Victoria's Cross (4 page)

If risk of death is a requirement of gaining a VC on contemporary battlefields, deep pockets are necessary to buy one off the battlefield. While it is admirable that philanthropists donate VCs to national museums, it is disquieting that the most highly prized military honour, awarded to someone who has performed a noble self-sacrifice, has become the subject of extreme self-interest. The 1856 VC statutes were silent on ownership but many today believe that such a national treasure needs to be owned by the nation of the person who gained it. The person awarded the Cross, or their surviving family, should be designated the holder of the VC until such time as they decide to place it either in the museum of the unit to which it belongs or some other place of safety, accessible to public viewing. The current situation, with second-hand VCs sold to the highest bidder, is antipathetic to the spirit of the VC.

And the price keeps going up. In 1955 a set of medals belonging to Edmund Barron Hartley, including the VC he gained for rescuing injured men in Basutoland on 5 June 1879, was sold at Sotheby's for what was then a record price, £300, and is now on display at the Army Medical Services Museum in Mytchett, Surrey. In January 1969 a fresh record of £1,700 was achieved, for the medal set of William Rennie, who fought at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny; his VC is now at the Cameronians Regimental Museum at Hamilton, in Lanarkshire. By the first decade of the twenty-first century such prices seemed paltry. In April 2004 the VC awarded in 1944 to Sergeant Norman Jackson of the RAF Volunteer Reserve was sold at auction for £235,250 to Lord Ashcroft, a keen enthusiast for everything related to the VC.
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Jackson gained his VC for crawling onto the wing of his Lancaster bomber to extinguish a fire in one of its engines. He was thrown off the wing and dragged behind the aircraft, clinging to his burning parachute.

The price history of the VC awarded to Leading Seaman James
Magennis, a naval diver, illustrates the inflation. Magennis gained his VC for attaching limpet mines to the hull of the Japanese cruiser
Takao
on 31 July 1945. He was Northern Ireland's only VC winner in the Second World War, and when he returned to Belfast its citizens raised for him more than £3,000 in public donations. By 1952 Magennis was struggling financially and sold his VC for £75. Lord Ashcroft bought his first VC, that of Magennis, at auction in 1986 for £29,000, plus fees. Ashcroft's VC collection – more than 160 at the last count – is now displayed at the Lord Ashcroft Gallery in the Imperial War Museum in London. As the gallery's website states, the VC was ‘deliberately intended to have little actual value . . . Its value lies in what it stands for and what people do to earn it.' In
Victoria Cross Heroes
, his book about the VC, Lord Ashcroft wrote: ‘The trustees of the medals know that I wish to see the collection preserved long after my death, and I am glad that the trust's rules prevent it from selling any of the medals.'
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Today the question on everyone's mind (but which few dare ask, like the unspoken rule of the BBC's
Antiques Roadshow
) is how much a particular VC might be worth.

Some inheritors of VCs resist the temptation to cash in on the bravery of their ancestor, instead donating the medal to the relevant regimental museum; but the high auction prices seduce others. When a replacement VC was sought in 1978 by the surviving family of Private Thomas Byrne of the 21st Lancers, who won his original for the last great cavalry charge, at Omdurman on 2 September 1898, the approval of Queen Elizabeth II had first to be obtained.
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The duplicate was soon after put up for sale and went at auction for £700. The Queen apparently took a decidedly dim view. Sir Angus Ogilvy, husband of Princess Alexandra of Kent, first cousin to the Queen, reported the Queen as saying: ‘If this is what people are going to do, I will never grant another replacement Victoria Cross.'
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In the US it is a federal offence to sell or trade a Medal of Honor, but venality is enterprising.
Selling the box containing the Medal of Honor or the certificate that accompanies it is not illegal – and the medal itself can then be passed on as a ‘gift'.
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Because of its prestige, the VC has also been, on occasion, a natural peg for commerce. In a letter to
The Times
in 1895, a reader asked if anyone else had ‘ever met with a case in which this coveted and most honourable distinction has been used for purposes of trade or business?'
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The letter reported that a pub, the Durweston Arms, displayed ‘in large letters' the name of the publican, F. Hitch, VC, in its window. The illiterate Hitch won his VC, one of eleven granted on 22 January 1879, for the defence of Rorke's Drift against massed Zulu warriors.
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As with other VC winners from humble backgrounds, Hitch was sometimes desperately short of money, and may have sold his VC to raise funds. It is known that he applied for and received a duplicate, now in the possession of the Regimental Museum of the Royal Welsh; the whereabouts of Hitch's original VC is a mystery.

