between Roberts and Adams continued; when trouble broke out in Burma in 1885, Roberts asked Adams to accompany the field force sent there to quash the rebellion. At Killa Kazi Adams may have been brave, but the courage involved in trying to help struggling officers escape a tense situation was merely a suitable peg on which to hang the reward. The Reverend Adams was never politically powerful; he merely inhabited the outer reaches of influence. But his VC consolidated his toe-hold at court. Before he died in 1903, having retired from India and taken up a living near Oakham, Adams was made Honorary Chaplain to Queen Victoria and then, after her death, was appointed one of a dozen Chaplains in Ordinary to Edward VII. For Stannus, Adams’s VC was to be judged purely on the basis of its citation, and that appeared ludicrous; for the rest of the world, and perhaps for history, it is more obvious that the Reverend’s VC was clearly a reward for good, loyal service to Roberts not just for a single day, but for years.

  In his principled and very public condemnation of the VC, Stannus was a lonely voice. Popular opinion, at least as represented by the jingoistic and imperially minded press, adored the Cross. Newspapers and periodicals gained tremendously useful copy in stories of individual heroism, as exemplified by the VC – a boon for the press that continues to this day. As the conquest of indigenous peoples came to be justified as extending ‘civilization’, the general public needed some of the ‘civilizers’ to be towering heroes. The VC became indelibly associated with a romantically inclined adulation of individual heroes, embodied in texts such as T. E. Toomey’s Victoria Cross and How Won, published in 1889.49 Toomey, a former colour-sergeant of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Irish, compiled from the London Gazette the names, rank and regiment of the VC winners, together with a brief description of their deeds. Toomey’s unquestioned assumption that winning the VC marked an individual out as indisputably heroic – he dedicated his book to ‘The Heroes of the Victoria Cross’ and, in a sign of a more deferential age, to ‘The Officers under Whose Command it was Won’ – remains the dominant mode for understanding the Victoria Cross. The VC, although a perfect example of the paternalism on which the hierarchies of Victorian industrialized society depended, was widely depicted as exercising a beneficial, socially unifying influence. According to one contemporary newspaper, the Cross was ‘the most democratic of distinctions, since on its roll of fame there are the names of Corporals and Sergeants, as well as those of Peers of the Realm and Generals. Here birth goes for nothing; and the trooper who has brought away his comrade under fire figures in the same list with the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army.’50

  Certainly the distribution of the VC was, in the nineteenth century, fairly evenly balanced between officers and other ranks: of the 404 VCs awarded by 1889, the year of Toomey’s compendium, 223 had gone to other ranks, 181 to officers. This amounted to little more than a democratic façade, however; existing social and military divisions were left intact. Stannus, Fraser, Hardinge and other officers or ex-officers who disliked the VC were no radicals; their critique of the Cross derived from an ultra-conservative position, a wish to defend the professionalism of the army from being, as they saw it, debauched by disruptive personal accolades. Their view, always a minority opinion, lost the debate, and by 1880 Stannus’s fundamental criticism of the VC, that it showered praise on men who were merely doing what had previously been expected of them, was already anachronistic. On 15 September 1882, Israel Harding, a gunner on board the Alexandra, was gazetted VC. The year before, on 11 July, the Alexandra was engaged in a very minor action against the forts of Arabi Pasha, at Alexandria, when the ship was hit by a shell that lodged on the main deck. On hearing shouts of alarm, Harding dashed up from below deck, saw the fizzing fuse, doused it in water, and then put the shell in a nearby tub. A hero? Or someone who simply did his duty? For Stannus these were key questions – and they remain so today – but they had been lost sight of by 1882. By then the received opinion was that the leaden dullard of a private soldier could be transmuted into a golden hero by performing an action that could, with suitable embellishment, be made to look astonishing; on occasion, might even be astonishing. As a contemporary commentary on the VC put it: ‘The private, graced with such a distinction, is no longer a plebeian. He is not one of the multitude. Even if his social and military rank should remain unchanged, he is raised morally much above his former self.’51

  As Stannus was struggling with his personal fate, British redcoats were about to suffer their most humiliating defeat at the hands of ‘uncivilized’ soldiers in the heart of Natal, South Africa, as Lord Chelmsford led a punitive expedition against the Zulu nation. The deeply republican Reynolds’s Newspaper struck a cautious note, little knowing that the disaster it feared had already happened. On Sunday, 2 February 1879, Reynolds’s warned:

  An attack on such a nation with a small army, in a difficult country, and with so large an unfriendly population behind, even though every possible precaution has been taken, involves some serious risks. The result of a struggle in the long run cannot of course be doubtful. We are, however, very likely to be once more reminded of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of engaging in a little war. A single mistake in the first hostile operations which should give a well-prepared enemy a momentary success might lead to lamentable disasters.

