126 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
of the secondary batteries of the High Seas Fleet.Nestorwas subsequently
sunk.^66
Like some of the nineteenth-century citations, it seemed not a matter of
whether or not Bingham actually accomplished anything, but rather that he
did so with style.^67 Some naval citations did not even require that. Petty
Officer Ernest Herbert Pitcher, of Q-Ship^68 HMSDunravenwas awarded a VC
by ballot, apparently for getting blown up:
He and the rest of the crew waited while the battle went on overhead
and all around them. When the magazine below them caught fire they
took up cartridges and held them on their knees to prevent the heat of
the deck igniting them and when the magazine finally blew up they were
all blown into the air.^69
Victorian sentimentality survived at sea:
On 31 May 1916, at the Battle of Jutland, Boy First Class [John Travers]
Cornwell, of HMSChester, was mortally wounded early in the battle, but
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 around
him.^70
The rank of ‘Boy First Class’ is a bit misleading, as Cornwell was 16 years
old at the time. And while the phrase ‘quietly awaiting orders’ has a sort
of noble tragedy to it, he would have been more use had he aided the
wounded gunners around him.
The Victorian ideal also survived for a time in the sideshows of the
colonial campaigns, but for a different reason. Here the campaigns were
of a much smaller scale than those on the Western Front, and owing to
the nature of the terrain and the opponents faced, were conducted in a
more nineteenth-century fashion. Even here, however, the Great War altered
the style of frontier heroism as the fighting continued on into its second
and third years. The first ‘sideshow’ Cross earned went to Lieutenant John
Paul Butler of the King’s Royal Rifles, attached at the time to the Pioneer
Company of the Gold Coast Regiment of the West Africa Field Force:
On 17 November 1914 in the Cameroons, West Africa, Lieutenant Butler,
with a party of 13 men went into the thick bush and attacked a force
of about 100 of the enemy, including several Europeans, defeated them
lily
(lily)
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