General brevet promotions could mark an event like a Royal Jubilee, or the end of a war. A large promotion followed peace in 1815 ‘to reward those by whose brilliant service the peace had been achieved’.11 When the army was being shrunk in the 1820s, brevet rank was used as an inducement to get officers to leave. They could retire with ‘Superior Brevet Rank in the Army’ and receive the half-pay of that new rank. They could then, if they wished, sell this ‘Unattached Half-Pay Commission’, an enticing departure from the general principle that one could only sell a commission that had been bought. There were an enormous amount of general brevets awarded in 1846, 1851, and 1854, but the process created a huge amount of elderly generals: the average age of major generals in the 1854 brevet was over 65. Over a twenty-year period half the major generals had not served for ten years, many had not served for twenty, and one had had no service for thirty-five. General brevets were abolished in 1854 and a fixed establishment for general officers was introduced, with rules for promotion and retirement.
A brevet officer usually did duty in his regimental rank, though serving outside his regiment – for instance, as aide-de-camp to a general – would allow him to be employed in his army rank, and to draw the full pay for it. There were certain other advantages. In 1869 it was laid down that captains holding a major’s brevet would be allocated cabins in troopships ahead of mere regimental captains; and in 1898 all brevet officers were ordered to wear the badges and appurtenances of their army rank. An order of 1912, however, ungenerously warned that brevet rank did not exempt an officer from passing the appropriate promotion examinations.
The over-generous use of brevets, together with the granting of temporary rank to help officer an army swollen by war, could create anomalies, with a favoured few enjoying temporary and brevet rank well in excess of their regimental rank. The Duke of Marlborough tried to explain that just because an officer had a temporary commission as brigadier, and brevets taking him through major to colonel, he was still not the senior captain in his own regiment, and when all the froth and bubble had gone, he was likely to finish up commanding a company again. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission as brigadier,’ wrote the duke, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, and there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’12 In 1767, a dispute over command of the Cork garrison between Lieutenant Colonel Tulikens of the 45th Foot and Lieutenant Colonel Cunningham (regimentally a captain in the 45th, but holding his senior rank by brevet) established that ‘When corps join either in camp, garrison or quarters, the oldest officer (whether by Brevet or any other commission) is to command the whole.’13
Brevet promotion lasted for much of the twentieth century, although it was increasingly discredited. On 26 August 1914, 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders formed part of the 3rd Division, holding the line in front of Audencourt at the battle of Le Cateau. Troops in that sector did not receive the order for a general withdrawal, and so, true to the standards of that tough old army, they fought on. At about 7.45 p.m. that evening Colonel William Gordon VC, second in command of the Gordons as a regimental major, noted that his battalion now had a company of Royal Scots and two of Royal Irish fighting alongside it. He immediately took command of the combined force by virtue of his army rank, which made him senior to Lieutenant Colonel Neish, his own commanding officer. The little party began to fall back just after midnight. It eventually collided with a field gun blocking the route, and although the Gordons rushed the piece before it could be fired, nearby Germans immediately stood to their arms and after an hour’s battle the British were overwhelmed. The Gordons lost about five hundred men, although a few survivors made their way through the German lines to Antwerp and on to England.
‘The fortune of war was hard upon the 1/Gordons’, lamented the official historian. ‘For the time, they practically ceased to exist as a battalion.’14 Survivors found the circumstances of the capture extremely galling, and after the war there was a civil action when Gordon sued a Dundee newspaper for repeating a story that he had ordered the men to lay down their arms: he demanded £5,000 and received £500, which was nevertheless a substantial sum. Whatever the truth of the decision to surrender, command arrangements had certainly not made for a quick decision at a moment when time was of the essence. Nor did brevet rank make Major General Hubert Hamilton’s task any easier at Le Cateau. His 3rd Division was bearing the brunt of the battle, but when Brigadier General McCracken of 7th Infantry Brigade was wounded, Hamilton had to send for the Army List to determine that, although both Lieutenant Colonel Bird of the Royal Irish and Lascelles of the Worcesters were substantive lieutenant colonels, and the latter had gained substantive rank first, Bird had an earlier lieutenant colonel’s brevet that gave him command of the brigade.
