Hell's Foundations by Geoffrey Moorhouse

Author:Geoffrey Moorhouse [Geoffrey Moorhouse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571281145
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

The Mayor of Bury had been invited to attend the homecoming celebrations, but had pleaded other commitments. Hutchinson wasn’t quite Bury’s man, after all, in spite of the poetaster’s efforts to claim him for the regimental town. He was close enough to being a native son, to be sure, which was why his occasional public appearances were dutifully logged in the local press; a garden party for VCs here, a London dinner for war heroes there; even though by 1929 James Hutchinson had moved away from Lancashire and was living beside the sea in Devon, where he died in 1972, at the age of seventy-six. Bury was hungry for a living hero of its own, whom it could adore unsparingly. It was being carefully drilled in the art of hero worship by the traditions of the Lancashire Fusiliers, by those awful weekly columns listing the latest Local Heroes who had given their lives, by the tremendous new example of the Six VCs. It wanted such a winner who was blood of its blood, and whose blood was yet unshed. George Peachment might have done, in spite of the fact that he was a Rifleman and not a Fusilier; but he was just another dead hero and Bury had plenty of those. So it made what it could of Jimmy Hutchinson; even more of the Six VCs, because they were the greatest source of regimental pride, which the town was being painfully taught to share and to glorify, far above any sense its people might have had of their own civic worth.

James Hutchinson, five foot four inches in his socks and a cocky twenty-one-year-old, left us with one of the very few descriptions of what it was actually like to receive the Victoria Cross from your sovereign; having none of the inhibitions that officers and gentlemen shared about the propriety of revealing what went on in the sovereign’s house. It was like this, he said: “There were only two VCs, and while we were talking together an officer came and attached a small pin to our tunics, just over the breast pocket. A few minutes later my name was called and I was shown in to the King. He looked in the best of health and wore khaki uniform. I advanced two paces and bowed to the King, and the officer commenced to read out the details of the little affair that gained the cross for me. ‘A very fine piece of work,’ the King commented, when the officer had finished reading. His Majesty then asked me how my right eye was progressing and I told him that the doctors did not give me any hope of getting my sight back. He expressed regret and said he was sorry that it would not be possible for me to rejoin my battalion. Meanwhile, the officer had placed the VC on a cushion near the King, who then pinned it on my breast. He then shook my hand and congratulated me on gaining the honour.

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