‘The Victoria Cross,’ gushed a mid-19th-century contributor to the Art Journal, ‘is thoroughly English in every particular. Given alike to the highest and the lowest in rank, but given always with a cautious and discriminating hand… the Victoria Cross is an epic poem’. Like all epic poems, the VC has its tragedies. For some that tragedy lay on the field of battle; for others, as Brian Izzard details in his often depressing new book, it lay in the life that followed.
The original Royal Warrant by which Victoria instituted her eponymous medal stipulated that it was to be given only for service ‘in the presence of the enemy’ for some ‘signal act of valour, or devotion to country’. Recipients were to receive a pension of £10 a year (worth £985 in today’s money, rather less than the tax-free £10,000 now offered) and were eligible to win it more than once (only three have won it twice, none more than twice). Most importantly, it was to be awarded without reference to rank, length of service, or wounds — and everyone, from civilians to buglers, drivers and Brigadier Generals, have since won this most distinguished gong.
Victoria’s Warrant also ordained that ‘if any person on whom such distinction shall be conferred, be convicted of treason, cowardice, felony or of any infamous crime … his name shall forthwith be erased from the registry’. This has been done only eight times, and not since 1908. In 1920, George V took the view that even if a VC were hanged for murder he should be allowed to wear his medal ‘on the scaffold’, and the position appears to have stuck.
One wonders whether the King’s views were cemented by the experience of George Ravenhill, to whom he had given the VC in 1901.
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