Brevet rank lapsed in 1952 but reappeared (though only for major to lieutenant colonel) two years later, to increase the field of selection for promotion to colonel, and ‘earmark outstanding officers and give them incentive’.15 It was finally abolished in 1967, although it lingered on into the twenty-first century in the Territorial Army, for specific use in the case of a territorial second-in-command of a unit normally commanded by a regular officer.
Even if no brevet rank was involved, an officer could be granted temporary or local rank, both of limited duration and the latter more fragile than the first. Local rank began by having a specific geographical limitation, like the ‘for America only’ caveat that made James Wolfe a major general in 1759. When Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief, formed his command into three brigades, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Pigot (in Boston in 1775) was promoted locally to brigadier general. He was to command his own 38th Foot, together with the 5th and 52nd. It was Pigot’s brigade that led the decisive break into the Patriots’ redoubt on Breed’s Hill (the key point in the battle known as Bunker Hill), and Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the American Department, announced in the Gazette that ‘the Success of the Day must in great Measure be attributed to his firmness and Gallantry.’ It brought him not only one of the first available regimental colonelcies, but promotion to local major general. He succeeded to his brother’s baronetcy in 1777, and shortly afterwards seniority brought him the substantive step of major general. Sir Robert was promoted lieutenant general in 1782, three years after his return to England. He did not serve again, but devoted himself to the improvement of his estate at Patshull, work begun by his elder brother, who had consulted Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.16
Temporary rank was linked to a specific appointment, but, unlike local rank which was generally unpaid, brought its holder the appropriate pay. The London Gazette solemnly deprived Winston Churchill of the temporary lieutenant colonelcy he had been granted in early 1916 to command 6/Royal Scots Fusiliers, and when he returned to politics that summer he reverted to major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. The rules could be very hard. Colonel Charles MacGregor was promoted to temporary major-general to serve as quartermaster-general in India in 1881, bypassing the appointment of brigadier. Although he held the post for four years, and was knighted in the process, he gave it up before seniority had yet made him a major general and so crashed back to colonel, and although he made a dignified protest, the system would not budge. Already mortally ill, he set off home. A Gazette of 18 February 1887 duly promoted him to major general, with seniority backdated to 22 January, but he had died at Cairo on 5 February and never knew of it.
The two world wars saw a huge expansion of local and temporary rank with the Second World War seeing the creation of a ‘war substantive’ rank which was precisely what its name suggests. The youngest British brigadier general in the First World War was Roland Boys Bradford, killed outside Bourlon Wood in 1917 at the age of 24, still only a substantive captain. The youngest major general of the war was the notoriously testy Keppel Bethell, described by one of his staff officers as ‘the most insubordinate man I have ever met’. He gained the temporary ran
k in March 1918 but never rose above substantive captain during the whole war, becoming temporary major in 1915, brevet major in 1916, and brevet lieutenant colonel in 1917. At that time promotion to full colonel came after four years as a lieutenant colonel and Bethell duly became a colonel in 1921, though it took him till 1930, six years before he retired, to get his second star back.
