David Charles Harvey

Who was David Charles Harvey?

David Charles Harvey was an historian and author born in East Ham, London. He is notable for his seminal work Monuments To Courage which documents the graves of almost all recipients of the Victoria Cross, a task which took him over 36 years to complete.

Harvey was the son of a grocer and worked as a salesman after attending Hinchley Wood School in Surrey. He later joined the Metropolitan Police where he started the mounted police magazine One One Ten, before moving to Denver, Colorado to run an equestrian Centre for over a decade.

A chance meeting with Canon William Lummis led him to take over his life-work of researching and documenting the final resting places of all Victoria Cross recipients. This task took Harvey to 48 countries over the next four decades. However, an accident during a visit to the Somme in 1992 left Harvey in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life and he later had to have a leg amputated. Monuments to Courage was finally published in 1999.

Harvey married once in 1968, to Ruth Ward. The couple had a son and two daughters. They divorced in 1979.

Harvey died on 4 March 2004.