Here we have some exclusive articles written for us by the producers of Victoria Cross Heroes.
Peter Georgi, Executive Producer writes for us about how HRH Prince Charles became involved in the series and Steven Clarke writes for us about why it was so important to make "Victoria Cross Heroes" in 2006.
So, I had met the owner of Empire Media Productions, Mark Souster, the man who had won the commission, and Ian Russell, Five’s commissioning exec. We were going to make a 3 programme series on the history of the Victoria Cross and it was to be presented by His Royal Highness, The Prince Of Wales. Incredible, it’s not often you get to work with our future king. I had visions of spending two or three days with him, filming in the palace, cemeteries and museums, perhaps being with The Prince when he hosts a dinner for some of the VC holders and families. Alas, reality very rarely lives up to one’s expectations. We were to have two hours with him, between 10:00 and 12:00 in three months time.
What could you do in two hours that would create good television and be respectful to holders of the Victoria Cross and Prince Charles himself? With three programmes to cover, a series of sequences within each show was out of the question. We decided that a well-crafted introduction to each show would be the best way to go. But what to say?
As someone who has lived in England all his life I have a member of the public’s view of the Prince. I have to admit that I have been a fan of his for a few years, and in a way I thought I knew why he would have agreed to take part in our series. He seems to respect history, values honour and duty, has been outspoken on the need to preserve ancient buildings and methods of construction and was at the forefront of making organic food popular. He is also the president of the Victoria and George Cross Association, a trust that looks after the interests of VC and GC holders and their families. But what did he really think?
I was put in touch with a long term friend of the Prince, Major General Arthur Denaro, an ex-commandant of Sandhurst Military Collage. It turns out the Prince is fascinated by the military and is deeply respectful of what we as a nation ask our armed forces to do. He was in the Navy himself and as the head of many regiments has seen the effects of injury and loss on soldiers and their families, most recently with the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan. It is the idea that the Victoria Cross is awarded for an extreme act of bravery, an act that always puts the safety and lives of others before oneself is what really attracted the Prince. As someone who has been fortunate enough never to have had to go to war myself, I feel the same way.
We had our theme and a basis for the script. On the day, myself, Steven Clarke, the series producer and Mark Souster found ourselves in a small room in Highgrove House. We had brought along six Victoria Crosses from Lord Ashcroft’s incredible collection and dressed them behind the Prince. To say we were nervous while waiting for him was an understatement. However, within minutes of his arrival it was just like a normal day’s filming. The Prince knew his stuff about the VC and the people in the association. He knew about the plight of the ordinary soldier and he was genuinely interested in our series. At some point in the two hours I stopped feeling as if I was in a room with Prince Charles and felt as if I was making a television programme with a well informed professional presenter. Looking back, it was an honour to spend that time with the Prince and I am proud to have been part of a series that he is in.
Peter Georgi November 2006
When Mark Souster, Managing Director of Empire Media, and Peter Georgi, the Executive Producer of the series, first talked to me about this wonderful project, they asked me how many VC’s I thought we should feature across the series? I replied ‘1351’. I half mean’t it. The conventions of television say that you should have 3 or 4 major stories in a one hour film. I knew that, even with 3 films, we’d have to do far more than that even to approach doing justice to this wide ranging subject peopled by men (and boys) of all ages, of all ranks, from all the services, from every kind of combat in every kind of war, skirmish or insurrection you’d care to mention over the last 150 years. The use of many photographs of VC holders that ‘resolve’ into an image of the medal in our title sequence is a visual way of saying that the series is really for and about all of them.
In the end, we have featured over 30 VC’s across the 3 programmes. It’s only a fraction of the whole, but we’ve tried hard to choose stories that are not only powerful and gripping in their own right (a prerequisite for any television programme), but that also stand for and reflect the many VC’s we couldn’t feature. As a way of showing how we arrived at our decisions on content, I’ll run through the choices I made as a director in relation to my own film, ‘The Great War’.
Choosing our VC’s: ‘The Great War’ I wanted the VC’s I featured both to be vivid stories of individual action, and also to help ‘tell’ the bigger story of the Great War itself. Choosing the very first VC’s of the War (Lt. Maurice Dease and Private Sid Godley, 23rd August 1914) seemed a good way to begin. The fact that they were an officer and a Private illustrated perfectly the range of the VC across ranks. Furthermore, the small action they were part of, and the high casualties suffered, also helped to tell the story of the BEF in the early months of the war - a tough little army that put up a strong fight but was a spent force by the end of the year. Godley also presented another opportunity; he was taken prisoner after his brave action, and spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. So I knew that, having begun the film with him winning one of the first VC’s of the war, I could end the film with him coming home, and finally receiving his VC.
The central character in ‘The Great War’ is Noel Chavasse. We first meet him as he arrives in France in November 1914, and his death in the summer of 1917 is very near the end of the film. He’s someone I hope the audience will get to know and engage with. As the only double VC of the Great War, his inclusion was virtually a ‘must’. Also, as a doctor, his VC’s are about saving life, not taking it. His compassion for his men is a powerful motivator that comes across vividly in his wonderful letters home. The moment that makes Chavasse truly ‘heroic’, I think, is after his first VC. He becomes engaged, and soon after is offered a ‘safe’ job in a base hospital behind the lines. With his impeccable record and his VC there would no shame in this; he would be free to marry his fiancée and secure himself a future. But he turns it down, deciding he must ‘stay with the lads’. He writes: “One of their choruses as they trudge up the line is: ‘Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home’. If they have to stick it out, why shouldn’t I”? Stick it out he did. And, tragically, it cost him his life.