In 1944 Michael Carver took over 4th Armoured Brigade in Normandy, becoming, at the age of thirty, the youngest British brigade commander of the war. He had been commissioned into the Royal Tank Corps in 1935 and took command of 1st Royal Tank Regiment in 1942: his driver remembered him as a ‘young, serious and very professional soldier, devoid of messes and batmen’.17 Carver later made no secret of the fact that ‘my attitude to politics and inherited privilege was … left of centre.’18 One of his first acts was ‘to rid myself of the encumbrance of my second-in-command, who served no useful purpose’.19 He then decided that the commanding officer of his brigade’s motor battalion, 2/King’s Royal Rifle Corps had ‘lost his grip’, and decided to replace him.20 Rightly sensing trouble, he asked another senior officer from the same regiment to visit the battalion to double-check, and then duly sacked the commanding officer. When Carver proposed to lead an attack with the Royal Scots Greys, his divisional commander objected ‘Couldn’t you send a less well-known regiment?’ Undaunted, he moved on to unseat another commanding officer, Sandy Cameron of 3rd County of London Yeomanry, an experienced warrior with bars to both his DSO and MC. ‘He greatly resented the decision,’ admitted Carver, ‘but 20 years later wrote me a charming letter admitting that I had been right.’
Carver was fortunate in gaining a temporary lieutenant-colonelcy after the war, to work for ‘a dull, characterless gunner … a dead loss’.21 He did not get command of a brigade again until 1960, sixteen years after commanding one in battle. But he was more fortunate than Peter Young, just four days younger, who led a Commando brigade in Burma in early 1945. Young did not become a lieutenant colonel again till 1953, when he went off to command a regiment in the Arab Legion. He left the army in 1959, still a lieutenant colonel, granted the honorary rank of brigadier on his retirement to run the military history department at Sandhurst, where he became this author’s first boss.
The army still grants temporary and local rank. The former is often awarded to an officer beginning an appointment in the course of which he will get promoted in the normal way of things, but there are times when temporary rank may reflect a wholly exceptional circumstance. In December 2007 Colonel Richard Iron was made a temporary brigadier to serve alongside the Iraqi army, helping develop its counter-insurgency plan for Basra. The British army’s run-down in Basra was primarily dictated by the political requirement to minimise casualties. Iron became a unrepentantly controversial figure. He was close to senior Iraqi officers who felt that they had received insufficient help, and he later suggested that the British had deviated from the principles of counter-insurgency that they, of all people, should have understood. He reverted to colonel on his return in 2008, and the following spring was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office, which has a proprietary interest in this award. Local rank usually reflects a short term expedient. For instance, when 4th Armoured Brigade was preparing to deploy for the first Gulf War, its established ‘Transition To War’ posts were immediately filled by the grant of local rank.22
CHAPTER 6
WEEKEND WARRIORS
THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN the (full-time) regular army and (part-time) volunteer and auxiliary forces has been long, for there was a militia long before there were regulars. This has been a complex (and often unedifying) association, with militia units being ‘embodied’ for occasional full-time service in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Territorial Army being merged, lock, stock, and barrel into ‘a single integrated national army’ in 1940. Two of the most irritating acronyms in my own time were STABs (‘Stupid TA Bastards’) and ARABs (‘Arrogant Regular Army Bastards’). The Reserve Forces Act 1996 made it much easier than before to mobilise reservists in situations short of major war, and 13,510 were called up between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 1 June 2007. They served in a wide variety of posts, from deputy brigade commanders to private soldiers, sometimes absorbed within regular units, and sometimes serving in composite TA companies.
