Victoria's Cross (15 page)

On 14 November 1900, with more than two years of the Boer War to run, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Warren, the hapless commander of British soldiers slaughtered by Boer commandos at Spion Kop, gave a rousingly patriotic speech in the town hall of Chatham, in Kent.
⁷⁵
According to
The Times
, Warren praised the unknown and unrecognized heroes who had fought the Boers and helped preserve the empire. He thanked those ‘men who had performed heroic deeds – men whose names had never been mentioned, and never would be mentioned. He had seen men do heroic deeds in bringing in the wounded, and he could not get the names of them . . . It was that modest and retiring spirit among so many Englishmen that made this nation what it was. (Cheers.)'
⁷⁶
Warren's speech prompted a thoughtful response published in
The Times
on 26 November 1900, in which ‘Old Soldier' referred to what he called ‘the unpopularity of the Victoria Cross':

There are dozens, I might almost say hundreds, of officers and men now in the service quite as worthy of reward as those which under luckier circumstances have earned the V.C, and these very naturally look with disfavour on a decoration in the earning of which luck has to be combined with merit . . . the standard of valour required varies enormously, for whilst one general will recommend anybody and everybody, another will recommend no one.
⁷⁷

The Boer War established beyond all doubt the truth of ‘Old Soldier's' assertion. Without luck, all the courage in the world could not win the VC. The VC is at heart a roulette wheel. If you had the bad luck to be in a regiment or ship whose commanding officer – either from laziness or on principle – did not put names forward, or put them forward to the wrong person, then you could be a Hercules and still go unnoticed.

Before Lady Roberts sailed to Cape Town to join her husband in South Africa, Queen Victoria handed her a small parcel, saying: ‘Here
is something that I have tied up with my own hands, and that I beg you will not open until you get home.' The parcel contained the VC awarded to her dead son.
⁷⁸
Lord Roberts had glided into legend in Afghanistan and India, been lionized as ‘Bobs' by Kipling in an 1893 ballad, and, by the time he took command in South Africa at the advanced age of sixty-eight, was a national military hero; but his involvement with the VC was less than glorious.

On the evening of 30 March 1900, a British column of about 1,800 soldiers, commanded by Brigadier General Robert George Broadwood, bivouacked close to Sanna's Post, near Bloemfontein in South Africa, unaware that a Boer commando was close by. Next morning the British were shelled and, amid the chaos, formed up and tried to move off. The Boers, under the command of Christian de Wet, captured the British supply wagons. Broadwood ordered U and Q Batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery to follow the supply train and cover the retirement of the force. U Battery was ambushed and captured, but one of its officers managed to signal the impending disaster to Q Battery. There was pandemonium, with panicking artillerymen and soldiers trying to flee while others tried to regroup to fight. The survivors of Q Battery lost one gun and two ammunition wagons before establishing themselves in buildings at Sanna's Post, where they unlimbered the guns and tried to fire on the Boers at a range of some 1,000 yards. The gunners immediately came under intense accurate fire from the Boers who occupied well-concealed positions. Under the order of Major Edmund Phipps-Hornby, Q Battery withdrew to behind the buildings to avoid being picked off and left behind a further gun, taking four back by hand. The British that day lost seven guns and suffered 570 casualties. Astonishingly, Lord Roberts exercised his right as a commander in the field to confer a provisional VC on Major Phipps-Hornby, and instructed the battery to elect three members to receive the same.
⁷⁹
He also forwarded to the War Office three more recommendations
for VCs.
⁸⁰
Brave the troops may have been, but this was yet another humiliation and to give away four VCs, albeit provisionally, in such circumstances was unheard of. The words of the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of War at the time of the Crimean conflict – that ‘great care would be required to prevent abuse' – were but a faint echo. But for London to deny them so soon after Roberts had taken over command in South Africa would have undermined his authority; the most that could be done was to refuse the three further recommendations. The provisional ‘conferment in the field' clause was quietly dropped in the 1920 redrafting of the VC warrant.
⁸¹

Victoria ended her reign as she had begun it, a staunch and sentimental supporter of ‘her' soldiers. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Acting Private Secretary to Victoria at the time of the Second Boer War, recalled: ‘In 1899 the Queen had started an album for photographs of all the officers killed in the war . . . After a year, the Queen came to the conclusion that the book was too sad to look at.'
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In the photograph album was her favourite grandson, Prince Christian Victor – a gifted amateur cricketer who played a match at first-class level, and the first member of the royal family to attend school (Wellington College) rather than be tutored at home – who died in Pretoria of enteric fever. A few days before her death on 22 January 1901 Victoria received the final visitor from outside her immediate family circle. It was, appropriately enough, Field Marshal, now Earl, Frederick Roberts VC.