More recently, officials have sought to preserve the dignity of the VC by unsuccessfully trying to prevent its commercial use. On 28 February 1968, William Brown complained to the MP Edward Taylor about the use of the VC design in the letterhead of a medal dealer, J. B. Hayward, of Piccadilly, London: ‘I think that it is sacrilege that any commercial enterprise should use the emblem of this high honour on a correspondence note paper . . . [Is] there any right or authority for a commercial company using such an honour on their letter-head?' Whitehall deliberated for months, with the Treasury solicitor commenting on 29 March 1968 that

The use by Haywards of the picture of a VC does not in our opinion contravene Section 197 of the Army Act 1955 and we do not know of any regulation or law which would prevent a firm using a picture of
a decoration or medal on their notepaper . . . There is no copyright or other property in the design of the Victoria Cross and a person commits no offence merely by using the design, so that there are no means by which the dealer can be prevented from continuing the use of it.

Squadron Leader K. J. Appelboom – one of many officials asked to comment in the following months – wrote on 17 May: ‘Brigadier Sir John Smyth, President of the V.C. Association . . . took the view that “the less said, the better”, though I do not think we should quote him.' In the National Archives' file there is a handwritten note from a Treasury official: ‘The Treasury do come across this kind of thing from time to time and they usually find that a fairly “stuffy” letter does the trick.'
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Stuffy letters are all that can be done to prevent anyone from using the VC design to advertise anything from fish and chips to microchips. Untidiness is a besetting sin of Britain's arrangements for military gallantry awards: while private commercial use of the VC for any purpose appears to be perfectly legal and may only elicit a ‘stuffy letter' from Whitehall, perversely there is a strict legal ban against any commercial use of the George Cross without prior approval of the-prime minister.
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When the VC's statutes were last revised in 1961, the standard of courage required for eligibility was stated as ‘only . . . for the most 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'. The question of the scale of distribution was, regrettably, left aside. Outside military circles the assumption is that operational gallantry awards, including the VC, are made purely on merit. This is incorrect. A quota system for gallantry awards, covering all ranks in a particular operation, has been applied to operational decorations for many years. It is not only that some potential VC winners fall by
the wayside by mistake; it is that many potential VC-winning acts are, thanks to the quota system, likely to be ruled out before they are even considered.

Questions of ownership, distribution, eligibility – these topics are rarely aired, but are important given the inexorable shrinking of the pool of surviving VC holders. An opportunity for a sensible public debate about the VC was missed in 1993, when Prime Minister John Major announced a sweeping reform of the honours system. In the House of Commons on 4 March that year Major announced:

Acts of courage, lives of sacrifice, inventiveness, generosity and commitment to others are formally recognized and acknowledged . . . To retain its valued role in our national life, the honours system must, from time to time, be reviewed and renewed.
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The prime minister's inspired decision was to try to fully democratize the honours system, distributing honours purely on merit and not by quota. One repercussion of Major's reformist drive was that the distinction between officers and other ranks in military operational gallantry awards was largely eliminated. Prior to 1993 there had been a long-standing tradition that ‘officers get crosses while other ranks get medals'. This ‘class' distinction was partially eradicated by Major's reforms. The Military Medal was abolished and the Military Cross (MC), hitherto for commissioned officers only, was extended to all ranks.
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The Conspicuous Gallantry Cross (CGC) was, peculiarly, created and inserted immediately after the VC and before the MC in terms of ranking.
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It was unfortunate that senior ranks of Britain's armed forces, perpetually anxious to preserve hierarchies, resisted Major's reformist impulse. The Distinguished Service Order (DSO) survived as an officers-only decoration, no longer granted for bravery but henceforth for ‘leadership'. But perhaps the greatest failure of the 1993 review was the continuation of the quota system of operational
gallantry awards, despite Major's insistence that quotas should no longer exist for civil awards.

