Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  The Militia would be drawn up in line and the officers or non-commissioned officers from the regiments requiring volunteers would give a glowing description of their several regiments, describing the victories they had gained and the honours they had acquired, and concluded by offering a bounty. If these inducements were not effective in getting men then coercive measures were adopted: heavy and long drills and field exercises were forced upon them: which became so oppressive that to escape them, the men would embrace the alternative and join the regulars.13

  Militia officers were offered free regular commissions if they could inveigle specified numbers of militiamen into signing on as regulars. George Simmons, from a family of impoverished gentry, managed to persuade a hundred men of the Royal South Lincolnshire Militia, of which he was assistant surgeon, to transfer into the regular army. He was rewarded with a regular commission in the crack 95th Rifles, and enjoyed a lively time in the Peninsula, ending up as a lieutenant colonel. By the end of the nineteenth century, when service in the militia was wholly voluntary, it had become a way for young men to test their aptitude for military service, and was ‘little more than a recruiting vehicle for the regular army, into whose ranks some 35 per cent of its members passed each year’.14 After the abolition of the purchase of regular commissions in 1871 a young man could still obtain a militia commission, which did not require him to attend Sandhurst. Then, provided he could pass the examination, he could transfer to the regular army: two future field marshals, John French and Henry Wilson, gained their regular commissions this way.

  In sharp social contrast to the militia were the volunteers. They were raised in times of great national emergency, like the Jacobite invasions of 1715 and 1745, and the threat posed by revolutionary France saw the first great wave of volunteering. Volunteer units were often middle class, their ranks filled with men who would have bought themselves out of militia service, giving the cartoonist James Gillray the unmissable opportunity of pouring meaty-bottomed tradesmen into tight breeches. Units were sometimes raised by the efforts of great families, in just the way that Bevil Grenville would have understood. Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland, had been (as Lord Percy) a professional soldier: a captain in the 85th Foot at seventeen, he fought at Minden and in North America. Percy left the army as a lieutenant general, and inherited his dukedom in 1786. Responsible, as lord lieutenant of Northumberland, for his county’s militia, he also raised the Percy Tenantry Volunteers from his own extensive estates. When he died in 1817 it was reported that the entire force was ‘paid and in every respect maintained in arms at the sole expense of this patriotic nobleman’. Infantry companies and cavalry troops were recruited from specific villages: the 1st and 2nd Barrisford Companies came from the parishes of Simonburn, Stamfordham and Kirkwhelpington, and the Guzance and Thirston Company from Felton Parish. The Percy Tenantry Volunteers numbered around 1,500 men, supported by the two three-pounder guns of its Volunteer Horse Artillery, based at Alnwick, the duke’s seat.

  The Percy Volunteers mirrored the area’s social fabric, with bigger tenant farmers officering the local companies, farmworkers shouldering their muskets, and the duke’s directing hand on the reins. Volunteer units raised in London were tiny by comparison, and rejoiced in names like the Temple Association, the Hackney Volunteers, the Guildhall Light Infantry, and the Bread Street Ward Volunteers. Often the city’s hierarchy led the way, with the same prominent citizens that summoned public meetings to raise volunteers emerging as the new unit’s officers. Volunteer officers were often elected by the unit as a whole, and democracy did not always obey the dictates of local hierarchy. It was also noticeable that volunteers, most of whom had to buy their own uniforms, tended to favour cutting-edge light infantry fashion (with no shortage of frogging), sometimes selecting blue precisely because regular infantry wore red, and so there was no chance of a heroic cheesemonger in the Poplar and Blackwall Volunteers being mistaken for a private in the umpteenth Foot. There were different terms of service: the Frampton Volunteers in Gloucestershire were prepared to deal with the French up to eight miles from their home village, but for the Hitchin Association in Hertfordshire just three miles was the limit.15 The government did its best to bring the volunteers under central control and the 1804 Volunteer Act did at least ensure that all were paid for twenty-one days a year.

  If a man’s zeal for his country’s defence was gratified by turning out as a smart light infantryman, how much more satisfying it was to emerge as a cavalryman with clinking spurs, and sword-scabbard trailing across the cobbles? The problem, even in a horse-using society, lay in the provision of suitable mounts. The Provisional Cavalry Act of 1796, an offshoot of the militia concept, required all those in possession of more than ten riding or carriage horses to furnish, when required, one mounted man, fully armed and equipped. Far more significant, though, was the raising, from 1794, of troops of ‘Gentlemen and Yeomanry.’ These local troops, officered by landowners, tended to be attracted by cavalry uniforms of the showier sort, light by name if not by nature, and one reason why the 1796 pattern light cavalry sword, with its D-shaped guard and broad, heavily curved blade, remains relatively common is the fact that so many of them were used by the yeomanry.

  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. Som
e 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

  Fig 2: Yeomanry reconnaissance at its best: ‘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 lieutenant
s 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