Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie VC, CB, CMG (23 July 1868 -26 April 1915) was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.

Colonel Doughty-Wylie was the British consul in Mersina, Turkey, during the Turkish revolution of 1909. Richard Bell-Davies (later a VC winner, then a lieutenant on the battleship HMS "Swiftsure") met him at the time and gives an account in his autobiography "Sailor in the Air" (1967).

Massacres of Armenians started along with the revolution, and Bell-Davies says that it was largely due to the efforts of Doughty-Wylie that these were halted in Mersina. Doughty-Wylie then went to Adana, forty miles away. He persuaded the local Vali (Governor) to give him a small escort of Turkish troops and a bugler and with these managed to restore order. Mrs. Doughty-Wylie turned part of the dragoman's house into a hospital for wounded Armenians. Bell-Davies says that by the time an armed party from "Swiftsure" arrived, Doughty-Wylie had again almost stopped the massacre single-handedly. Newspaper reports of the period record that Doughty-Wylie was shot in the arm, while trying to prevent these massacres.cite news| title=WOMAN DESCRIBES RIOT AT ADANA.|url= http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E0DE5D71738E033A25750C0A9639C946897D6CF&scp=1&sq=Adana+Armenians+Minaret&st=p |author=|date=3 May 1909|publisher="The New York Times"]

Doughty-Wylie was 46 years old, and a Lieutenant Colonel in The Royal Welch Fusiliers, British Army when, "owing to his great knowledge of things Turkish" according to Bell-Davies, he was attached to General Sir Ian Hamilton's headquarters staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force during the Battle of Gallipoli.

On 26 April 1915, following the landing at Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula, during which the brigadier general and the brigade major had been killed, Lieutenant Colonel Doughty-Wylie and another officer (Garth Neville Walford) organized and made an attack through and on both sides of the village of Sedd-el-Bahr on the Old Fort at the top of the hill. The enemy's position was very strongly entrenched and defended, but mainly due to the initiative, skill and great gallantry of the two officers the attack was a complete success. Both were killed in the moment of victory.

Doughty-Wylie is buried close to where he was killed. His grave is the only solitary British or Commonwealth war grave on the Gallipoli peninsula.

His Victoria Cross is displayed at the Royal Welsh Fusiliers Museum "(Caernarfon Castle, Gwynedd, Wales)".

References

*Monuments To Courage (David Harvey, 1999)
*The Register of the Victoria Cross (This England, 1997)
*VCs of the First World War - Gallipoli (Stephen Snelling, 1995)

External links

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