The other major stories weave in and out of the story of the war. Jackie Smyth won his VC in 1915 leading troops of the Indian Army in France. He caught my attention because he’s one of the few VC’s to actually write about the medal, in his ‘History of the Victoria Cross’. Jackie’s reflections on the kind of people who win the VC are fascinating. There is no ‘VC type’, he says, ‘because courage is an unpredictable thing. No one knows how much they have, or what it will enable them to do’. But, he says, there may be one characteristic linking all VC’s: ‘a degree of obstinacy’. Albert Jacka certainly has that. I knew I wanted an Aussie VC in the film, and I knew I needed a Gallipoli VC too. Jacka was the perfect choice: Australia’s first VC of the war in a spectacular, if gruesome, Gallipoli action - the single handed killing of 7 armed Turks. Jacka is really the opposite of Chevasse – the one a life saver over long periods; the other a life taker over a very short, bloody episode. But, like it or not, war needs both kinds of men.
A Naval VC also seemed a must, but was quite a challenge, especially as we set out to dramatise as many of our key stories as possible. I really wanted to cover Jutland, but clearly couldn’t dramatise the last all-big-gun naval engagement the world has ever seen! The breakthrough came when I discovered that one of the VC’s, Loftus Jones, was found dead with a leg missing on a beach in Sweden. That’s what I dramatised, and unfolded the Jutland story through a body on the beach. Jutland also allowed me to tie in the young Jack Cornwell (at 16, the youngest VC of the Great War). His story, as historian Richard Holmes says, really did change the medal forever. At Jutland, this ‘Boy, First Class’ stayed at his post when all around him were killed or wounded. He made it back to hospital in Hull, but died of his wounds. From a poor family, he was buried in a pauper’s grave. The Somme battle happened a month later, and left the nation reeling with shock. Cornwell’s story – brave boy, paupers grave – hit the papers and caught the public imagination. Under public and press pressure, the Admiralty disinterred the lad, buried him in a lavish state funeral, and awarded him the VC – showing how the medal had become something that the public was beginning to feel belonged to them.
Our story from the Somme is a VC won before the battle had even begun. A brave Ulster lad called Billy McFadzean threw himself on a box of grenades to save his comrades – he had only 4 seconds to decide what to do after a live grenade fell into a grenade box in a packed trench. Richard Holmes calls it ‘instant courage’. The last of my VC stories shows a very different kind of courage. Wilfrith Elstob, commanding a battalion of the Manchester Regiment in France, knew that the great German attack of March 1918 was coming, and he had decided how he would act, telling his men there would be ‘no surrender.’ They held out for much longer than many units. Elstob was offered a chance to surrender, cried ‘never’ and was shot in the head. But this isn’t just an act of ‘self sacrifice’; the great German advance nearly won them the war, but eventually it was stopped in its tracks – in part because of Elstob and others like him.
An International Medal The medal has been won by men from all over the British Isles and Ireland, and from all corners of the Empire. We were really keen that the series should reflect this. The first programme in the series, The Modern Age, features a Canadian aircrewman, an English infantry officer in Burma, a diver from Northern Ireland, a Private with a Scots Regiment in Korea, a Ghurka fighting in Indonesia, an Aussie in Vietnam, and of course Johnson Beharry, a Private soldier (now Lance Corporal) from Grenada, who earned his VC in Iraq. The last film in the series, ‘The Empire’, features the first ‘black’ VC, William Hall, son of freed slaves from Canada who served in the Royal Navy in the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny.
The Modern Age The first film in the series covers the later medals, from the 2nd War to the present. We were always keen to gather first person testimony from living VC holders, and were very pleased to be able to interview 5 of them, ranging in age from mid 20’s to mid 70’s: these stories are covered in detail elsewhere on the web site. But we were also delighted to have the chance to interview two of the men who were with Johnson Beharry when he won his VC in 2004. Richard Deane (‘the boss’) was Beharrys’ company commander, and the man whose life Johnson saved. Dave Falconer was in the Warrior at the time, and vividly describes the scene. In documentary, it’s always powerful to have several perspectives on the same event, and I think we were able to tell the Beharry story as never before by having these 3 ‘viewpoints’.
The Empire The challenges in making the last film in the series – covering the first 50 years of the medal – were perhaps the greatest. A remote subject with scant detail on many of the VC’s; no moving archive; the challenge of dramatising wars as disparate in location and historical period as The Crimea, The Indian Mutiny, The Zulu War and The Boer War. With the drama we made a crucial decision: economics mean’t that much of the shooting needed to be done in the UK. But we felt that we needed to add something more, to give a sense of the exotic, to produce a real feel of heat and aridity. So we shot elements of the film in Spain. The light, the landscape, the vegetation, the architecture all give the film a distinctive feel and deliver the crucial message – these were wars fought far from home. The film was also a demanding one to structure. But early on the director, Nick White, found two VC winners whose stories he could use as the backbone of the film from start to finish. Edward Daniel and Henry Wood were Midshipmen, and friends, in the Crimea. Daniel wins his VC here; Wood wins his in the Indian Mutiny. But then their paths start to divide. Wood rises through the ranks, while Daniel is disgraced and deprived of his VC. By the end of the film, Wood is the British Army’s most senior officer, while Daniel has disappeared, his ultimate fate a fascinating mystery.
The Ashcroft Collection We couldn’t have made the series without Lord Ashcroft’s support, and without access to his extraordinary collection of Victoria Crosses. Many of the key VC’s in the series are owned by him (including Edward Daniel’s in ‘The Empire’, James Magennis’s in ‘The Modern Age’, and pilot William Leefe-Robinson’s in ‘The Great War’). Our thanks and gratitiude also go to Michael Naxton, a real VC expert who acts as ‘Curator’ of Lord Aschcroft’s collection, was interviewed for two of the films in our series, and was an invaluable source of help, advice and information during the making of the series.