  The first lamentable disaster had already happened. On 22 January, Lord Chelmsford foolishly failed to entrench his troops, declined to build a defensive laager, and divided his force, taking half with him supposedly to pursue the Zulu force. He left behind at Isandlwana almost 2,000 British and natives troops; the majority of these were slaughtered by Zulu impis, some of whom then went on to threaten a tiny British-held frontier post at Rorke’s Drift.

  The British expedition to subdue Zululand was in some respects a repetition of the Crimean disaster; it is difficult to say whether Lord Chelmsford suffered more from arrogance or ignorance. London’s newspapers had assumed the fighting would be so brief and one-sided that it was not considered worth the expense to send special correspondents – which did not prevent some from publishing remarkably colourful accounts. The Graphic of 15 March 1879 depicted the final moments of Lieutenants Nevill Josiah Aylmer Coghill and Teignmouth Melvill of the 24th Regiment as they failed to cross the turbulent Buffalo River and were killed by pursuing Zulus: ‘We may presume that the wound of Coghill necessitated dismounting. The other, ten
ding him with all the care of a comrade, must have witnessed his death. He himself, too, spent with loss of blood, could not remount, and with the colours wrapped around him, sank down to die, happy in the soldierly conviction that honour was saved.’ This was fiction parading as fact: Melvill and Coghill, whose final moments cannot possibly be known – there were no British eye-witnesses, and no Zulu account has been recorded – were thrust forward for public adoration and hero worship. They were not the only British officers who, rather than be slaughtered, chose to gallop away from Isandlwana – an option unavailable to the horseless rank-and-file redcoat. Some officers at Isandlwana were fortunate to be wearing their dark blue-and-black patrol uniforms; the Zulus had been ordered to ignore those dressed in black, who were presumed to be civilians. Captain Allen Gardner of 14th Hussars, who fled the scene and survived, was one such; he later justified what could have been seen as desertion by asserting that he thought it vital to warn Chelmsford, who warmly commended Gardner. Gardner was prematurely talked of in the British press as having gained the VC; but as the scale of the disaster slowly emerged, the honour of British officers began to be questioned, and Gardner’s mooted VC was quietly forgotten.52

  The bigger the military catastrophe, the greater the need to boost national morale; and Isandlwana was the greatest military defeat for British forces up till then. It was time for a few ennobling and attention-diverting VCs. Thus Lieutenants Coghill and Melvill were swiftly depicted in the British press as having sacrificed themselves to save the quasi-mystical soul of the regiment, the colours. The Zulus, however, were so indifferent to this scrap of woven cotton that it was later found 500 yards downstream from Coghill’s and Melvill’s corpses. Next day at Rorke’s Drift honour was partially restored, thanks to the stalwart defence by 150 British and colonial troops of the tiny garrison against 4,000 Zulus. Rorke’s Drift, no doubt because of the eleven VCs given to its defenders, has come to symbolize for the British national psyche all that is ‘best’ in the tradition of military heroism. The two senior officers at Rorke’s Drift, Lieutenants John Rouse Merriot Chard and Gonville Bromhead, became nationally feted as heroes, although Colonel (as he then was) Evelyn Wood, part of Chelmsford’s expeditionary force, thought Chard a ‘most useless officer fit for nothing . . . a dull, heavy man, scarcely able to do his regular work’,53 while Major Francis Clery, who was garrisoned at Rorke’s Drift with Bromhead after the battle, commented: ‘Reputations are being made and lost here in an almost comical fashion . . . [Bromhead is a] capital fellow at everything except soldiering.’ Lieutenant Henry Curling, also at Rorke’s Drift with Bromhead after the battle, wrote: ‘It is very amusing to read the accounts of Chard and Bromhead . . . Bromhead is a stupid old fellow, as deaf as a post. Is it not curious how some men are forced into notoriety?’54

  Whatever the truth about Bromhead and Chard personally, they at least stayed at their posts – although flight was not really an option – and fought with determination, unlike Coghill and Melvill. The drama played out in Zululand that January – a desperate, and successful, ‘last stand’ by brave white men against hordes of ‘savages’, a bloody defeat redeemed by the valiant defence of a handful of individuals from the same regiment that had been so badly let down by an inept commander – was perfectly suited to the contemporary mores of the VC. Britain’s newspapers did their utmost to secure Coghill and Melvill posthumous VCs, despite that being technically impossible; posthumous VCs had only gone to the families of those who had been granted the decoration but died before it could be bestowed. This was of little consequence to the Morning Post, which in March declared: ‘Such heroes as Coghill and Melville [sic] would certainly have been accorded the Victoria Cross had they lived. Is it too much to suggest that this grand deed should be recorded in the Official Gazette, and that the Cross should be awarded as an heirloom to their families?’55 An innovation of this sort would not come for almost three decades; in 1907 Edward VII, against his better judgement, succumbed to pressure to grant posthumous VCs to Coghill and Melvill and a handful of others.56