Pressure to end the quota system for gallantry awards is longstanding, as this view from 1969 by Major R. Clark shows:

The rationing of operational awards is a bad policy and should cease. Awards should be given to cover deserving acts of gallantry, regardless of numbers. To help eradicate past inadequacies, an Awards Board should be established to investigate any recommendations which were lost or not approved due to their exceeding the ration. A similar board has been established in the USA where today awards are being made for deserving acts in World War I which had been missed for various reasons.
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Removing quotas and rewarding all courageous acts, perhaps graded according to degrees of bravery, would certainly mean many more medals given out; but this need not entail the kind of cheapening seen with the Iron Cross or the Croix de Guerre. Unfortunately, the British armed forces continue to support quotas for operational decorations, the end result being that, as John Wilkinson, MP for Ruislip-Northwood, baldly stated during the same Commons debate: ‘Anyone with military experience knows that the heroism of the bravest and the best usually goes unrecognized.' Switching from a quota to a merit system for operational military decorations might ruffle feathers but would be eminently sensible for all such awards, and particularly for the VC. Senior officers want to preserve a quota system for operational decorations as they regard this as the only certain defence against a slide towards ever-cheapening of prestigious awards, which they privately believe has been the case with civilian honours. But it is questionable policy to try to preserve the spiritual value of the VC by raising the VC standard such that the bodily sacrifice of the VC candidate is necessary. It ought to be a matter of national regret that Britain's foremost
battle honour has mutated into an emotively supercharged symbol, something never intended by Victoria and Albert.

Courage, like love, is incorrigibly subjective. Debate over both all too easily falls into circularity – ‘we know it when we see it'. Yet just as we yearn to formalize definitions of love – to demonstrate that it has an objective reality, through some form of externalized institution, such as marriage – so we long to objectively recognize courage, most obviously through the ceremonial process of giving a medal. If only it were so simple.

We lack a clear, universally agreed objective definition of courage; this is a bedevilling problem when it comes to awarding military honours. The higher up the scale we go, with the VC at the very top, the more intractable it becomes. The VC plucks out an individual who has done something remarkable. But the intrinsic subjectivity associated with making a VC award inevitably opens up space for accusations of inconsistency and anomaly; the history of the VC is littered with both. As there are no VC ‘grades', all VC winners are considered equal, even though they are not. There is an understandable yearning to discern some quality, some human capacity that all VC holders have in common; the easiest, if laziest, course of action is to label them all ‘heroic'. This circular definition really tells us nothing. Tommy Atkins won a VC and therefore is a hero. What is a hero? Someone like Tommy Atkins, who won the VC. The VC does not simply rank men morally, it also ranks them socially and politically. As William I. Miller, who has written extensively on courage, writes, the courageous

are not only objects of admiration and awe; they are also objects of gratitude . . . Prizes, praises, and medals breed envy among those eligible and not-so-eligible who are passed over . . . Disgruntlement, anger, distrust, and cynicism over the award of medals and honors is a commonplace of military memoirs.
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Indeed it is. Frank Richards wryly concluded his 1933 First War memoir,
Old Soldiers Never Die
, by observing how time flattens the heights separating the brave from the rest, until all dwell in a valley of ordinariness:

It is Armistice day today and the ex-Service men are on parade wearing their War medals. The men who served at the Bases and a hundred miles behind the front line are wearing their medals more proudly than the men who served in the firing line. There is no distinction between the War medals.
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