4

Big War

‘There's no good having decorations unless they are given the right way!'

BRIGADIER FRANK CROZIER
¹

‘Few countries muddle along without an honours system of some sort, for it is quite simply the cheapest method of rewarding and encouraging those the state holds in esteem or to whom it may even consider it owes its survival.'

MICHAEL DE-LA-NOY
²

At the start of the twentieth century old soldiers were still fighting the battles of the nineteenth century – at least, when it came to deciding who, and what, deserved the Victoria Cross. Pseudonymous correspondents – obviously serving or former officers – skirmished back and forth across the letters' page of
The Times
in 1902, clashing over whether or not the recent South African war had seen a subtle alteration of the standards required for gaining a VC. ‘Pretoria' was annoyed that senior officers, colonels and above, had apparently been excluded from the Cross:

In
The Times
History of the South African War it is stated that General French recommended Colonel Ian Hamilton for the Victoria Cross,
but . . . it was not considered wise to grant this decoration to so senior an officer for a purely personal act of bravery . . . If it has been decided that senior officers are not eligible for the decoration, the Victoria Cross warrant should certainly be at once amended.
³

Field Marshal Sir Charles Brownlow sternly reminded readers that the gallantry of senior officers was usually regarded as no more than their duty:

Nearly forty years ago . . . Lord Straithnairn, then Commander-in-Chief in India, decided that personal gallantry on several occasions during a hard-fought campaign, on the part of certain majors in command of regiments was no more than their duty, and should be recognized by other rewards than the V.C., for which they had been recommended in his published despatches by the general under whom they had served [Sir Neville Chamberlain];
⁴
they received instead a step of rank and the C.B., as more conducive to their future promotion and usefulness . . . In a profession, the members of which are all supposed to be brave, a badge of superior courage, in addition to the usual rewards of a successful Commander, is more or less an invidious distinction.
⁵

More jaded correspondents, such as ‘An Unamazed Veteran', voiced a widespread sense that chance had displaced gallantry:

The young officer, or, for the matter of that, the old officer, who has never seen service has an exceedingly exalted view of the V.C. and what should win it; but as he serves on campaign after campaign and sees who get the cross, how easily it is often obtained, and how unequal the standard, his estimate of it falls lower and lower till he joins with the general ante-room verdict that ‘luck,' not necessarily bravery, is the predominating factor . . . only conspicuous bravery or devotion to the country should be rewarded, irrespective of rank or wounds or any
other consideration. It is the deviation from this strict interpretation of the warrant that has, I assume, raised the present outcry.
⁶

Twelve years after this was written, the yearned-for ‘strict interpretation of the warrant' was in tatters, and luck – and politics – were exercising as much sway as ever over who gained a VC.

Few were luckier than the Canadian pilot Billy Bishop, who rose from complete obscurity to acclaimed hero during the First World War, thanks to social connections and his own aggressively tear-away self-promotion. When William ‘Billy' Avery Bishop was gazetted with the VC on 11 August 1917, the citation spoke of his ‘most conspicuous bravery, determination and skill'.
⁷
The skill thus acknowledged was for Bishop's so effectively handling his Nieuport 17 biplane, a plane that sometimes lost its wings in a steep dive and was slower and had less firepower than the Albatros D-III, the main German single-seater fighter in 1917; but many believe it could equally have been for Bishop's expertise at embellishment. For very few of Bishop's claimed forty-seven enemy aircraft kills with 60 Squadron in France were witnessed. This was unusual and definitely suspicious: ‘for a claim to be confirmed it was customary for the name of a witness, or witnesses, to be included in the combat report. Only three of [Bishop's] claims were indisputably corroborated in that fashion . . . as for the thirty claims made while flying alone, obviously there could be no corroboration.'
⁸

The specific action for which Bishop received his VC took place on 2 June 1917. At 3.57 a.m. that day Bishop took to the clouds alone, although he had asked others, including Willy Fry, his deputy flight commander, to join him in a planned raid on a German aerodrome.
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Bishop flying solo was not unusual; his squadron commander gave him a very free hand. On his return, Bishop claimed to have destroyed seven enemy planes on the ground, and to have shot down three others
that had managed to take off and pursue him. Controversy over the veracity of Bishop's claims for that day will persist; the scanty available evidence is contradictory.

