The Victoria Cross (VC) was introduced in Great Britain on 29 January 1856 by Queen Victoria to reward acts of valour during the Crimean War.[1] For the Indian Mutiny (also known as India's First War of Independence, Revolt of 1857, or the Sepoy Mutiny) the VC was awarded to 182members of the British Armed Forces, the Honourable East Indies Company (HEIC) and civilians under its command. The VC is the highest British honour and is awarded for valour "in the face of the enemy". Created in 1856 for the British Army and Royal Navy, eligibility was extended in 1857 to members of the HEIC and in 1858 to non-military personnel bearing arms as volunteers.[2]
Queen Victoria created the tradition of the British monarch presenting the VC to the recipient, personally presenting 74 of the 111 awards for the Crimean War. Many VCs for the Indian Mutiny were sent to India for presentation and while there is documentation for 42 presentations, the information on 51 presentations which were likely presented in India is vague and it not known if the medal was personally presented or received by post. There were 18 Indian Mutiny VCs sent to next of kin where the award was posthumous, or the recipient died before presentation. The Queen personally presented 63 Indian Mutiny awards after the recipients returned to the UK.[3]
The Indian Mutiny began as a mutiny of sepoys of British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut. It soon erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, northern Madhya Pradesh, and the Delhi region.[4] The rebellion posed a considerable threat to Company power in that region,[5] and it was contained only with the fall of Gwalior on 20 June 1858.[4] The rebellion proved to be an important watershed in Indian history; it led to the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858, and forced the British to reorganise the army, the financial system, and the administration in India.[6] India was thereafter governed directly from London—by the British government India Office and a cabinet level Secretary of State for India—in the new British Raj, a system of governance that lasted until 1947.
Indian troops were not originally eligible for the VC, because since 1837 they had been eligible for the Indian Order of Merit—the oldest British gallantry award for general issue. When the VC was created, Indian troops were still controlled by the Honourable East India Company, and did not come under Crown control until 1860. European officers and men serving with the Honourable East India Company were not eligible for the Indian Order of Merit; the VC was extended to cover them in October 1857. The first citations of the VC varied in the details of each action; some specify one date, some date ranges, some the name of the battle and others have both sets of information. The Indian Mutiny holds the record for the most VCs won in a single day; 24 on 16 November 1857, of which 23 were at the Second Relief of Lucknow and one was for an action south of Delhi.[7]
The original royal warrant did not address the question of posthumous awards, and a policy to avoid posthumous awards was adopted. Between the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the beginning of the Second Boer War, the names of nine officers and men were published in the London Gazette with a memorandum stating they would have been awarded the Victoria Cross had they survived. A further three notices were published in the London Gazette in September 1900 and April 1901 for the Second Boer War. On 8 August 1902, as an exception to policy for the Second Boer War, a notice was published stating the Victoria Crosses were to be sent to next of kin of the three mentioned in the notices in 1900 and 1901. In the same notice the first official posthumous awards were announced. Five years later in 1907, the posthumous policy was reversed for earlier wars, and medals were sent to the next of kin of the six of nine officers and men whose names were mentioned in notices in the Gazette dating back to the Indian Mutiny. Prior to the reversal of policy It had been discovered that the crosses of three of the five Indian Mutiny memoranda names had been sent to next of kin shortly after the memoranda was gazetted. The Victoria Cross warrant was explicitly amended to allow posthumous awards in 1920, but one quarter of all awards for World War I were posthumous..[8][9]
↑ The National Archives, Victoria Cross Register Vol 1, pages 58-60 and 146-150; M J Crook, The Evolution of the Victoria Cross, 1975, ISBN 0 85936 041 5, Chapters 11 and 12.
↑ Victoria Cross presentations and locations by Dennis Pillinger and Anthony Staunton, published in 2000, ISBN 0 646 39741 9
1 2 Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar; 2004; pp.169–172 Bose, Jalal; 2003; pp.88–103; Quote: "The 1857 rebellion was by and large confined to northern Indian Gangetic Plain and central India."
↑ Bayly, C.A.; 1990; p.170; Quote: "What distinguished the events of 1857 was their scale and the fact that for a short time they posed a military threat to British dominance in the Ganges Plain."
↑ The 'siege' mentioned in the citation is not identified and is often wrongly assumed to be Lucknow. He served at Delhi where he was badly wounded in September 1857.
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