Where were the Victoria Crosses won, where were the men who won them born, and how far apart were the two? I matched all 1,354 recipients to their birthplaces and located every place of action I could.
The Victoria Cross is Britain's highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy. Since 1856 it has been given 1,357 times, for acts at a Baltic island fortress and on Crimean hillsides, at Lucknow and Delhi, Rorke's Drift and Colenso, Gallipoli and the Somme, Burma, Korea and Helmand. 256 of the recipients are marked in the list as posthumous awards, and many more died later in the same wars. Behind each award is one person and two places: where they were born and where they did the thing the citation describes.
I wanted to see both places on one map. I took the Wikipedia lists of recipients as the master list, matched each person to their birthplace on Wikidata, and located the place of action wherever the lists or Wikidata gave one. Birthplaces are almost complete: 1,338 of 1,354 (99%). Places of action are not. I could pin down 448 of the 1,357 awards (33%) to a named place, so the map of deeds is a sample, and I say below which way it leans.
Three things stand out. Ireland supplied a remarkable share of the early awards. The First World War dominates everything, and most of its British recipients won their crosses a few hundred kilometres from home. And as the empire's armies changed, so did the birthplaces: by the Second World War, a quarter of recipients were born in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or southern Africa, and nearly a fifth in South Asia.
Each line runs from a recipient's birthplace to the place of action, coloured by conflict. Play the years through, pick a conflict, or tap a line or dot for the person. Small grey dots are birthplaces whose place of action I could not locate; switch them on to see the whole list.
The first deed to earn the cross came on 21 June 1854, when Charles Lucas, a ship's mate born at Poyntzpass in Ireland, threw a live Russian shell overboard off Åland, Finland. The Crimean War brought 111 awards and the Indian Mutiny 182. Then come sixty years of what were called small wars: 229 awards between 1856 and 1913 across Africa, Asia and New Zealand, including 117 in the wars of southern Africa (23 in the Anglo-Zulu War and 78 in the Second Boer War).
The First World War changed the scale: 628 awards, 46% of all there have ever been. The single busiest year is 1918, with 206. The Second World War brought 182, and since 1945 there have been 15, the latest for an act on 22 August 2013 in Afghanistan.
Of the 1,354 recipients, 660 (49%) were born in England, 154 (11%) in Scotland and 28 (2%) in Wales. The island of Ireland gave 173 (13%): 136 born in what is now the Republic and 37 in what is now Northern Ireland. South Asia gave 101, Australia 80, Canada 55, New Zealand 24 and southern Africa 19.
The balance moved with the wars. In the Crimea, 25% of recipients were Irish-born, and in the Indian Mutiny 31%: the Victorian army recruited heavily in Ireland. By the First World War the Irish share was down to 5%, and in the Second to 3%. Recipients born in the dominions went the other way, from 2% in the Crimea to 17% in the First World War and 26% in the Second, when 18% were also born in South Asia.
Within Britain, counties do not compare fairly without the population of each county at the time, which I do not have here, so the figures below are raw counts. Greater London, as it is today, was the birthplace of 159 recipients, far ahead of anywhere else. Then come the big industrial and port counties and the old garrison and naval counties: Greater Manchester 31, Merseyside 28, Hampshire 28 and Devon 25. Among single towns and cities (as Wikidata names them), London has 25, Edinburgh 20, Glasgow 17, Dublin 16 and Liverpool 14.
For 448 awards I have a named place of action that I could put on the map. Grouping places within 15 km of each other, the busiest are the Ypres salient (40 located awards), the Somme (38), Lucknow (37), Sevastopol and Balaklava (28) and Delhi (24). Rorke's Drift and Isandlwana, close together in Zululand and both fought on 22 and 23 January 1879, account for 10 located awards, and Gallipoli for 15.
These counts are floors, not totals: the Western Front is under-counted most, because the lists that give a place of action cover only some of its recipients. To get a fuller picture of where the crosses were won, I combined the located places with the campaigns that happened in a single region (the Indian Mutiny in India, the Boer wars in southern Africa, and so on). That places 792 of the 1,357 awards (58%) in a region. The other 565 are all world-war awards whose place I could not locate.