Born to an upper-middle-class Canadian family, Bishop arrived in France as a junior officer with a cavalry regiment. Always a maverick loner, he soon tired of the grimness of trench life and sought out the greater independence – and glamour – offered by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). During his first combat tour of duty as an observer in two-seater biplanes, his aircraft crashed and Bishop was hospitalized in England, thus avoiding the grisly summer of 1916, the meat-grinding Somme offensive. While in hospital, Bishop was taken up by an influential London socialite, Lady Mary St Helier, who, like many upper-class women of the day, had discovered a new outlet for their
noblesse oblige
through visiting injured troops in hospital. Lady Mary's son would have been the same age as Bishop, had he not died of typhoid in India many years previously; she took the young Canadian airman under her wing. Her London salon, a honeypot to the eminent, was regularly attended by some of the most influential political and cultural figures of the day. Among their number was Winston Churchill, the Canadian-born newspaper magnate Max Aitken, and F. E. Smith, attorney-general in Lloyd George's administration. Not only did they regularly sip Lady Mary's champagne; they were all personal friends of the commanding officer of 60 Squadron, Major A. J. L. (Jack) Scott, who was persuaded to take Bishop as a pilot officer in March 1917. Bishop had a baptism of fire; the following month was a harrowing period for the RFC, and thirteen of 60 Squadron's original eighteen pilots, and seven replacements, were shot down during the Battle of Arras. Bishop, however, proved relentlessly aggressive, and scored twelve of the squadron's thirty-five confirmed April victories. In late April he was promoted to captain. Bishop became Scott's protégé, his determination to take on the enemy and unquestioned bravery
cementing a lasting friendship. Scott understood that medals had an extra-curricular function – that they were not simply for the brave but also had propaganda value. This view of gallantry decorations was shared by Major General Hugh Trenchard, the RFC commander, with whom Scott had a warm relationship. In turn, Trenchard was highly regarded by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who took command of the British Expeditionary Force in December 1915. These ‘friends at Court', together with the coalition government's need to publicly identify and reward Canadian RFC fliers, set the stage for Bishop to be granted the highest military decoration.
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After the death of the RFC's leading fighter pilot Albert Ball on 7 May 1917, Bishop became lauded as the RFC's unquestioned rival to the German air ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Revelling in his status, Bishop was given command of the newly formed 85 Squadron; more than 200 pilots immediately put themselves forward to join it. As CO of his own squadron, Bishop could confirm his own claims. He registered a remarkable twenty-five victories in twenty-three days between the beginning of April and 19 June 1918, when he was ordered to return to Britain – a living hero had greater propaganda and recruiting value than a dead ace. Bishop's final and, in later years, much disputed tally was seventy-two, including two balloons. In June 1918 Bishop published a racy account of his flying days. Exceptionally thin on facts but surfeited with derring-do, the book was ghost-written by the Office of Public Information under supervision of the War Office, with the intention of boosting public morale. The final chapter details Bishop's VC investiture by King George V:

Following some Generals and Colonels, who were being admitted to the Order of St. Michael and St. George [so much for the VC's precedence over all other decorations], it came my turn to march in . . . Imagine my consternation, when, at the first of those ten paces, one of
my boots began to squeak . . . approaching the King, he hooked three medals on my breast. These had been handed to him on a cushion. He congratulated me on winning them, and said it was the first time he had been able to give all three to any one person.
¹¹

A war-weary Britain – and Canada – got the charismatically glamorous, if perhaps morally ambiguous, hero it so desperately wanted, and probably deserved.

