Bravery beyond belief: The awesome and inspiring stories behind the VC and George Cross
Interview in the Daily Mail on 06 November 2010.
Leading Seaman James Joseph Magennis
Lieutenant-Commander Ian Edward Fraser
Staff Sergeant Olaf Sean George Schmid
Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse
Warrant Officer Norman Cyril Jackson
Colonel Bertram Stuart Trevelyan Archer
Captain William George Foster
Captain Jenkin Robert Oswald Thompson
Interview By Robert Hardman
Try to imagine the scene. It’s impossible to do it justice, but just try.
Four of you are squeezed inside a midget submarine, a metal tube so cramped that no one can stand up, and you have just travelled 40 miles underwater dodging patrols and mines to blow up a 10,000-ton enemy battle cruiser anchored off Singapore.
Detection equals instant death, but you reach the target and your midget sub edges itself into a gap between the bottom of the ship and the seabed.
You dive out of a hatch and attach various explosives to the bottom of the ship, badly injuring your hands in the process.
Then you climb back into your sub and clear off sharpish.
Except you don’t. Because not all the explosives have stuck.
So you decide to climb out again to re-attach them, even though your hands are so raw you can hardly move them.
And then it gets worse. Much worse. The tide recedes and the entire bulk of the battlecruiser descends on top of your midget sub, pinning it to the seabed. You are stuck inside, knowing that the whole thing is about to explode into smithereens.
It helps to put a bad day at the office in perspective.
Finally, your equally heroic skipper manages to wriggle the sub free, but instead of getting the hell out of there, you still persist in climbing out again and properly attaching the explosives. Only then, finally, do you sneak away.
Shortly after this genuine incident took place in July 1945, the Japanese cruiser, Takao was, indeed, blown apart. Five months later that diver, Acting Leading Seaman James Magennis, and that commanding officer, Lieutenant Ian Fraser, were both at Buckingham Palace to receive the Victoria Cross from George VI.
This bronze cross, just 1.375 inches across and hanging from a crimson ribbon, remains the most illustrious decoration in Britain and the Commonwealth (some would say the world). But life thereafter would never be quite the same for either man.
Ian Fraser found the adulation back home so overwhelming that he had to refuse invitations to events in his honour. James Magennis, a working-class Catholic boy from Belfast, found his fame caused resentment on both sides of the religious divide. He and his family moved to Yorkshire, where he died in 1986.
Five months later, his Victoria Cross came up for sale at Sotheby’s in London. It might have been a sad postscript to an act of breathtaking bravery. Instead, there would be a much happier ending. After the auctioneer brought his hammer down at £29,000, the Magennis VC would become the catalyst for an extraordinary homage to the bravest of the brave. And next week it all goes on show to the world.
The mystery buyer at Sotheby’s that day was a 40-year-old entrepreneur called Michael Aschroft. In public, he would go on to become an international businessman, life peer, Tory Party deputy chairman and founder of Crimestoppers.
In private, that first acquisition would inspire him to build up the world’s largest collection of VCs (reportedly valued at £30 million), put them all in a charitable trust and now spend another £5 million to give them a permanent public home at the Imperial War Museum in London.
We meet there in a downstairs room, just beyond a Spitfire and a V2 rocket. The builders are still hammering away in the new Lord Ashcroft Gallery and even Lord Ashcroft is not allowed in. He’s not bothered.
Next week, the most exclusive club in the world gathers, as it does every two years. Nearly all 32 members of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association (aged from 24 to 96) will arrive in London from as far as Nepal and New Zealand.
Keep an eye out for this awesome little gang if you are in the capital next week.
On Tuesday, they will have their traditional thanksgiving service and tea with the Prince of Wales. On Wednesday, the Queen is having a party for them at the Palace.
And on Thursday, at Armistice Day’s sacred eleventh hour, they will be at the Cenotaph to lay a wreath. Then, to round it all off, they will head for the Imperial War Museum to see the Princess Royal open Ashcroft’s gallery.
It will be a very, very big moment for the 64-year-old peer. The proud son of a badly wounded D-Day veteran, he developed a boyhood fascination for military history and, in particular, the VC.
He vowed to buy one as soon as he had the means and the opportunity. And when that Magennis VC came up 24 years ago, he was in the wings at Sotheby’s
‘A few days later, the VC was delivered to my office,’ he recalls. ‘I just sat there rereading the citation with this little medal in my hand and a kind of frisson went through me. Even then, I had the feeling that this would be the start of something bigger.’
He was not stopping at one. By the time he had ‘a couple of dozen’, he had already started pondering how he would share them with the wider world.
‘I could never see any circumstances in which I would sell them,’ Lord Ashcroft says.
And even though the prices kept rising (a VC will now fetch at least £150,000), he kept on bidding. ‘I was anonymous until I was well through the 100 mark, but I just carried on.’
He does not enjoy the spotlight, having had quite enough of it during a controversial political career from which he has now withdrawn. It’s clear that he would much rather leave his collection to speak for itself.
He does not like to nominate a ‘favourite’ VC — ‘you shouldn’t differentiate between such acts of bravery’ — but reels off a list of particularly unusual citations. He talks of Capt Noel Chavasse, an Army doctor and one of only three men to win the VC twice.
In 1916, a year after winning the Military Cross, he followed his regiment into battle at the Somme and spent two days in no-man’s-land saving the injured under the nose of the enemy, even when wounded himself.
