World Orders, Decorations and Medals

By Order of a Direct Descendant

The important Crimean War Victoria Cross group of four awarded to Colonel William Hope, 7th Regiment (The Royal Fusiliers) City of London Regiment

Victoria Cross, the reverse of the suspension bar inscribed ‘Lieutenant William Hope, 7th Regt.’, the reverse centre of the cross dated ‘18 June 1855’; Crimea 1854-55, 1 clasp, Sebastopol (W. Hope. Lieut. Royal Fusiliers) naming impressed in the regimental style; Al Valore Militare, Spedizione d’Oriente 1855-1856 (Lieutt. Wm. Hope. 7th Regt.); Turkish Crimea 1855, Sardinian issue, unnamed, this a superior quality contemporary tailor’s copy, the first three contained in an old R. & S. Garrard fitted case, this damaged, the silver medals with contact marks, nearly very fine, the Victoria Cross good very fine (4)

See colour illustration on back cover

Victoria Cross London Gazette 5th May 1857: “William Hope, Lieut., the 7th Regt. (The Royal Fusiliers) City of London Regt. Date of Act of Bravery: 18 June, 1855. After the troops had retreated on the morning of the 18th June, 1855, Lieut. W. Hope, being informed by the late Sergt.-Major William Bacon, who was himself wounded, that Lieut. and Adjutant Hobson was lying outside the trenches, badly wounded, went out to look for him, and found him lying in the old Agricultural Ditch running towards the left flank of the Redan. He then returned and got four men to bring him in. Finding, however, that Lieut. Hobson could not be moved without a stretcher, he then ran back accross the open to Egerton’s Pit, where he procured one, and carried it to where Lieut. Hobson was lying. All this was done under a very heavy fire from the Russian batteries.”

Al Valore Militare: “Lieutenant William Hope. - At the great explosion of the French siege train, on the 15th of November, 1855, Lieutenant Hope was conspicuous for his coolness and activity, when in charge of a fatigue party, to cover the mill with wet blankets; the roof had been blown off, and one hundred and sixty tons of gunpowder were exposed to the fire of burning materials, rockets, etc.; he mounted the mill, and by his courage and example saved the magazine, which was momentarily expected to explode, and preserved the lives of probably hundreds of the light division. His conduct received the marked ecomiums of the authorities. He had previously distinguished himself at the assault and taking of the Quarries. He received the decoration of the Victoria Cross.”

William Hope was the son of the Right Honourable John Hope, Lord Chief Justice Clerk of Scotland, and his wife Jessie Irving, and was born in Edinburgh on 12 April 1834. He was educated privately and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and entered the Her Majesty’s 7th (City of London) Regiment, The Royal Fusiliers, at the height of the Crimean War as a Second Lieutenant on his twenty-second birthday. The Siege of the Russian naval base at Sebastopol in the Crimea was already six months old, and in June 1855, with the arrival of fresh supplies and drafts, the British and French armies in the field under Raglan and Pélissier, determined with wild optimism as it turned out, to bring the siege, and with it the war, to swift a conclusion. On the night of 7 / 8 June 1855, Hope received his baptism of fire in the fierce fighting for the ‘Quarries’. ‘We ... attacked at dusk - a forlorn hope of 600,’ Hope recalled towards the end of his life, ‘and Lord Raglan’s excellent orders provided for our being supported, if we effected a lodgement, by 1,800, to be followed again by a working party of 1,000 ‘to turn’ the work. But the Headquarter Staff did not carry out Lord Raglan’s orders, and our ‘supports’ only came to relieve us - at least, the remains of us - at about nine on the morning of the 8th.’

In mid June 1855, the Allied commanders decided upon an assault on two of Sebastopol’s principal defensive works, the Malakoff and the Redan, and in the early hours of Monday, the 18th of June, under a clear night sky, French troops moved forward to their starting positions. The Russians, perceiving the movement of men and fully understanding what would follow, swiftly dragged field guns up to the Malakoff and crowded their forward defences. A French gun was fired in error which one French General took to be the signal for the assault. A few minutes later the air was filled with the sharp crackle of small arms and the roar of guns. Pélissier, in an attempt to rectify the situation, ordered the intended rocket signal to be fired early, but the other French Generals were not immediately ready. Dawn revealed their attacks had failed in terrible slaughter, though some French troops were still grimly holding ground around the Malakoff. Lord Raglan reluctantly considered it was his duty to encourage the French by ordering his own troops into the assault on the Redan. It was a decision distinguished only by the determination of the British troops and individual acts of valour such as that performed by Lieutenant Hope of the Royal Fusiliers.