There were more triumphs than disasters. 1/Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment took a slice of Territorials with it to Al Amarah in 2004. Charlie Curry, a regular captain, describes the integration of a multiple (half-platoon) of Scots Territorials into his company:
We had ownership of them from the start of their mobilisation and they were trained centrally by the battle group prior to deployment. We had teething problems as we whittled down those not physically or mentally tough enough for the job in hand … What remained was a very well motivated multiple commanded by Sgt Steve Cornhill and supported by Cpl Steve Marsh and LCpl Sven Wentzel. These regs would assist in the integration of the multiple on ops, and eventually step back to allow the TA ranks to take the leash. It is worthy of note that other TA soldiers wound up in company HQ and in other multiples within the company. One such individual was Cpl ‘H’ Hogarth who went into the company signals detachment and manned the ops room throughout the tour … he was a fantastic operator, could effectively run the ops room alone, and could fix anything he turned his hand to – a top lad.1
A regular Royal Armoured Corps NCO in the same battle group was also impressed by the Territorials he served alongside. ‘At the beginning I thought that because they were part-timers I would be better than them,’ he wrote, ‘but they soon changed my mind. I would honestly work in any environment with them again, and I made some really good mates.’2
The regular army could not have fought either world war without a massive influx of non-regulars, with the TA, with all its strengths and weaknesses, taking the strain before the ponderous engine of conscription could cut in. In terms of Britain’s long-term relationship with her defenders, locally recruited auxiliary forces have always been more visible than regulars, who are either away campaigning or mewed up in barracks that have become increasingly forbidding. For most of the army’s history, there were more auxiliaries than regulars actually stationed in Britain. In 1935 Lieutenant Colonel J. K. Dunlop wrote that
In these days, most of the Regular battalions are concentrated in one or other of our great military training areas – Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, or Catterick. The Militia is no longer in existence, and there are large areas of the land without any visible sign of the existence of the British Army were it not for the local Territorial Army unit.3
Things are different today only in that the TA’s geographical ‘footprint’ of training centres is about one-tenth the size of that in 1935.
Service in the fyrd, the Old English word for army, was one of the ‘common burdens’ shouldered by free men of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, who were obliged ‘to build fortifications, repair bridges and undertake military service’.4 I can scarcely think of the fyrd save in terms of that dark October day in 1066 when Duke William beat Harold Godwinson on Senlac Hill to seize the crown of England. But it remained a useful asset even to the victorious Normans. Levies from the northern shires stood steady around the great bloc of dismounted knights (all hefting sword and spear beneath the consecrated banners from the minsters of York, Beverley, and Ripon that gave the fight its name) to break the wild rush of King David’s Scotsmen at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. An obligation for military service was incorporated in the Assize of Arms of 1181 and the Statute of Winchester of 1285, and embodied into the first militia acts in 1558. In the absence of a standing army, the process of selecting men for military service ‘kept the more established householders at home and sent abroad those socially less desirable persons whom deputy [lord] lieutenants and [village] constables wished to be rid of’.5
The practice of calling up the most easily spared sa
t uneasily alongside the theory that the country was best defended by free men with a stake in its welfare. Sir Francis Bacon had argued that sturdy yeomen made the best soldiers: tenants, cottagers, and labourers were too servile; vagrants and vagabonds unstable and unfit. The Trained Bands, formed in 1572 in an effort to modernise the militia, were essentially county militia regiments, controlled by the lord lieutenants (who entrusted the heavy lifting to their deputies). They were composed of freeholders, householders and their sons, taught how to use pike and musket by a small number of professional soldiers – the rough equivalents of Permanent Staff Instructors in today’s TA. The quality of the trained bands was mixed, partly because the more affluent strove to avoid personal service but sent servants or hired substitutes to represent them. In 1642 the London Trained Bands numbered 8,000 men in six regiments, named the Red, Blue, Green, White, Orange, and Yellow. They were certainly better than most, partly because of the role they played in providing guards and contingents for the ceremonies of mercantile London. There was an intimate connection between status in the city and rank in the Trained Bands: all the colonels were aldermen. They also gained much benefit from the existence of the city’s voluntary military associations, like the ‘Martial Yard’, ‘The Gentlemen of the Private and Loving Company of Cripplegate’, and ‘The Society of the Artillery Garden’.
Many of the enthusiasts belonging to these clubs would have read the drill-books of the period, perhaps taking note of Robert Ward’s warning in his 1639 Animadversions of Warre that drinking was ‘the great fault of the English nation’ and particularly of English martial culture. Ward was profoundly mistrustful of the Trained Bands, and his observations prefigure the exasperated comments of many regular soldiers who have tried to train part-timers. Their training periods were
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