William Hall

William Neilson Hall was born on 28 April 1827 at Horton Bluff, Nova Scotia, though the Canadian Encyclopedia gives 1829. His parents, Jacob and Lucy Hall, had escaped slavery in Maryland during the War of 1812, and had been brought to freedom in Nova Scotia by the Royal Navy as part of the Black Refugee migration. He worked in the shipyards of nearby Hantsport and went to sea at 17.

After service in the US Navy during the Mexican–American War, Hall joined the Royal Navy in 1849. During the Crimean War he served ashore in a naval brigade from HMS Rodney, taking part in the battles of Inkerman and the siege of Sevastopol in 1854, and he later served in HMS Shannon.

When the Indian Rebellion broke out in 1857, HMS Shannon was sent to help suppress it, and a brigade of some 450 sailors and marines was formed under Captain William Peel. They dragged heavy naval guns overland to Lucknow, where a large British garrison was under siege.

On 16 November 1857, at Lucknow, Hall and his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Thomas Young, brought a 24-pounder gun up close to the walls of the Shah Najaf mosque, a heavily defended stronghold. Under heavy fire that killed or wounded everyone around them, they kept loading and firing until the wall was breached. Captain Peel recommended both men for the Victoria Cross, and Hall received his on 28 October 1859.

He was the first Black person, the first Nova Scotian and the third Canadian to be awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for valour in the British Empire. Hall retired from the navy as a petty officer first class in 1876, and returned to Nova Scotia to live with his sisters on a small farm near Hantsport. He died there in 1904, and was at first buried in an unmarked grave. In 1947 he was reburied beneath a memorial cairn at the Hantsport Baptist Church, and in 2010 Canada Post issued a stamp in his honour. His medals are held by the Nova Scotia Museum.