Bishop was a complex character who in later life seemingly spurned his First War braggadocio.
¹²
He owed his elevation to pilot officer status to a chance hospital encounter with a woman in perpetual mourning for her own son, but he made the best of that lucky break and pursued both glory and the enemy with complete dedication. He has been accused of being ‘an inveterate liar; and no one but Bishop ever told one to get himself a Victoria Cross!'
¹³
But the case against Bishop is circumstantial and unproven; First War pilots often fought in single combat, far from the eyes of reliable (or any other) witnesses, and cast-iron confirmation of victory was often impossible. There is a broader question about Bishop's VC: did his courage stem from the lack of, or the overcoming of, fear? In a 1982 National Film Board of Canada drama documentary,
The Kid Who Couldn't Miss
,
¹⁴
Harold (later Lord) Balfour, who served in 60 Squadron, commented: ‘Billy Bishop is one of those who I felt did not know fear. The definition of a brave man is someone who is frightened, and overcomes it. The definition of someone who does not fright is somewhat different.' Either way, the VC makes no distinction between those who were fear-less, and those who were fear-full, yet carried on.

It would be unwise and unfair, given the nerve it must have taken simply to get into a flimsy aircraft and seek out a skilful enemy equally intent on killing, to suggest that Bishop did not deserve his Cross. It is equally clear that Bishop was groomed for greatness, and that his
VC was not awarded for courage alone but served a wider political purpose, as did that bestowed on John (‘Jack') Travers Cornwell.

Cornwell enlisted in the Royal Navy in October 1915 and was fatally wounded at the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916), when aged sixteen. Cornwell was part of a deck gun-crew of HMS
Chester
, all of whom were killed or mortally wounded by shell splinters when the ship was bombarded by a squadron of German cruisers. When the battle was over,
Chester
's medical staff found Cornwell still at the gun-sight, apparently awaiting orders; he died of his wounds shortly after. Poor Cornwell was one of more than 6,700 Royal Navy deaths and one of four VCs awarded at Jutland, an indecisive engagement where both sides claimed victory. The other three names are largely forgotten,
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but Cornwell's youth – which might have been politically embarrassing, even though boys aged fifteen could join the navy (the minimum age for army enlistment was eighteen) – helped ensure him a lasting place in the national mythology of heroism. Letters to
The Times
called for his photograph – or, better still, a brass plaque with his story engraved on it – to be ‘placed in every school in the Empire'.
¹⁶
Cornwell was buried ‘with every honour, military and civil' at Manor Park Cemetery in London, ‘an extraordinarily impressive funeral both for its details and all that it implied', with a volley fired over the grave and the Last Post sounded.
¹⁷
King George V presented his mother, Alice Cornwell,
¹⁸
with the posthumous VC on 16 November 1916 at Buckingham Palace; the society painter Francis Owen Salisbury was commissioned by the Admiralty to paint ‘Boy Cornwell in the Battle of Jutland', using Jack's brother Ernest as a model, and subsequently built his career as a specialist in royal sitters on the back of the painting; the ‘Boy Cornwell Memorial Fund' was established; Robert Baden-Powell first awarded the Bronze Cross (the highest award for boy scouts, modelled on the VC) to Cornwell, and then created the ‘Cornwell Scout Badge'; streets and schools were named in Cornwell's honour.

Yet Cornwell's VC was a flagrant infringement of the terms of the VC warrant, which the somewhat embarrassing citation – he ‘remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders, until the end of the action, with the gun's crew dead and wounded all round him' – could do little to disguise.
¹⁹
If a wounded and no doubt traumatized child, either unable to leave his post or terrified of the consequences of doing so, deserved the VC, then who did not? Not all First War VCs were so obviously outside the prevailing rules; some, such as that of Alfred Oliver Pollard, one of Britain's most highly decorated First War soldiers, might be said to have over-fulfilled the VC warrant's stipulations.

Few First War VC winners committed to paper what it was that drove them to act as they did. Pollard was exceptional in this regard, writing a memoir of his wartime experiences in which his determination to kill as many Germans as possible is the central focus. Pollard had been an insurance clerk prior to joining up as a private in August 1914, and quickly became a specialist in trench raiding and bombing; after the war he became a prolific author of thrillers and crime novels. Pollard wrote that he felt more alive when bombing an enemy trench than at any other time. His account of the trenches of the Western Front –
Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a V.C
. – is a refreshing counterbalance to the view that First War soldiers were sunk in despair, universally despising the mud, misery and murderousness. Some soldiers, such as George Coppard, a machine-gunner, found, if not joy, then a sense of shared community: