On Tuesday 4 March 2025 at 12pm, Dr Tony Insall will consider the life and legacy of his great-uncle, Group Captain Gilbert Insall VC, MC. This lecture will be hosted virtually via Crowdcast and livestreamed from the RAF Museum's London site.

Group Captain Gilbert Insall is the only person to have both won a Victoria Cross and to have successfully escaped from a German prison camp during the First World War, earning a Military Cross; two acts which demonstrated quite different types of bravery. This lecture will tell his story.

Gilbert grew up in Paris, where he became interested in aviation and got to know the famous pioneer aviators Louis Blériot and the Farman brothers, who gave him flights. He joined the Royal Flying Corps and was posted to France. In November 1915 he engaged a Germanaircraft, forced it down and descended to low level to ensure its destruction. In the process, his own machine was disabled and he was forced to land just behind the Allied front line. Enduring constant bombardment, he supervised the repair of his aircraft under cover of darkness so that he could fly it home the following day.

In December 1915, he was shot down and captured, quite badly injured, spending several months in hospital. Once recovered, he made three attempts to escape, all of which required at least some temporary confinement in unpleasantly constricted areas. He dug a forty-yard tunnel to get out of Heidelberg in the middle of winter, and was at large for five days in freezing conditions. Then he concealed himself on a horse-drawn cart to get away from Crefeld. Finally, Gilbert and several companions concealed themselves in a claustrophobically small space which they had excavated under the floor of the bathhouse (outside the camp perimeter) and remained there for seventeen hours, enduring the heat of a summer day while a fruitless search for them was being carried out. They emerged early the following morning, and reached Holland a few days later in September 1917.

Dr Tony Insall worked for more than thirty years in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and served in Nigeria, Hong Kong, China and Malaysia before spending five years in Norway. He was also an editor for the FCO Historians, and has published several books and articles mainly on Norwegian and Scandinavian history including Haakon Lie, Denis Healey and the making of an Anglo-Norwegian special relationship 1945-1951 and (for the FCO Historians) The Brussels and North Atlantic Treaties, 1947-1949.

He is the author of Secret Alliances. Special Operations and Intelligence in Norway 1940-1945, (Biteback 2021) a comprehensive study of Anglo-Norwegian resistance cooperation during the Second World War.

He is a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Lunchtime Lecture (London): The Madness of Courage: Group Captain Gilbert Stuart Martin Insall, VC, MC