CONCLUSION: THE NEW HERO IN ACTION, 1940–2006 203
the individual hero. The Queen and Prince Consort wanted a new link to
the Army to replace their perceived loss of influence within it. The award
represented cheap balm to mend fences between the Palmerston government
and Queen Victoria. All parties concerned had something to gain from the
institutionalization of the abstract ideal.
The award inaugurated by the 1856 warrant was quite Victorian in its
application. It was egalitarian – to a point. By statute and Lord Panmure’s
ruling, all personnel were to be considered equally, regardless of rank at the
time of the act. In practice the award was slanted toward the lower echelons
of the officer corps, particularly the rank equivalent to that of the Army
lieutenant. This was due in part to the nature of nineteenth-century warfare,
with many actions involving small units and lower ranking officers detailed
off in independent command situations. Heroism by senior officers was
increasingly deemed inappropriate. Sir Colin Campbell cursed a colonel who
neglected commanding his unit to capture an enemy standard. Ian Hamilton,
recommended and denied a second time as a lieutenant colonel, was told
his place was to command, not to gallop off in some stunt worthy of a
subaltern. The Victorian concept of heroism valued dash and impetuosity in
youth, but required sober reserve from age and experience.
The heroism deemed worthy of the Victoria Cross was fairly broad in
its nineteenth-century definition, and to a certain extent was concerned
more with style over substance. While ‘war-winning’ acts more often than
not gathered the lion’s share of awards in each decade, actions saving the
life of a comrade always garnered a respectable percentage, and in some
decades actually surpassed acts that took the war to the enemy. The military
establishment was willing to recognize the gallantry in retrieving a wounded
man. Paternalistic, romantic class relationships were further sanctified in the
awards given to loyal soldiers who rescued a living officer or risked their
lives to retrieve the body of a dead one.
The Victorian Victoria Cross was, for most of its incarnation, an award
for the living. On numerous occasions the War Office repeated that point,
denying all claims to posthumous Crosses. In instances of extreme though
fatal valour or an especially sentimental circumstance, such as Melvill and
Coghill, the War Office grudgingly gazetted the hero as ‘would have been
recommended to Her Majesty had he survived.’ Only as a result of the
Victorian sense of fair play did this posthumous prohibition change at the
very end of the Victorian/Edwardian era with the granting of the Roberts
posthumous VC. While there was some evidence of nepotism and favor-
itism – the Havelock provisional bestowal, the Roberts case – the War
Office and Horse Guards were meticulous in maintaining the integrity of
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