Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
‘The eyes and ears of the Army’ by W. B. Giles.
The Yeomanry underwent a resurgence when the French invasion scares of the 1850s saw redbrick forts put up on Portsdown Hill to prevent an invading army – which might have landed at sleepy Bosham or harmless Chichester – from descending on Portsmouth dockyard. Far more characteristic of the age were the revived volunteers, about as unlike the yeomanry as it was possible to be. They were prevailingly middle class. Some units elected their own officers. They favoured uniforms of ‘French grey’, and were delighted to be forbidden the gold lace worn by regulars since this reduced the chances of being mistaken for ‘the dregs of society’. They seized on innovation: Hans Busk, one of the most prominent leaders of the rifle volunteer movement, set up a model rifle club at Cambridge in 1837. Long before the Boer War gave fresh emphasis to marksmanship in the regular army, volunteers were spending their weekends on the ranges at Bisley in Surrey. The National Rifle Association was founded in 1859 ‘for the encouragement of Volunteer Rifle Corps, and the promotion of rifle-shooting throughout Great Britain.’ It moved to Bisley in 1890 when high velocity rifles made the ranges in suburban Wimbledon unsafe. Volunteers eagerly combined their martial zeal with the bicycle, another great passion of the late nineteenth century, to produce cyclist battalions. There was a Railway Volunteer Staff Corps in 1865 and a Volunteer Medical Staff Corps twenty years later. Cartoonists sniped away (‘Wipe the blood off your sword, general?’) but the volunteers, in their worthy, whiskery way, somehow went to the heart of Victorian England. They were visible to the community in the way that regulars were not. They appeared unfussy and meritocratic, and embraced the innovation that regulars, with all their noise and pipeclay, seemed to shun. But their officers were not necessarily gentlemen. There was a saying of the 1860s that a greengrocer with a volunteer commission was not an officer but a greengrocer pleased. When aspiring Jewish families wanted to confirm their own rising status they joined the yeomanry. The Rothschilds bought Waddesdon Manor in 1874, and patronised the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, soon nicknamed ‘The Flying Foreskins’.19
The Boer War unleashed a surge of patriotic enthusiasm, and saw volunteers and yeomanry as part of what Kipling eulogised in The Absent Minded Beggar where ‘Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl/Son of a Lambeth publican – it’s all the same to-day.’ The process of getting part-timers embodied, trained and sent to South Africa was wasteful and inefficient. It was quipped that the ‘IY’ (Imperial Yeomanry) hat-badge stood for ‘I Yield’, and it was clear that the whole busy ant-heap of yeomanry, militia, and volunteers needed kicking over.
As part of the main post-war reforms that took their name from the Liberal Secretary of State for War, R. B. Haldane, the auxiliary forces were reorganised root and branch, and so the Territorial Force, with an establishment of just under 315,000, came into being on 1 April 1908. One of Haldane’s strokes of genius was to entrust the TF’s administration to County Associations chaired by lord lieutenants. The force’s 1909 yearbook lists county chairman like a digest of Debretts: Chester: the Duke of Westminster; Derby: the Duke of Devonshire; Essex: the Earl of Warwick; Hampshire: the Marquess of Winchester; Middlesex: the Duke of Bedford; Oxford: the Earl of Jersey; and Warwick: the Marquess of Hertford. There were 115 peers in the association by November 1909.
