Vanishing Bravery

The Imperial War Museum in London recently announced its decision to close the Lord Ashcroft Gallery permanently, thereby removing from public display the largest collection of Victoria Crosses in the world.

First awarded in 1856 by Queen Victoria, the Victoria Cross is the highest recognition of bravery in the British Honours system. It commends members of the British Armed Forces and other Commonwealth nations who have shown outstanding courage in the face of the enemy, throwing themselves in harm’s way in order to help others. The emphasis is on self-sacrifice and many VCs are posthumous for this reason. 1,358 have been bestowed and anyone in the military is eligible, irrespective of race, creed, sex, or rank. The Ashcroft collection also includes St George Crosses. The GC is the highest civilian decoration for bravery in peacetime or “in war but away from the intensity of battle”.

The philanthropist, businessman, author, and Former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Lord Ashcroft loaned his collection of some 230 VCs and GCs in 2010. The collection, meticulously gathered since 1986 out of “a passion for bravery” and detailed on his website, Lord Ashcroft Medals, is the most impressive of its kind and spans 1857 to 2014. Not only did Lord Ashcroft loan the medals for fifteen years with a view to extend, he paid more than £5 million to create a gallery to house them alongside other memorabilia, as well as VCs and GCs either owned by or loaned to the IWM.

The IWM failed to inform Lord Ashcroft of the decision to axe the gallery, instead releasing a statement to the public. It outlines the intention to prioritize “less well represented” conflicts which occurred within “living memory”.

Our displays exploring the past 80 years of post-Second World War conflict, including the Cold War, Falklands War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are less well represented. Our aim is to address this by creating new gallery spaces on upper floors at IWM London, which will allow us to share more stories of conflicts that are within many of our visitors’ living memory. 

To prepare for the development of these new spaces, The Lord Ashcroft Gallery at IWM London will close permanently from 1 June.

The logic of this is questionable. It presumes that the lives of those who died within “living memory” somehow matter more than the lives of those who died before. If anything, shouldn’t we make a greater effort to commemorate the individuals who laid down their lives before our time, instead of letting them drift out of public consciousness to become a statistic?

The IWM does already share stories from many conflicts over “the past 80 years”. Further to the WWI, WWII and Holocaust galleries, “Peace and Security: 1945-2014” brings to life global warfare from the Cold War to 9/11, the Falklands to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Museum also includes multiple “Witnesses to War” sections which put the past in dialogue with the present. On the first floor alone, one can see a Supermarine Spitfire alongside the car destroyed in the 2007 Mutanabbi Street suicide bombing in Baghdad. The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries take a similar approach, exploring how war is represented in visual culture across the ages. Special Exhibitions plumb the depths of conflict – the current exhibition is dedicated to “War and the Mind”, examining the psychology of war from WWI to the present day.

Moreover, the VCs and GCs themselves are not time-specific. They span 1856 to today, so in any case some would certainly fall within the remit of “living memory”. The wars in Afghanistan, The Falklands, and Iraq are all represented. Objects presented alongside the medals include the backpack worn by Lance Corporal Matt Croucher, who threw himself onto a Taliban tripwire grenade in order to save his comrades in Afghanistan in 2008.

The gallery also celebrates the heroic actions of Johnson Beharry in Iraq in May 2004.

The “Extraordinary Heroes” display transcends the context of war to encompass courage more broadly. The youngest recipient in Ashcroft’s collection is Doreen Ashburnham-Ruffner, who saved her friend from a cougar attack in 1916 by putting her arm in its mouth. She was eleven years old. The most recent medal in the Ashcroft collection was awarded to Samuel John Shephard of the Royal Marines in 2014. Lieutenant Shephard received a GC for disregarding his own life and risking the unknown in order to rescue a friend on a diving trip. As a collection, the Ashcroft collection honors bravery right up to the present day.

Understandably, Lord Ashcroft expressed his dismay on X:

“Sad for me. I’ve got this [statement] from the Imperial War Museums closing the Lord Ashcroft Gallery displaying around 200 Victoria Crosses representing the finest deeds of servicemen in UK’s history. Sadly into storage for the time being and my £5m cost to open lost. Please visit before closing…”

He went into more detail in the Telegraph, expressing concern that “the museum’s decision may leave these tangible monuments to past valour gathering dust in a storeroom”. Acts of heroism are being relegated and the collection is at risk of being dispersed.

