Lieutenant Colonel Eric Charles Twelves Wilson VC (2 October 1912 – 23 December 2008) was an English British Army officer and colonial administrator. He received 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. At the time of his death, he was the last surviving British Army recipient of the Victoria Cross in the Second World War, and the earliest and oldest recipient.
Early life
Wilson was born at Sandown on the Isle of Wight, where his father Cyril Charles Clissold Wilson was a curate. His mother's maiden name was Twelves. His grandfather Charles Thomas Wilson was the first missionary from the Church Mission Society to visit Buganda, in 1877. He was educated at Marlborough College, where fees were reduced for the sons of clergymen, and he became a house captain. Although he wore glasses, he was awarded a prize cadetship to attend the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
Military career
Wilson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in The East Surrey Regiment on 2 February 1933. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1936 and was seconded to the 2nd (Nyasaland) Battalion The King's African Rifles in 1937 serving in East Africa, where he learned to speak Nyanja. He was then seconded to the Somaliland Camel Corps in 1939. Some of his guns were blown to pieces by the enemy's field artillery fire, and his spectacles were smashed. He was wounded in the right shoulder and the left eye, and he was assumed to have been killed. For his actions, likened in the Daily Sketch to another Rorke's Drift, Wilson was awarded the Victoria Cross. and with the rank of temporary major, he served as adjutant of the Long Range Desert Group and then as second in command of the 11th (Kenyan) King's African Rifles, part of the 25th East African Brigade in 11th East African Division, in the Burma Campaign. Having contracted scrub typhus he was hospitalised for two months and then returned to East Africa to command an infantry training establishment at Jinja in Uganda. He was promoted to acting lieutenant-colonel in June 1945 and was seconded to The Northern Rhodesia Regiment in 1946.
Victoria Cross citation
The formal citation for Wilson's VC, published in the London Gazette in October 1940 when he was still presumed dead, reads:
Later life
Wilson married Ann Pleydell-Bouverie (a descendant of the Earls of Radnor) in 1943. They had two sons. After they divorced in 1953, Wilson married Angela Joy Gordon, and they had one son.
He suffered from prostate cancer in later life, and died after a stroke. He was buried in Stowell, survived by his second wife and their son, and both of his sons from his first marriage.