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Captain Robert Cuthbert Grieve

Unit: 37th Battalion, 10th Brigade, 3rd Division
Action: 7 June 1917, Messines, Belgium

Grieve, 27, commanded the men of A Company, who were hit by fire from a pillbox as they were going through a gap in the wire.
Half the men and all the officers except Grieve were injured. Grieve called for help from a mortar and machine-gun unit, but they had been wounded as well.

The citations says: ``He then, single handed, under continuous fire from these two machine-guns, succeeded in bombing and killing the two crews, re-organised the remnants of his company, and gained his original objective. Captain Grieve, by his utter disregard of danger, and his coolness in mastering a very difficult position, set a splendid example, and when he finally fell wounded the position had been secured and the few remaining enemy were in full flight.''

Biography: Because no superior officers survived the action described above, Grieve's recommendation for a VC was unusual in that it was issued by the men he led.
Grieve, born in Brighton, Melbourne, on 19 June 1889, was educated at Wesley College where he was a keen cricketer and footballer before becoming a travelling salesman.
He enlisted on 9 June 1915, and with nine months service in the Victorian Rangers he was commissioned second lieutenant in January 1916. The wound from a sniper he received in the VC action caused him to be hospitalised in Britain for six months.
He rejoined his unit but was soon back in Britain suffering double pneumonia and trench nephritis. He returned to Australia in May 1918 and within three months married the Australian Army nurse who had cared for him.

He set up his own business which he ran until he died, collapsed at work with a heart attack, on 4 October 1957.

He is buried at the Springvale Cemetery; his wife predeceased him and they had no children. He donated his VC to his old school Wesley College, where it was one of the artefacts to survive a fire which destroyed the school's war memorial library.