V.C.'S QUEERLY WON.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 87, 24 September 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

V.C.'S QUEERLY WON.

GIVEN FOR RAISING THE WHITE FLAG AND FOR SKILL IN FISTICUFFS.

Twice (luring the present War lias the Victoria Croes been won in a way that could by no possibility have been foreseen when the decoration was firet instituted.

For Queen Victoria, of course, never saw an aeroplane or an airship, nor ever dreamt of the possibility of »»a aerial duel between the two types of aircraft such as gainesd )for the late Flight Sub-Lieutenant Warenford the coveted bit of bronze. Neither could she, nor any of her advisers probably, have imagined the episode in the Dardanelles, when Lieutenant Holbrook dived his submarine under five rows of Turkish mines in order to torpedo the battleship Messudiyeh, thereby winning the first naval V.C. of the War.

WON BY A MAGISTRATE. Xor was Wilson the only Britisft of licer who earned the V.C. through skill in fisticuffs. At Jeerum, in India, dur. ing the Mutiny, the late General James Blair knocked down several armed mntineers in almost precisely similar circumstances, his sword having been broken off early in the scrimmage; while at Inkermann Captain Hugh Rowlands saved his commanding officer, Colonel Hay, by bowling over with n straight left-hander a gigantic Russian who was running up to bnjoaei liim as ho lay wounded on the ground. Both these officers received the V.C. in due course. | Of the five civilian recipients of the Victoria Cross, two gained it in exceptonal circumstances. One of them. '■ Lucknow" Kavanagh, as he was af-. terwards called, was given his for penetrating the lines of the mutineers dis-, guised as a native at a time when! Lucknow was closely invested and besieged. Another, Fraser McDonnell, an Indian magistrate, who practised carpentry as a hobby in his spare time, I was similarly decorated because he } rigged a new rudder to a disabled boat while under fire. j Dr. Douglas, and four young soldiers of the 24th Regiment, named Bell, Cooper, Griffiths, and Murphy, won their Crosses, five in all, by what was practically a plucky exhibition of amateur lifeboat saving, they having put out in their boat to the crew ot the sailing ship Assam Valley, cast away some days before on the wild and savage island of Little Andaman, in the Bay of Bengal. This constitutes the biggest batch of Crosses won at one time, with the single exception of Rorke's Drift, for which eleven were awarded. A V.C. has been gained by raising the white flag. But it was raised »y * Medical Staff Corps man as a sign that he had wounded under his care. The hero of the exploit was Corporal Farmer, who at Majuba Hill waved a white handkerchief as a signal to the Boer'? to cease firing, and when hand and "flag' 1 were shot away raised the latter aloft again with his other sound liana, until that, too, was shattered by a bullet.