Money was spent on curating and housing these medals, and, according to his article, Ashcroft was not only planning to extend the loan indefinitely, but to donate: “I had already made arrangements to leave the collection to the IWM when it was time for me to meet my maker.” Without his loan and intended donation, the nation loses a culturally resonant and extremely valuable asset. Surely these items belong in the UK’s most prestigious military museum. They should be proud to have them.

The decision appears to have been made relatively recently, given that the Museum felt perfectly happy to take further items on loan from Ashcroft under two years ago. This was recorded in the Board of Trustees Minutes of 5 December 2023 under 12.1 (Collections Review): “Trustees noted an additional 40 objects borrowed from the Lord Ashcroft Collection for the Lord Ashcroft Gallery.” What happened between then and now? Does this have anything to do with the change of political leadership, one wonders? Labour won the election on 4 July 2024. According to the Telegraph, the IWM took the decision at the end of July 2024.

Gavin Mortimer of the Spectator sees this as another move towards the “wokeification” of the IWM, focusing on their proposed intention to “embed diversity”. This comes at the cost of honoring exceptional acts of valor. He points out that visitors will instead be able to attend two new exhibitions. “Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict” explores “the contexts in which sexual violence occurs in conflict, exploring how propaganda shapes perceptions of gender and power to shine a light on this often-silenced issue”. The upcoming winter exhibition, “Emergency Exits: The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus”, focuses on Britain’s detention camps and colonization.

Last year the IWM spent £100,000 in order to make its exhibitions more “diverse”. It consulted equality and inclusion “experts” with a view to giving the museum a more global perspective on the impact of war. This came off the back of its Access and Inclusion Strategy, which aims to “reflect the diversity of our local communities and the nation as a whole”. It sets out its overarching vision: “IWM’s vision is to help people, as global citizens, make sense of an increasingly unpredictable world.”

If the closure of the Gallery is an attempt to diversify, however, the Museum is shooting itself in the foot. The recipients of the medals were from all castes and creeds, uniting in a common cause. Surely this honors diversity? Established in 1917, the IWM is currently governed by the Imperial War Museum Act 1955, which stipulates that seven members of Commonwealth nations should be trustees. The Commonwealth Governments of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, and Sri Lanka are all represented by their High Commissioners in an ex officio capacity. Many of these countries are represented in Lord Ashcroft’s collection of VCs.

There is something deeply ironic about this vanishing of diversity. Time and again, we are told that this is what we need: the integration of all colours, creeds, and backgrounds in a national vision. War achieved that to a degree, through a defense of our land and common values. Recognition of bravery and sacrifice transcends “difference”.

Take Captain Rambahadur Limbu, the last Gurkha recipient of the Victoria Cross, who died in 2023. The funeral was held at British Gurkhas Nepal HQ in Kathmandu. Captain Rambahadur received the award in 1966 for showing exceptional bravery during the Borneo confrontation in 1965. With no regard for his own safety, he ran through heavy enemy fire in order to carry back two of his wounded friends. The Gurkha Museum has a more detailed account of Rambahadur’s actions. After saving his friends, Rambahadur proceeded to rejoin the latter stages of the assault. Notably, the biography describes his experience upon his return to Nepal in 1967:

“[He] suffered another setback when a large portion of his belongings, including his medals, were stolen during an overnight train journey. He later received replacement issues for all those lost including the VC, but to date the original has never been found.”

His medals were stolen. This was painful because they meant something; they represented his strength of spirit and honored his bravery. The VCs in Lord Ashford’s collection, now removed from display, would have meant a great deal to their recipients. They also act as memorials to those who died. One can understand why, in some cases, museums might feel a moral obligation to return objects to their originating cultures or nations. But this is not restitution. It is the extinction of memory.

The Gurkha Museum has numerous other accounts of Victoria Cross recipients in its gallery, spanning different nationalities attached to the Gurkha Rifles. These include Bhanbhagta Gurung, Lachhiman Gurung, Ganju Lama, Agansing Rai, Netrabahadur Thapa, Michael Allmand, Tulbahadur Pun, and George Wheeler. It is humbling to read their stories.