With one VC to his name, Chavasse was doing the same a year later near Ypres when he was hit in the skull. Refusing evacuation, he was still at his aid post two days later, when it was struck by a shell. The second VC was posthumous.
‘Just think of him, night after night, going into no-man’s-land to those wounded men,’ says Lord Ashcroft who bought the VC and bar (the bar denotes it has been won twice) from St Peter’s College, Oxford, last year. He won’t talk sums, but college sources put the figure at a world record £1.5 million.
Lord Ashcroft’s eyes light up as he recounts the story of Sergeant Norman Jackson who, in 1944, was flight engineer in a Lancaster bomber when it was attacked by a fighter over Germany and the starboard wing caught fire.
Though injured, Jackson volunteered to climb out of a top hatch at 200mph with a hand-held fire extinguisher wedged into his lifejacket.
On the way out, his parachute fell open and spilled back inside the aircraft. He pressed on undeterred. In the end, however, the extinguisher fell from his hands, he lost his grip and was swept through the flames and out into thin air followed by his tangled parachute, now on fire.
Miraculously, it still managed to slow his fall and he was captured with a broken ankle, one eye burned shut and numerous injuries before spending the rest of the war in captivity. He died in 1994.
‘That story just has this amazing visual effect,’ says Lord Ashcroft, who set an auction house record when he paid £200,000 for Jackson’s VC in 2004.
There are certain self-imposed Ashcroft rules. ‘I have never ambulance-chased a medal,’ he says firmly. ‘The decision to sell must have been made already. I’m never part of a persuasion process.’
Some vendors need the money. Sometimes, a family cannot decide who should be the custodian. And he has introduced some descendants to a long-lost family heirloom they have never seen before.
‘There have been some very emotional scenes.’ Some may find it a strange thing to spend so much effort and money acquiring the emblems of other people’s heroism.
But, for Lord Ashcroft, it has never been a mere question of ownership.
He is fascinated by the memorabilia which often comes with a medal — a logbook or a piece of kit. He has written a book about VCs and co-funded a television series, passing all the proceeds to the VC and GC Association (a benevolent fund for its members).
He has dispatched VC education packs to every school in the land. And when the medals of New Zealand’s double-VC winner, Charles Upham, were stolen in 2007, Lord Aschroft put up the £100,000 reward which secured their safe return to their New Zealand museum.
The Ashcroft collection now numbers 164 VCs — more than a tenth of the 1,356 awarded during the medal’s 154-year history — but he has just bought his first George Cross. Could this be the start of a new obsession? ‘If any more become available, I will be interested,’ he says with a wry smile.
The GC is the silver cross with a blue ribbon created by George VI in 1940 to honour those, like the bomb disposal experts, whose supreme gallantry did not meet the VC’s strict criteria about valour ‘in the presence of the enemy’. Awarded during war and peace to men and women, serving or civilian, the GC has been presented 161 times and ranks alongside the VC. More than half of all GCs awarded have been posthumous — an even higher percentage than the VC.
Although he owns just one GC — for now — Lord Ashcroft has just published a new book, George Cross Heroes. It tells the stories of many of the inexplicably selfless men and women who went far beyond the call of any duty, often making the ultimate sacrifice.
There is Stuart Archer GC, who worked upside down inside a blazing Swansea oil depot to defuse a booby-trapped bomb in 1940, a classic case of what Lord Ashcroft calls ‘cold courage’. Now aged 95, Lt-Col Archer will try to be at next week’s reunion.
There is Lt William Foster GC, a winner of the DCM and MC in the First World War but a member of the Home Guard in the Second. During a training exercise near Salisbury in 1942, a grenade failed to clear a parapet and fell back among 30 troops. Foster calmly dived on top of it and gave his life for his men.
Two of the most heartbreaking stories are those of Jenkin Thompson GC, an Army doctor, and Herbert Pugh GC, an RAF chaplain, who both found themselves on board sinking ships during the Second World War. Both refused to abandon ship, staying put with men who could not escape to comfort them on their journey to a watery grave.
This anthology of raw nerve comes right up to the present with the story of Staff Sergeant Olaf ‘Oz’ Schmid GC.
Described by his commanding officer as ‘simply the bravest and most courageous man I have ever met’, the bomb disposal wizard had saved countless lives in Afghanistan when he was finally killed by an improvised device last October.
His widow, Christina, has written a foreword to the book and will be at next week’s reunion and exhibition where his GC will be on show.
Some 240 astonishing stories just like this will be told and illustrated in the new gallery because it will not only display the Ashcroft collection but also the 48 VCs and 31 GCs already in the care of the Imperial War Museum. They will not be ranked in order but displayed in different sections — ‘Leadership’, ‘Aggression’, ‘Sacrifice’ and so on.
Free to all and open in perpetuity, it should be a mandatory day out for every pupil in the land. I can certainly think of some adults who could benefit from a visit, too.
As the Fire Brigades Union continues to threaten strike action, I wonder what William Mosedale GC would say. In 1940, the Birmingham fireman spent an entire night tunnelling his way in and out of collapsing, blazing buildings — including his own fire station — saving 12 lives.
‘Don’t for God’s sake write about me as a hero,’ he said many years later. ‘Damn it. I was in the rescue department, wasn’t I?’