REVIEW: ORDERS, DECORATIONS, MEDALS & MILITARIA 21 JUNE

The sale of the important Second Afghan War medal awarded to Victoria Cross winner Gunner James Collis for £95,000, against an estimate of £15,000-20,000, on 21 June recalls one of the most extraordinary tales associated with the V.C.

Such were the ramifications of Collis’s fate that after his death, and with the support of King George V, the British Government changed the law over rules governing the V.C.

Gunner Collis was part of “E” Battery “B” Brigade, of the Royal Horse Artillery during the Battle of Maiwand, Afghanistan on 28 July 1880 when he showed conspicuous bravery during the retreat to Kandahar.

Masses of fugitives blocked the road, and the sufferings of the wounded were increased by terrible thirst. It was Collis who, time after time, went into the villages on the road to procure water for them, running the greatest risk in so doing, by reason of the bands of Afghans who hovered around, attacking the retreating soldiers whenever an opportunity presented itself.

As the citation explained: “His finest act took place at the bend of a road through a narrow defile. A body of Afghan cavalry bore down upon the gun carriage he was guarding and directed a hail of bullets on the wounded, who had been placed upon the limber. In order to draw their attention from the helpless men, Collis sprang to the side of the road and returned the fire of the pursuing horsemen, making himself their target, and by his heroic act the limber was dragged round the bend of the road and the wounded saved. Later on, he again distinguished himself by volunteering to carry a message from the beleaguered garrison to General Dewberry, entrenched some distance off. This he successfully accomplished, though fired at by the enemy on both legs of the journey.”

Lord Roberts presented Collis with his Victoria Cross on Poona Racecourse on 11 July 1881.

After being discharged from the army, Collis joined the Bombay Police in India in 1881, rising to the rank of inspector. In March 1882, he married Adela Grace Skuse, a widow, in Bombay, returning to the UK in 1884. He re-enlisted three years later, joining the Suffolk Regiment and returned to India in 1888 as part of his service. By 1891 he was suffering from rheumatic fever and was invalided home, where he journeyed without his wife.

At some point he met - and in 1893 married - Mary Goddard, who was apparently unaware that he had a wife in India. This was to be the beginning of Collis’s fateful downward trajectory.

In 1895 his deception was discovered, and Collis was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour. Later that year his V.C. was declared forfeit for his crime under the original statutes of the Royal Warrant of 1856. However, by this point, having already fallen on hard times, Collis had pawned his Victoria Cross for just eight shillings. The decoration was retrieved by police for the same sum of eight shillings from a pawnbroker’s shop for the Crown on the instructions of the Home Office.

After leaving prison Collis settled in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and pursued a number of jobs but in 1914 after the outbreak of the First World War he re-enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment, aged 58, as a drill instructor. Dogged by poor health he was invalided out of the army on medical grounds in August 1917.

Collis died at Battersea General Hospital in London on 28 June 1918, aged 62. At his funeral at Wandsworth cemetery, his coffin was draped with the Union Flag and borne on a gun carriage escorted by a military firing party. He was given full military honours but there was no mention of his crime or the forfeiture of the Victoria Cross. His family, who regarded him as a black sheep, did not attend the funeral even though he had three sons in the Army. Nor was there money for a headstone and he was buried in a mass grave for the poor. A headstone was erected over his burial plot in May 1998.

Two years after his death, Collis’s sister Hannah Haylock petitioned the War Office on behalf of the family for the forfeiture to be cancelled. King George V was sympathetic to the family’s wishes but Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, opposed the reinstatement. He believed that because Collis had pawned his medals, he placed little value on them. Furthermore, Churchill noted that the family had not kept in contact with Collis, and it was only 25 years later that they had decided to raise their grievance with the authorities.

Yet the King and others won the day on the wider issue and Churchill approved amendments to the rules relating to the V.C. which stated that henceforward only “treason, cowardice, felony or any infamous crime” should lead to forfeiture. The King also insisted that Collis’s name should be inscribed, along with all the corps’s other V.C. recipients, on the Royal Artillery Memorial in Woolwich, south-east London.

Collis’s Victoria Cross first appeared for sale in Colonel Gaskell’s collection at Glendining’s on 23 May 1911. It was next sold at Glendining’s on 10 June 1938, when it was bought by Colonel Oakley. After his death it was owned by his daughter who resold it at Sotheby’s on 21 March 1979, when the V.C. was together with a renamed Afghanistan campaign medal. For the next 34 years, it was held in private ownership until it was purchased by the Ashcroft Trust in 2014 and is now on display at the Imperial War Museum, still with a renamed campaign medal.

The original campaign medal awarded to Collis was never the subject of forfeit and was sold at Christie’s in July 1990.