Many lord lieutenants were also militia colonels, and had been inclined to oppose the reorganisation, but the king made it clear that he backed Haldane. The powerful National Service League feared that if the TF actually worked, the case for conscription would be weakened, and therefore condemned the scheme as inadequate. Some regulars grumbled about the sheer impossibility of part-timers grasping the mysteries of gunnery, and the new TF embodied all the social complexities of the auxiliary forces that composed it. At one extreme the yeomanry was richly decorated with peers and Tory MPs. Brigadier General the Earl of Longford died commanding 2nd Mounted Brigade on Gallipoli in August 1915. They had advanced across a dry salt lake, marching steadily in open order under accurate shrapnel fire. ‘Don’t bother ducking,’ he told his officers. ‘The men don’t like it and it doesn’t do any good.’ Not far away that day Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Milbanke, 9th Baronet, with a VC from the Boer War and now commanding the Sherwood Rangers, announced that the regiment was to attack a redoubt: ‘I don’t know where it is, and don’t think anyone else does either, but in any case we are to go ahead and attack any Turks we meet.’ He did, and was duly killed.20
At the other extreme, when young Alan Harding, a Post Office clerk, sought a Territorial commission he knew better than to approach one of the ‘class battalions’ of the London regiment, like the London Rifle Brigade or Queen Victoria’s Rifles. These were subscription clubs for all ranks, but Harding slipped instead into 11/London, the Finsbury Rifles, fondly known, from the location of its headquarters at the top of Penton Street and the beery ways of its members, as the Pentonville Pissers. After a good war, Harding transferred to the regular Somerset Light Infantry, and was knighted in 1942, using the name John which his regular brothers in arms had preferred to Alan Francis. This had not, though, stopped subordinates from maintaining that his initials stood for ‘All Fucking Hurry’. After mobilisation in 1914, middle-class units considered that both 1/8th Royal Scots and 1/8th Scottish Rifles were ‘slum battalions,’ and the gentleman troopers of the Westminster Dragoons found their journey to Egypt aboard the same troopship as 1/9th Manchesters made an ordeal by, horrid to relate, the Mancunians’ predilection for spitting and swearing.21
On the formation of the Territorial Force all officers had their commissions signed by the monarch. When serving alongside regulars they took precedence ‘as the junior of their degree’, and were subject to military law at all times, principles which have not changed since.22 Mobilised Territorials served alongside regulars in all the main theatres of the First World War. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Territorial Army was formally absorbed into the regular army. In both world wars, though, the regular army kept a firm grip on senior appointments. In February 1916 the House of Commons was told that only 18 Territorials had risen above lieutenant colonel at the front and three at home. In January the following year Lord Derby, secretary of state for war, announced that four Territorials had commanded divisions, and 52 brigades. He later admitted that these figures included officers in temporary command in the absence of the regular incumbent, and only ten Territorials were currently commanding brigades.
Assertions were made that it was wholly proper for regulars to have a controlling interest in senior command. But this is undermined by the fact that both the Australian and Canadian contingents on the Western Front, by wide agreement some of finest Allied troops, were eventually commanded by lieutenant generals John Monash and Arthur Currie, who were respectively a businessman and an engineer by profession. Both had ‘amateur’ major generals amongst their subordinates. William Holmes, killed commanding 4th Australian Division in 1918, had never been a regular, though he had joined the New South Wales Militia as a boy bugler and won a DSO in the Boer War. David Watson, a journalist by profession, commanded 4th Canadian Division for the whole of its existence. Andrew McNaughton, a university lecturer in engineering, commanded the Canadian corps heavy artillery and went on to command the Canadian 2nd Army in a later war. Archibald Macdonnell had been a regular officer for just a year before going off to be a Mountie, and led 1st Canadian Division to some of its greatest successes. The British were occasionally prepared to make generals out of civilian specialists, commissioning Sir Eric Geddes, general manager of the North Eastern Railway, as major general in 1916. But not once did they give a reservist permanent command of a division. In view of the success of the Canadians and Australians, who produced real talent (and not a little rancour and incompetence too) from a far smaller recruitment pool, we can see that there was indeed a khaki ceiling with which non-regulars collided.
In September 1939 the Territorial Army was abolished as a separate entity, and its conditions of service were changed so that ‘all wartime promotion would be temporary, with no opportunity for substantive advancement and reversion to the pre-war rank at the war’s end’.23 Eventually concessions in the form of timed promotions (which could take an officer to lieutenant colonel after twenty-two years’ service) were introduced in May 1945. A few months earlier former TA officers included one substantive major general, Claude Liardet, who had commanded 56th London Division before the war but did not lead it in action; one temporary lieutenant general; seven major