The History Chap Podcast
The History Chap Podcast
242: Only Man Awarded Both Victoria Cross & Olympic Gold
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Chris Green is The History Chap; telling stories that brings the past to life.
The story of Philip Neame, the only man to be awarded both the Victoria Cross and an Olympic gold medal.
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He won the Victoria Cross in the trenches of the First World War.
He won Olympic gold at the 1924 Paris Games.
To this day, no one else has ever achieved both.
This is the extraordinary story of Sir Philip Neame VC — soldier, sportsman, prisoner of war, and member of one of Kent's most famous brewing families.
Born near Faversham in 1888, Philip Neame grew up in the family behind Shepherd Neame, Britain's oldest brewer.
Educated at Cheltenham College, he trained at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers. When war broke out in 1914, he was serving at Gibraltar but was quickly recalled to join the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Within weeks of arriving in France, the young sapper found himself in the thick of fighting at Neuve Chapelle, where a desperate situation with faulty grenades and improvised fuses led to an astonishing act of bravery that earned him the Victoria Cross — one of 628 awarded during the entire war.
He was just 26 years old.
Neame served throughout the First World War, was awarded the DSO, mentioned in dispatches ten times, and in 1920 was among the 75 VC holders who formed the guard of honour at the burial of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey.
But his story was only getting started. At the 1924 Paris Olympics — the games immortalised in Chariots of Fire — Neame was part of the British shooting team that won gold in the Running Deer Double Shot event, beating Norway by a single point in a dramatic finale.
It was a triumph largely forgotten in the shadow of Abrahams and Liddell, yet Neame's unique double of Victoria Cross and Olympic gold has never been matched in the century since.
Transferring to the Indian Army, Neame survived being mauled by a tiger, married the nurse who saved him, and returned to Woolwich as its last ever Commandant before the Second World War intervened.
Sent to North Africa as a lieutenant general, he was captured during Rommel's first offensive in Libya alongside fellow general Richard O'Connor — making them among the most senior British officers taken prisoner in the entire war. Held at the Castello di Vincigliata near Florence, a medieval fortress turned special POW camp, Neame used his engineering skills to design the escape tunnel through which two New Zealand brigadiers made it all the way to Switzerland.
He himself escaped in September 1943 during the chaos of the Italian Armistice, eventually reaching Allied lines and meeting Churchill in North Africa before arriving home on Christmas Day.