For 428 awards I know both the birthplace and the place of action precisely enough to measure the distance between them. Their median is 6,486 km, but that sample leans heavily towards Irish-born and dominion recipients, because those are the lists that give a place. Reweighting it so that each combination of birthplace group and conflict counts as often as it does in the full list (which covers 96% of all awards) gives a typical distance of about 2,819 km. On that reweighted basis about 39% of deeds were done within 1,000 km of the recipient's birthplace and 42% more than 5,000 km away.
The spread is the story. The 30 English-born recipients in the First World War with a located place of action won their crosses a median of 282 km from where they were born: Flanders and Picardy are a day's travel from Kent. Australians in the same war fought a median of 16,679 km from home, and New Zealanders 18,620 km, close to the far side of the planet. The longest journey in the data is Donald Brown's, from Dunedin to High Wood, France in 1916: 18,992 km. The shortest is James Blair's, who won his cross in 1857 at Neemuch, India, the place Wikidata gives as his birthplace.
Taking today's Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside together, which between them cover most of the old county of Lancashire (along with some places that were once Cheshire or Yorkshire), 75 recipients were born here: 16 in today's Lancashire, 31 in Greater Manchester and 28 on Merseyside. Counted as one area, that would put it second only to Greater London. Liverpool alone has 14, Manchester 6 and Blackburn 4. 55 of the 75 were First World War awards, and 15 are marked as posthumous.
The place of action is the weak link. The main Wikipedia lists give each recipient's name, rank, unit, campaign and date, but not the place. The national lists (Irish, Indian Army, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and by nationality) do give a place, so recipients in those lists are much better covered than English, Scottish and Welsh soldiers of British regiments. Located awards are 32% Irish-born, against 13% in the full list, and 17% English-born, against 49%. The reweighting in section 05 corrects for the mix of birthplaces and conflicts, but not for anything else that might differ between the people in those lists and the rest.
Places can be coarse. Many places in the lists are small villages, ridges or woods. Where the list linked a Wikipedia article I used that article's coordinates; otherwise I looked the name up in GeoNames, in the stated country, and kept it only if it was unambiguous. A place like "Sevastopol" stands for a siege that lasted a year. Places that could only be resolved to a whole country or large region are left off the map and out of the distances.
Birthplaces come from Wikidata and inherit its errors. A few are only a country ("Nepal"); those are left out of distances. Counties are today's, not those of the time. And the birthplace is not always home: many recipients grew up, enlisted or emigrated far from where they were born.
No per-head rates. A fair comparison of counties or countries would divide by the number of men of military age at the time. I did not have historical populations at county level, so I give counts and say so.
Master list. I parsed the three Wikipedia tables "List of Victoria Cross recipients (A to F)", "(G to M)" and "(N to Z)": 1,354 named recipients. Three people won the cross twice (Noel Chavasse, Arthur Martin-Leake and Charles Upham), giving 1,357 awards. The Unknown Soldier of the United States, who was given the cross symbolically in 1921, is not in these tables, nor are the later awards of the separate Victoria Cross for Australia and Victoria Cross for New Zealand.
Birthplaces. I joined the list to Wikidata through each recipient's English Wikipedia article (1,353 of 1,354 matched) and took the place of birth and its coordinates. I placed each birthplace in a country with Natural Earth boundaries, and births in Great Britain in a county with ONS boundaries.
Places of action. 717 rows of the six national lists give a place. I located 497 of them to a named place: through the Wikipedia article the list links to (checked to lie in the stated country), an unlinked name that is exactly the title of a linked article in that country, a unique GeoNames town of 1,000 people or more in that country, or a Wikidata battle named after the place. 89 resolved only to a region and 131 (18%) not at all; the file of every lookup is published with the data. I added 34 awards whose Wikidata record names exactly one specific battle with coordinates and a matching year.
Distance. Great-circle distance between the two points. The adjusted median weights each located award by the number of awards in its birthplace group and conflict period in the full list, divided by the number located.
Corrections. One row in the list gives the Indian Mutiny for William Knox Leet, whose deed was at Hlobane in the Anglo-Zulu War on 28 March 1879; I use the Anglo-Zulu War. Where a hidden sort date disagreed with the visible date, I used the visible year. The list links both John Williamses to one article; I gave the First World War recipient his own.