On emerging from the trenches the British attacking force of 2,600 men immediately felt the full weight of the Russian fire, being met by a storm of shot from guns which were believed to have been put out of action by the previous day’s bombardment. Men were shot down and dismembered in every direction, as they tried to cross the 400 yards of open ground to the abattis in front of the Redan, where numbers sheltered in craters and folds in the ground seemingly unable to advance or retreat, as the Russian guns continued to thunder away above them. Some men of the Royal Fusiliers, ‘under a perfect hell of fire,’ tried to get over the abattis or pull it down, but, ‘we might just as well,’ one of their sergeants wrote, ‘have tried to pull down the moon.’ At length a general retreat began, though not before, ‘The Royal Fusiliers [had] charged three times, and [had been] so decimated that William Hope and seven men were all that came back.’ On Hope’s return to the comparative safety of the British forward trenches, ‘He heard that the Adjutant was missing, and instantly went out again to look for him under a very heavy fire. He found the Adjutant so shattered that he dared not attempt to carry him for fear of increasing his sufferings, so he fetched a stretcher party to bring him in. The Adjutant subsequently died of his wounds.’

Sebastopol finally fell in September 1855, but much of the army was obliged to spend another winter in the Crimea. In November, Hope further distinguished himself by preventing a major disaster after an accidental explosion in camp. ‘Over an area of nearly half a mile’, reported the Daily News, ‘the air was one huge column of powder-smoke and cast-up earth, up into and athwart which, ignited or exploding balls and rockets ever anon darted and flashed by hundreds, spreading destruction to nearly everything, animate and inanimate, within a radius of more than a thousand yards ... Both within our enclosures and those of the French, great heaps of firewood, old gabions, and other combustible materials had been collected; and these speedily ignited. As night came on, the whole broke into great sheets of fire, firing the separate piles of ammunition as it rolled along ... Immediately after the first great explosion, when it was ascertained that the windmill itself - which forms our main magazine in that part of the camp - had escaped, General Straubenzee, who commands the Brigade, hurried up to the tents of the 7th Fusiliers, and asked if any of the men would volunteer to mount the wall of the mill and cover the wall with wet tarpaulin and blankets, as a precaution against the thickly flying sparks and burning wood ... Hardly anything could exceed the danger attending such a labour as the General proposed; notwithstanding, Lieut. Hope and twenty-five men at once responded to the Brigadier’s appeal, and proceeded to the powder crammed building ... Within ten minutes of the first great blow Mr. Hope was on the walls of the mill, piling the wet coverings over the exposed powder-boxes, exploding shells and burning wood flying through the air in perfect streams ... In little more than half an hour this vast pile of powder was well-protected from the thickly-flying sparks and rockets as it could be, short of entire removal from the scene of the conflagration ... For the most perilous service which he had so bravely and effeciently rendered, Lieut. Hope was publicly thanked by General Straubenzee and by the Colonel of his regiment ...; and I, one of many, sincerely hope that his daringly meritorious conduct will not be allowed to pass without further reward. Had the contents of the windmill exploded, we should not now be reckoning our killed and wounded by tens but by hundreds, for exprienced Engineer officers declare that hardly a living thing in the whole division could have escaped destruction.’

Although Hope received no British decoration for the windmill episode, his bravery was recognised by the award of the Sardinian silver medal for bravery ‘Al Valore Militare’, conferred by Victor Emmanuel. His gallant attempt to save the life of Lieutenant Hobson under a galling fire on 18 June 1855 was publicly acknowledged with the announcement in the London Gazette of his award of the Victoria Cross in May 1857. He received the then new decoration from the hands of Queen Victoria at the first Victoria Cross presentation parade held in Hyde Park on 26 June 1857, having left the Army the previous April on his marriage. In after years Hope invented the shrapnel shell for rifled guns, and later became an enthusiastic supporter of the volunteer movement, rising to the command of the 1st City of London Artillery Volunteers. In 1908, on the publication of a list of Crimean V.C’s ‘still living’, he found that he had been forgotten by the military authorities as a result of his early retirement from the Fusiliers. The error was rectified by a friend, the well known war correspondent, Bennet Burleigh, and gave cause for a letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which Hope brought to the public’s attention the existence of another Fusiliers’ V.C., ‘still living’, Captain ‘Alma’ Jones: ‘... We [the Royal Fusiliers] began the war with twenty-nine officers, and had fifty-six casualties, the entire staff of the regiment being swept away on 7 and 18 June, 1855. Alma Jones and I were both killed by the War Office many years ago, when it was discovered that neither of us had any pension, and, therefore no right to live; so the young gentleman told off to keep the list in the War Office promptly killed us both. - I am, Sir, W. Hope, Colonel, formerly commanding No. 1 Coy., The Royal Fusiliers.’ Colonel Hope’s material demise occurred less than a year later at a London nursing home on 17 December ,1909. He was buried at Brompton with full military honours, his funeral being attended by, among many others, Private Lewis, a Chelsea Pensioner who had served with him in the Crimea, and a ‘young neighbour who had joined the Army in the boyish spirit of hero-worship’.