Eric Charles Twelves Wilson

Major · VC

What this roll records

Eric Charles Twelves Wilson VC (1912–2008) — the Sandown man who won the British Army’s first Victoria Cross of the Second World War, and its last living Army recipient from that war. He was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of the Rev. Cyril Charles Clissold Wilson, rector of Hunsdon; his mother was Evelyn Sophie Twelves of Sandown. Educated at Marlborough and then Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the East Surrey Regiment on 2 February 1933, but spent his war seconded to local African units — perhaps inspired by his paternal grandfather, Charles Thomas Wilson, a missionary in Uganda. He was seconded to the King’s African Rifles in 1936 and to the Somaliland Camel Corps in 1939. It was in British Somaliland that he carried out the act of heroism for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. The citation in the London Gazette of October 1940, believing him killed, announced the award as posthumous: “For most conspicuous gallantry on active service in Somaliland. Captain Wilson was in command of machine-gun posts manned by Somali soldiers in the key position of Observation Hill, a defended post in the defensive organisation of the Tug Argan Gap in British Somaliland. The enemy attacked Observation Hill on August 11th, 1940. Captain Wilson and Somali gunners under his command beat off the attack and opened fire on the enemy troops attacking Mill Hill, another post within his range. He inflicted such heavy casualties that the enemy, determined to put his gun out of action, brought up a pack battery to within 700 yards, and scored two direct hits through the loopholes of his defences, which, bursting within the post, wounded Captain Wilson severely in the right shoulder and in the left eye, several of his team also being wounded. His guns were blown off their stands but he repaired and replaced them and, regardless of his wounds, carried on, whilst his Somali sergeant was killed beside him. On August 12th and 14th the enemy again concentrated field artillery fire on Captain Wilson’s guns, but he continued, with his wounds untended, to man them. On August 15th two of his machine-gun posts were blown to pieces, yet Captain Wilson, now suffering from malaria in addition to his wounds, still kept his own post in action. The enemy finally over-ran the post at 5 p.m. on the 15th August and it was reported that Captain Wilson, fighting to the last, had been killed.” Wilson had in fact been captured by the Italians and imprisoned in Eritrea. He was released in 1941 when Italy surrendered in East Africa, returned to Britain, and received his VC from the King at Buckingham Palace in July 1942. He then returned to the fighting as adjutant of the Long Range Desert Group, with the rank of major — the rank and appointment in which he is photographed here, the LRDG’s distinctive scorpion cap badge visible on his forage cap. He went on to be second-in-command of the 11th (Kenyan) King’s African Rifles in the Burma campaign, where he fell ill with typhus and spent two months in hospital. In 1946 he was seconded to the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, and retired from the Army in 1949 as a lieutenant-colonel. A tall, rather shy man and a good athlete who wore glasses from a young age, he married Ann Pleydell-Bouverie in 1943, with whom he had two sons before the marriage ended in divorce; he later married Angela Joy Gordon and had a third son, Hamish. After the Army he joined the Overseas Civil Service in Tanganyika, serving there until independence in 1961 and mastering several languages, and later worked in England as Warden of London House, a residence for Commonwealth students, before retiring in 1977 to Stowell, Dorset. As a holder of the Victoria Cross he was both the earliest and the last surviving British Army recipient of the Second World War. Despite his serious wounds and later illnesses, including prostate cancer, he lived to the age of 96, dying of a stroke on 23 December 2008.

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