Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
field force divisions between 1940 and 1945 only three were Territorials. Moreover, a sharp cull of TA commanding officers had seen 253 removed in the war’s first thirteen months, as opposed to 72 regulars.
There was, in part, good reason for this. The TA was endemically short of officers, despite their selection criteria being lower than for regulars. The lack of soldiers at weekend training and annual camp made it hard for a Territorial officer to feel the full weight of command, and Territorial commanding officers were not obliged to attend the Senior Officers School. There was a wide spread between ‘class corps’ like the London Scottish and the Honourable Artillery Company, that naturally attracted well-educated recruits, and the majority of units that relied heavily on urban working-class soldiers. These working-class soldiers needed the pay and found the two-week annual camp (often at the seaside) a blessed relief from the daily grind, but it was hard to produce NCOs from amongst this group. Many of the TA’s problems stemmed from systemic underfunding. As David French points out in his majestic Raising Churchill’s Army, ‘the Territorials became victims of governments determined to reduce estimates, and a War Office that preferred to see the cuts fall upon the part-time Territorials rather than the regulars.’24
Experienced Territorial officers, some of whom had commanded with success during the last phases of the First World War, complained that the regular army, having denied them the opportunity to train and recruit, now blamed them for it. In April 1941, one of the few surviving TA commanding officers in 48th Division discerned ‘a very definite set against Territorial officers’. The Territorial acting commander of 26th Armoured Brigade writing in May 1944, doubted if he would even manage to command his own regiment when his current appointment ended. ‘I have the ever-present spectre of some suitable Lt Col arriving from way back,’ he wrote, ‘either a loathsome little tick from the Tank Corps or else an equally horrible cast-off from some cavalry regiment – we’ve had plenty of experience of them in this war.’25
The TA was reconstituted in 1946, and the successive reductions, in 1956, 1961, and 1966 matched wider reductions in defence expenditure and the army’s increasing preoccupation with the defence of Germany. The reductions announced in 1965, however, brought about a more radical downsizing, to some 50,000, and even did away with the name, replacing it with the untidy Territorial and Army Volunteer Reserve, or T&AVR. Territorials had at least abbreviated to ‘Terriers’, and a suggestion that ‘Tavvers’ might replace it drew little applause. The disagreeable title was eventually discarded after a Conservative victory in 1971 saw the gradual increase of the TA to reflect the perceived importance of home defence against Soviet special forces. From 1981 the TA reached its post-war apogee, providing the bulk of a division to reinforce 1st (British) Corps in Germany, and reaching almost 89 per cent of its establishment of 86,000. With the collapse of Communism, however, numbers shrank once again, first with the 1990 Options for Change review under the Conservatives, and then again with the Strategic Defence Review of 1998 under Labour, which brought the TA down to around 40,000.
The County Associations (a term harking back to Parliamentarian organisations in the Civil War) were Haldane’s device for ensuring that the TA would be administered and supplied by bodies that would at one and the same time protect it from the War Office, and take some of the load off commanding officers’ shoulders. They would also link the TA to the community and, so Haldane hoped, encourage military training more widely. Over the TA’s evolution these associations had come under the same pressure as the organisation they represented, in part because a smaller TA demanded less administrative support, and in part, too, because a regular army anxious to save money on the TA did not always welcome their interference. There were ninety-four associations in 1909, and sixty-six in 1965, with further reductions to produce the ten large regional groupings that exist today. The associations were successively renamed, becoming, from 2000, Reserve Forces and Cadet Associations. Although the RFCAs rightly emphasise their local knowledge, continuity and independence, they are now more firmly under the control of the army’s chain of command than ever before.
There can be no doubt that their influence has declined. In 1965 the Duke of Norfolk, chairman of the Council of Territorial Associations, led the opposition to the reduction, and although he commanded substantial support (the attempt to reverse the cuts was lost by a single vote in the Commons) he was no match for a Labour Government whose military advisers firmly believed that the reforms were essential. But in 1990 the cuts imposed by Options for Change would have been more severe had it not been for the personal intervention of George Younger, who had recently been secretary of state for defence and carried great weight within the ruling Conservative party and the army, in which he had served as both a regular and a Territorial. During the debate over the Strategic Defence Review I was assured by one of the TA’s supporters that ‘the lord lieutenants would never stand it’, but it was evident that the wrath of the lieutenancy did not alarm a Labour administration with a massive majority, and in any event there was a palpable tension between Harris Tweed and Hugo Boss, with the waning power of the old county connections eclipsed by the growing strength of the Whitehall apparat.
Moreover, the office of lord lieutenant itself had changed from the days of Elizabeth I, when its holders were concerned with enforcing the Act of Uniformity and commanding the county militia at a time of real threat. During Elizabeth’s reign all who held office for any length of time were peers or heirs to peerages, apart from three who had close relationships with the queen. Forty-six of the 103 lieutenancies were held by peers as late as 1956, all but one of whom (Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke in London) had inherited their titles, and a further sixteen baronets. Most were landowners, thirty-two had held the rank of lieutenant colonel or its equivalent, and amongst their military awards were twenty-three DSOs and eighteen MCs. In 2006 there were only eight hereditary peers and three baronets amongst the 99 lord lieutenants, and only six of the total had held senior military rank. The first female lord lieutenant had been appointed in 1975 when Lavinia Duchess of Norfolk took over from her husband, who had died in office: there were twenty-eight ladies amongst the 2006 sample. There was no longer a natural bias towards the land, and only eight rated their main concern as farming or estate management. Some lord lieutenants have run major public companies, and several of the ladies have had an impressive involvement in charities.26 The lieutenancy makes an extraordinary contribution to public life, but its days of marshalling county opinion are long over.
About 12 per cent of the 2,700 active deputy lieutenants in the United Kingdom held senior military rank, a proportion justified by the need to advise non-military lord lieutenants on their responsibilities towards the reserve forces and cadets in their counties. As evidence of the wholesale shift away from traditional deputies, when most retired brigadiers soon added DL to their post-nominal initials, there is now a conscious attempt to make deputies socially inclusive, and to reflect the ethnic composition of the population.27
In one sense it is hard to fault the remorseless progress towards what is often hailed as ‘One Army’. Territorial officers are now selected by the same process as their regular counterparts, and pass out from Sandhurst in a parade which culminates (just as it does for regulars) in marching up the steps of the Grand Entrance. Promotion across the whole rank-structure depends on passing the appropriate courses. The TA’s representation within the army has increased. When I became a brigadier in 1994 I was the only one in a large TA. Now there is a two-star Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets), a post held first by the Duke of Westminster in 2004, and there are TA brigadiers at Land Command, Headquarters Adjutant General and the army’s district headquarters.
In terms of overall training and efficiency, the TA I left in 2000 was unrecognisable from the organisation I joined as a private in 1964. Its expectation of use had also been transformed. Militia, yeomanry, and volunteers had been concerned with home defence. Haldane’s new Territorial Force was so called because it was territorial (designed to defend the national territory) rather than expeditionary. Those of its members who agreed to serve overseas proudly wore an Imperial Service badge on their right breast. In 1914, Territorials had to volunteer to be sent abroad, and by no means all did so. Although those who joined the TA in the inter-war years and after 1946 recognised that they might be called up for foreign service, there was a clear understanding that this would only happen in time of a major national emergency. Indeed, for most of my own time the mechanism for calling