Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

      Fig 1: The Yeomanry Cavalry on manoeuvres by W. B. Giles.

      Yeomen were countrymen of respectable standing, tenant farmers or smaller freeholders. The Spectator made much of its character Sir Roger de Coverley, that genial baronet so preoccupied with hunters, hares, and partridges. But no less important in the hierarchy of the shires was his neighbour,

      A yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man. He is just within the Game-Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant … He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges. In short, he is a very sensible man – shoots flying – and has been several times foreman of the petty-jury.¹⁶

      The Game Act of 1670 had prevented anyone with less than £100 a year in lands or tenements from killing game, and authorised the seizure of ‘guns, bows, greyhounds, setting-dogs and lurchers’ that might be used in the process. It was a measure of substantial social control, and was not significantly altered till 1831. In a system that was always more pliable than it seemed, a second-generation yeoman might indeed make the transition to gentleman, or, if harvests failed, thud down into the ranks of the agricultural labourers. A yeoman had more of a stake in the country than most, and one cannot understand the quintessentially British phenomenon of yeomanry without remembering this.

      Few volunteer units survived the Napoleonic wars, for there was no longer a need for them. But the yeomanry trotted on, because now the nation was in the grip of widespread unrest, with Chartists and Luddites in the towns and the Captain Swing rioters in the countryside all presenting a threat to the established order of JP, squire, and vicar: one of Swing’s threatening letters put ‘Parson Justasses’ amongst the ‘Blackguard Enemies of the People.’ There was no doubt whose side the yeomen were on, and in the absence of a proper police force, they were frequently called out in aid of the civil power. On 16 August 1819 a huge crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to hear the radical speaker Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. The local magistrates had decided to arrest Hunt and other leaders. Although the military commander on the spot, Lieutenant Colonel Guy L’Estrange, had some infantry, two guns, six troops of the regular 15th Hussars and six of the Cheshire Yeomanry wisely deployed, the magistrates sent a troop of Manchester and Salford Yeomanry towards the speakers’ platform.

      The Manchester and Salford was not a wartime-raised unit, but had been formed in 1817 as a response to local unrest. Their commanding officer, Major Thomas Trafford, was a Roman Catholic landowner, and his second in command, Captain Hugh Birley, a mill-owner. Although we risk confusing history with current politics if we call the troopers ‘younger members of the Tory party in arms’, most were well-to-do tradesmen with an animus against radicals. Trafford apparently told Birley to take a detachment to make the arrests. Some of the crowd maintained that the troopers were drunk, but Birley argued that the yeomanry horses were not used to working together and were frightened by jeers, yells, and the fluttering of banners. After the arrests were made there was a shout of ‘Have at the flags’, and some of the yeomen slashed at the crowd as they kicked their horses forward to get at the banners. The magistrates ordered L’Estrange to disperse the crowd and rescue the yeomanry, so he sent in the 15th Hussars. Although the regular troopers had been ordered to use the flats of their swords, more damage was done by sword-swipes and horses crashing into people who were themselves trying to escape. The affair, dubbed ‘The Peterloo Massacre’ in parody of Waterloo, polarised opinion then and now. Perhaps a dozen people were killed and many more injured, though estimates of 700 casualties beggar belief. The magistrates and yeomanry were supported by the government. Trafford was later made a baronet, while Birley went on to partnership with one Charles Macintosh – who had invented a process for waterproofing cloth. Had things been a little different, we might slip gratefully into a Birley on a rainy day.

      Although many yeomanry units disappeared in the 1830s and 1840s, individual troops were consolidated into county regiments, and it was to take the TA reorganisation of 1964–5 to remove most of these, with their shoulder-chains and bright forage caps, from the Army List. Some regiments were the hunting field in arms. The future Field Marshal Sir John French recalled that when he was adjutant of the Northumberland Hussars:

      They were commanded by the Earl of Ravensworth, than whom no better sportsman ever lived. The officers were all good sportsmen and fine horsemen, and to those who can look back fifty years such names as Cookson, Straker, Henderson and Hunter will carry the conviction of the truth of what I say. Two of them were prominent masters of hounds, but my most intimate friend was Charley Hunter, a born leader of cavalry, whose skill in handling £50 screws over five-barred gates I shall never forget.¹⁷

      Others had even more blue blood in their veins. The troops of Gloucestershire Gentlemen and Yeomanry were combined into a regiment in 1834, with the Marquess of Worcester (soon to be the 7th Duke of Beaufort) as its commanding officer. The regiment became the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars in 1841 and, with its roots deep in Beaufort Hunt country, marched past to ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’. When the Yeomanry celebrated its bicentenary in 1994, the 11th Duke was regimental colonel. The Oxfordshire Yeomanry was officially disbanded in 1828 but it remained in being, thanks to being privately financed by the Duke of Marlborough. It was restored to the Army List two years later, becoming the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, or Queer Objects on Horseback, with striking facings of (rather trying) Mantua purple. The regiment was closely linked to the dukes of Marlborough and their seat at Blenheim Palace, which provided a striking backdrop for annual camps: the 6th Duke took command of the regiment in 1845 and the 9th Duke in 1910. Amongst its officers on the eve of the First World War was Major Winston Churchill, who was honorary colonel until his death in 1965. He had given a detachment of the regiment a prominent position at his funeral, but its protocol offended the Foot Guards brigade major who pointed out, with some asperity, that this was not how state funerals were done. Major Tim May, the detachment’s commander, was characteristically unabashed: ‘In the Oxfordshire Yeomanry we always do state funerals this way.’

      This was just how jolly yeo-boys were meant to behave, with a faintly cavalier disregard for the formal side of military life and a generous pinch of self-parody. A Yeomanry brigadier detailed one of his colonels to send a subaltern on a wearing and doubtless nugatory mission. ‘I shall send Charles’, decided the colonel. ‘Charles? Charles?’ replied the brigadier. ‘D’you think he’ll go?’ Cartoons in officers’ messes caught yeomen the way they liked to think of themselves. A portly farmer-turned-trooper in the Suffolk Hussars scrambles up a bosky bank, with his sergeant, mounted, in the lane behind him, anxious for a report:

      No sergeant – no – I don’t see no enemy – not to speak of I don’t – But I do see as John Martin’s roots is terrible backward – wonderful backward they is – to be sure!

      ‘Beg pardon, Major,’ observes a trooper, drawn up in rank and file, with an easy gesture towards his passing squadron leader. ‘You’ll excuse my mention on it, but you’ve got something on your noose.’ The first part-time major general since the 1940s was the 6th Duke of Westminster. He had joined the yeomanry as a trooper in 1970, was commissioned in 1973, and went on to command the Queen’s Own Yeomanry. He reckoned that ‘military zeal is at its best when tempered by a fine sense of humour’: a wholly yeomanry view.¹⁸