Metal for Mettle
Across the decades since the first Victoria Cross was awarded, it has been stated officially that the awards have all been made of metal from Russian cannons captured during the 1854 – 1855 siege of Sebastopol. We examine the evidence for this assertion.
Ever since the Victoria Cross as an award for all ranks was implemented in 1856 it has been common knowledge that the medals were all manufactured from a captured Russian gun. But were they? If anyone should know, then surely it would be the sole manufacturer of the crosses: the prestigious jewellers, Messrs Hancocks of London. Indeed, the Hancocks website is very clear on the matter, stating unequivocally:
‘The bronze from which all Victoria Crosses are made is supplied by the Central Ordnance Depot in Donnington. This metal is cut from cannons captured from the Russians at Sebastopol during the Crimean War. When more crosses are required, Hancocks requests a supply of metal, and this is then delivered to them by COD Donnington.’
To all intents and purposes, this is the definitive answer from the very source of all Victoria Crosses that have thus far been made and issued. And until quite recently, nobody had seriously challenged that the crosses were made from anything other than the source material described.
Unlike most medals, the Victoria Cross is cast rather than struck and this means that molten metal is poured into a sand cast mould; usually, the medals are created four specimens in a batch, but 12 at a time. When the metal has cooled, the medals are removed from the sand moulds and a hand finishing process begins. Then, the suspender bar from which the cross is hung is finished and the complete medal is hand chased to the finest detail before a special bronze coating is applied overall. Finally, the date of the action for which the award was made is engraved in the central disc of the medal’s reverse and the recipient’s name and details are hand-engraved onto the reverse of the suspension bar before the ribbon is fitted.
The source of the molten metal, according to both the Ministry of Defence and Hancocks, is always the captured Russian gun material held in secure storage at Donnington. Specifically, that material comprises the cascabel of a gun which is the round protrusion at the back of a muzzle loaded cannon.
That this has always been the source of Victoria Cross metal was questioned in May 2020 by Dr Andrew Marriott of Newcastle University. A former lieutenant colonel in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, Marriott stated that he had found historical evidence that this cascabel may have been taken from a gun captured during the Second AngloChinese War (also known as the Second Opium War) in 1860. But this was three years after the first VCs were awarded.
Use of this cascabel, or others like it, apparently began early in the First World
War when a supply of the metal was given to Hancocks, but a 1942 newspaper report claimed this supply had run out, prompting the Donnington commandant to clarify, in 1943, that his depot still held 53 pounds of the material. He later sent some more of the metal to Hancocks. It has thus been suggested that this would indicate that Victoria Crosses were cast in bronze originating from an unknown source for at least one year during the Second World War.
Adding weight to this suggestion, metallurgist John Ashton analysed some 54 VCs almost 20 years ago that were then held by the Australian War Memorial. He concluded that the composition and casting method of the metal left no doubt the cannons were Chinese. He then made similar findings with VCs held in New Zealand in 2014.
Returning to Andrew Marriott’s work, though, he used X-ray fluorescence scans to examine the composition of 50 VCs awarded between 1856 and 2013, and along with previously unpublished data collected by the Royal Armouries in the 1980s and 90s, this examination revealed that partway through the First World War, and again during the Second World War, there were notable changes in composition compared with 19th century versions.
There seems no credible reason to question the science, and further to that research it was also found that some are even brass alloys and not bronze at all.
Nevertheless, does it really matter if it is a myth that all VCs are cast from the same metal from a gun captured at Sevastapol? Andrew Marriott:
“While it’s unlikely that even the earliest medals came from the ordnance captured at Sebastopol, it is clear that most of the VCs awarded since the First World War have plausibly been sourced from the cascabels of captured guns—an important and symbolic fact for those who have received the honour in recognition of their bravery.”
After all, and even if we cannot be sure what a Victoria Cross is made of, then at least we know what a Victoria Cross recipient is made of.