Likewise, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, a global organization which cares for war graves at 23,000 locations in more than 150 countries and territories, commemorates about 1.7 million individuals. It has an online resource for sharing the memories of the Commonwealth’s war dead: For Evermore: Stories of the Fallen. Narrowing down the search for “Victoria Cross holders” yields 233 stories. Narrowing the search further by way of country shows the range of those awarded VCs: United Kingdom (131), Canada (32), Australia (31), India (21), New Zealand (12), Non-Commonwealth countries (4), South Africa (3). This list is not exhaustive, but it speaks to the range of countries involved in conflict and honored by VCs. Many of the memorial gardens are tended by the local people who owe their existence to the fallen beneath their feet.

Not only does the Victoria Cross include multiple countries, it transcends rank, class, and sex. By this marker it could be seen as extraordinarily “diverse”. Lord Ashcroft’s website dedicated to his medal collection sets this out:

“The decoration can be awarded to a person of any rank in any service and also to civilians under military command […] The origins of the VC lay in the Crimean War: the notion of giving a bravery award to low-ranking soldiers and sailors first came under serious consideration in 1854. Until that point, neither the government nor its military leaders had felt the need to reward ‘ordinary’ men for their courage […]

Until the Crimean War, officers – usually majors and above – were often given the junior grade of the Order of the Bath for acts of bravery. However, there was no such equivalent medal for junior officers or non-commissioned officers (NCOs), let alone ordinary soldiers, or sailors. In Britain, though, there was a growing feeling that a new award was needed to recognise examples of gallantry […]”

According to the IWM, the plan is for the VC and GC medals from their own collection “to continue to be displayed across our UK branches, integrated within galleries that tell the full story of the conflicts in which these acts of bravery occurred”. But the IWM’s collection is much smaller than Ashcroft’s. The promise that it will “continue to be displayed” isn’t much of a consolation when the much more substantial collection has no home. It is also a travesty to break up a collection. Not only is the Museum dividing its own medals from Ashcroft’s, it is disbanding them further by spreading them “across our UK branches”. No longer does it bring together a community based on bravery for public comparison, study, and contemplation. To fracture this community is a terrible pity.

What does Rambahadur have in common with Captain Noel Chavasse? In 1965 in Borneo, Rambahadur threw himself in harm’s way to help his wounded friends. He was prepared to die for them and received a VC for the beauty of his actions. Back in 1916 in Guillemont, France, Chavasse tended the wounded under sustained enemy fire and received his first VC as a result. In 1917 he received a bad head wound early on in the Battle of Passchendaele, but he refused to leave and tended to other soldiers despite being injured himself. He received his second VC posthumously, having been hit by a blast the next month. He was one of three people to receive a VC more than once. He is represented in Ashcroft’s collection. As Lord Ashcroft wrote in 2009, “this is the ultimate VC and Bar. It has a spectacular story to it in terms of sustained bravery. Day after day, this courageous man was risking his life in the trenches to save his comrades.”

Different people, different places, different creeds and colours, different times in history. But they are united by bravery. By bringing together so many VCs in the same place, we create a narrative of heroic altruism throughout time.

Bravery is love in action. It is our moral imperative to honor sacrifices made by those in the past – sacrifices which defended our way of life and preserved our civil liberties. We must not take these for granted. It should be a priority to celebrate acts of service and bring them to the forefront of public life, not diminish them.

Lord Ashcroft exhorts anyone to go while there is still time.

We can only hope the controversy will bring more people’s attention to this collection. As Lord Ashford said in a statement of 10 March, “I am optimistic this medal collection will go on public display again – bad luck might turn out to be good luck”. He claims he has had two offers from Commonwealth nations to display the collection abroad. This is England’s loss. Perhaps it could join the National Army Museum, which houses a collection of 39 VCs.

In “For the Fallen”, an elegy for the soldiers of World War One, Laurence Binyon commemorated those “fallen in cause of the free”. It is engraved onto the front of the British Museum and figures on the Cenotaph ceremony on Remembrance Day:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”