  General Sir Garnet Wolseley, who took over from the disgraced Lord Chelmsford in Natal, confided to his South African diary his scepticism regarding the ‘heroism’ of Coghill and Melvill: ‘I am sorry that both of those officers were not killed with their men at Isandlwana . . . I don’t like the idea of officers escaping on horseback when their men on foot were killed.’57 In all likelihood the tale of Coghill and Melvill riding to save the colours was entirely fictitious, the spurious creation of a British press that was developing an appetite for heroes. There were no eyewitness accounts – a direct infringement of the seventh clause of the 1856 warrant, which required the deed to have been performed under the watchful eye of a commanding officer, or, failing that, that the claimant of the VC ‘shall prove the act to that satisfaction of’ a senior officer. In his memoirs, Horace Smith-Dorrien, then a young subaltern transport officer (and later a fine First War general), one of five surviving officers at Isandlwana, suggested that although the two bodies were found together, the men had retreated separately, and that the river swept them downstream to the spot where they met before being killed.58 Coghill’s ride may have been ‘no more than an entirely human, and in the context of a rout a permissible if unheroic, attempt to save his life, something that, as a well mounted staff officer, he was better placed to do than the ordinary soldiers’.59 The deaths of Coghill and Melvill did produce one sensible change: the carrying of regimental colours into battle was thereafter banned, to prevent rash soldiers from risking their lives to defend or rescue a piece of cloth.

  At least 150 VCs prior to 1890 were awarded for the rescue or attempted rescue of a fallen comrade. Many of these acts more appropriately merited the Albert Medal, which in 1877 was extended to cover the saving of life on land, but that medal lacked the prestige – and certainly never attracted the same publicity as the VC. And one key element of the original 1856 VC warrant – the principle by which officers and men could elect one or more of their number to be put forward for a VC – was implemented inconsistently. Cases such as that of Private J. Divane, who gained his VC by election of his peers, were rare.60 Divane, of the 60th Regiment, led a successful charge against rebel trenches during the Indian Mutiny; a clear case of a VC that was merited – if Divane’s peers thought he deserved it, who could with justice deny it? Other examples, such as that of Private W. Griffiths, who rescued seventeen comrades from drowning close to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal on 7 May 1867, were clearly wrong, even at the time. Yet the VC, once bestowed, joins all winners in a hallowed club of the heroic.

  Winston Churchill never won the VC, although arguably he deserved it for his personal courage in battle on several occasions. Yet paradoxically he also represents a good illustration of what Stannus particularly disliked about the Cross: the encouragement it gave to a young and dashing officer, who so eagerly sought a decoration that he was prepared to risk his life whenever the opportunity arose, indifferent to larger questions of battlefield strategy. Churchill’s courage was of the type that, had his friends at court been sufficiently powerful (or his enemies less formidable), he would have got the VC. Churchill joined the 4th Hussars in 1895 after passing out from Sandhurst eighth of the 150 cadets in the previous year. As a subaltern he fought in campaigns on the Northwest Frontier, the Nile, in the South African and First World Wars, and served in turn with the 31st Punjaub Infantry, the 21st Lancers, the South African Light Horse, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, the Grenadier Guards, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the Oxfordshire Artillery, the unit changes driven by his self-acknowledged lust for action. About the only thing he was afraid of was being shot in the mouth, as that might have stopped him from being able to talk.61 Hungry for medals, Churchill found the colonial campaigns in which he fought full of ‘fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed. Here and there in every regiment or battalion, half a dozen, a score, at the worst thirty or forty, would pay the forfeit
; but to the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.’62 He participated in the last great cavalry charge, that of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, where Captain Raymond de Montmorency received a VC for having recovered the corpse of Lieutenant Grenfell.63

  In October 1899 Churchill arrived in South Africa, where he was to experience his fourth war in as many years. Churchill was at the time the correspondent of the Morning Post, having resigned from the army on 3 May 1899 to fight a by-election in Oldham. It was in South Africa where he displayed, before a very public audience, the kind of bravery that unquestionably merited the Cross. At dawn on 15 November 1899, Churchill left Estcourt aboard a train carrying some Dublin Fusiliers and a company of the Durham Light Infantry, destined for Colenso, close to Ladysmith, where a beleaguered British garrison was under siege. He had been invited to accompany the trip by a friend, Captain James Haldane, DSO, of the Gordon Highlanders. As Churchill recalled: ‘Out of comradeship, and because I thought it was my duty to gather as much information as I could for the Morning Post, also because I was eager for trouble, I accepted the invitation without demur.’64 The train was ambushed and partially derailed, and three Creusot cannon, a thousand rifles and one Maxim gun poured fire onto the stranded train, stuck in the open. Winston rallied the driver and promised that, if he ‘bucked up’, he (Churchill) would ensure he got a medal. As they tried to pull the derailed trucks from blocking the engine’s path, Churchill’s party came under intense rifle, Maxim gun and artillery fire, killing four soldiers and wounding thirty more, at a range of around 900 yards. According to Haldane’s later account, Churchill supervised the work to clear the line: