Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Capn Lieut James Grant to be Captain

  Vice Heptune Dead

  Lieut Robert Wilson to be Capn Lieut

  Vice Grant Preferred

  Ensign Wilm Roberts to be Lt

  Vice Wilson preferred

  Joseph Wrigglesworth Volunteer to be Ensign

  Vice Roberts preferred.

  Because Heptune’s vacancy had been caused by his death, all these promotions were free, and swept up the senior officer of each rank below captain. But when Lieutenant Lord Borriedale of the 17th Foot sold out, the vacancies were filled by purchase:

  Ensign Isaac Cary to be Lieut

  Vice Lord Borriedale by Purchase

  Robert Ludlow Gent to be Ensign

  Vice Cary by Purchase.44

  Joseph Wrigglesworth would have been serving in North America as a gentleman volunteer, messing with the officers but doing duty as a private soldier, hoping that either gallantry in the field or comradeship at table would leave him well placed when an ensign’s vacancy came up. Sometimes the practice concealed fraud, for that gallant officer Lieutenant Colonel James Cockburne of the 35th listed his son William as a volunteer, drawing a private’s pay, before gaining him an under-age ensigncy. James Brotherton, a light dragoon officer in the Peninsula, thought that most volunteers were killed in an effort to make their names, ‘but those who escaped were well rewarded for their adventurous spirit.’45 Perhaps the best-known example of the successful volunteer is that of George Hennell, son of a Coventry ribbon manufacturer ‘in a moderate way of business’ who arrived in Spain in 1812 with a letter of introduction to Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, who attached him the 94th Foot. Two days later he took part in the storming of Badajoz, and led the way up one of the storming ladders, shouting to encourage the men as he did so. He was promptly given an ensigncy in the excellent 43rd Foot. A gentleman volunteer is remembered in one of the classic images of the age. When Major General James Wolfe was mortally wounded at Quebec, Lieutenant Henry Browne and Volunteer James Henderson of the Louisbourg Grenadiers were with him at the end. Henderson is frozen forever in Edward Penny’s painting, gesturing helpfully towards Wolfe’s victorious firing line which is, alas for accuracy, far closer to the stricken general than was actually the case.

  Genuinely close to Wolfe when he died was his adjutant general, Major Isaac Barré, plucked from obscurity by his master, and told that he would have the honour of taking the victory dispatch homewards, duly receiving the promotion that usually came to such bearers of happy news. He now lamented to William Pitt that ‘one hapless stroke’, had robbed him of his patron, leaving him ‘in all the distressful circumstances of an orphan’ and a bullet had smashed his nose and left him blind in one eye.46 One man’s misfortune was another’s good luck. Wolfe left a thousand pounds apiece to four brother officers, one of whom was Colonel Adolphus Oughton, whose own career is a wonderful example of the manipulation of interest by an officer who worried, as many did, about looking after his family and friends.

  Oughton was the illegitimate son of Colonel Sir Adolphus Oughton, Baronet and MP, and Miss Frances Dickinson. The baronet, who had no other children, raised the boy as his own, and when he died in 1736 his friends rallied round to give the 17-year-old Adolphus a cornetcy in his father’s regiment, the 8th Dragoons. He bought a lieutenancy when he came into his legacy, and soon moved upwards, first into a captaincy in the newly-raised 61st Foot, and then into the 37th. He remained in the regiment for eighteen years. When Oughton joined it Christopher Green was serving in its ranks, and in 1746, having been sergeant major, he was commissioned without purchase, just two weeks after the battle of Culloden. The regiment had not behaved well at Falkirk in January that year, but at Culloden it stood firm before the plaid torrent, its right-flank platoons slamming the clansmen to a halt short of the line with their volleys, and the platoons on the left shoving with their bayonets as Camerons and Stewarts swirled into them. Perhaps Sergeant Major Green distinguished himself in the carnage on Drummossie Moor. He could scarcely have gained his commission without the approval of that stern old Huguenot Lieutenant Colonel Louis Dejean, who had stood behind the 37th’s colours, yelling encouragement in both French and English. Oughton became major in 1747 and lieutenant colonel commanding the 37th two years later, first appointing Ensign Green to the potentially lucrative post of quartermaster and then making him adjutant.

  Green was killed as a lieutenant at Minden in 1759 when five regiments of British infantry advanced against the French cavalry and tumbled them to ruin. His widow Britannia was left with four children, three of them boys. The eldest, Nicholas, had been commissioned into the 37th in 1755 and died as a lieutenant in 1769. Charles went off to be an artillery cadet at Woolwich, and Christopher joined the Bengal Artillery as a cadet. Oughton became colonel of the 55th Foot in 1759 and moved on to the 31st in 1762. Three years later he secured an ensigncy for 16-year-old Charles Green, launching him on a career that saw him die a general and a baronet. Oughton was no less diligent where his own family members were concerned: his brother-in-law became an ensign shortly after Oughton married; and in 1763 he found space in the 31st for his stepson, then only twelve years old, promoting him lieutenant in 1766. When Oughton died, a general and a knight, in 1780, he had not only repaid his debt to his old adjutant, but ensured that his own immediate family was well looked after. Samuel Bagshawe had a debt of his own. When he was dangerously wounded before Lorient, a fatigue party of the 39th under Corporal Kirkland carried him from Plomeur Church to the beach. Kirkland was sergeant major of the 39th when Bagshawe was its lieutenant colonel, and then, when Bagshawe raised the 93rd, Kirkland became its adjutant.

  It became progressively more difficult for the likes of Bagshawe and Oughton to ply this sort of patronage, and a major plank in the lofty but ramshackle edifice of interest was snatched away when the purchase of commissions was at last abolished. The end of purchase in 1871 was part of a package of army reform that included the linking of the old numbered regiments of foot into the county regiments that formed the basis of a system which has only just definitively disappeared. It also fitted into a much wider pattern of social and political change at the time: the second Reform Act of 1867, the Education Act of 1870, the legalisation of Trade Unions in 1871, the Public Health Act of 1872, and the 1875 Artisan’s Dwelling Act which would make slum clearance possible. Purchase had been under sporadic attack for some time, but an 1833 committee reported that it was ‘not inconsistent with the constitutional privileges of the country, but wise and beneficial’. However, the army’s failings in the Crimea, which seemed – at least according to that most unreliable of barometers, popular opinion – to be epitomised by the Earl of Cardigan – encouraged George de Lacy Evans to demand a select committee to consider the issue. The Earl led the Charge of the Light Brigade having paid a non-regulation £25,000 for command of the 11th Hussars. Lord Palmerston, the Tory Prime Minister, agreed to establish a Royal Commission, which duly reported in 1857. It recommended doing away with the sale of lieutenant colonelcies and the strengthening of promotion examinations, holding that this would eventually ‘tend towards the abolition of the purchase system’. The report generated considerable debate, much of it initiated by Sir Charles Trevelyan, co-author of the pioneering Northcote–Trevelyan report into the Civil Service. Eventually Palmerston concluded that while nobody would think of inventing purchase if it did not already exist, it was a fine example of a scheme that might, ‘when opinions and habits had become attached to it, work well, although theoretically objectionable’.47 He decided, for he was after all a Conservative, to leave things as they were.

  By the time the issue was revisited just a few years later, Palmerston was dead and the Liberals were in office under Gladstone. His secretary of state for war, Edward Cardwell, included the abolition of purchase in his Army Regulation Bill of 1871, but it failed to get through the Lords, largely because the compensation to be paid to purchase officers would not include non-regul
ation sums, illegal even though everyone knew perfectly well what went on, and so officers would lose money. However, the case for reform had been strengthened by German victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Cardwell correctly argued that it owed more to ‘the professional education of officers than to any other cause’. The government duly forced abolition through by a Royal Warrant of 1 November 1871, and purchase ended at last.

  With the disappearance of purchase went the ranks of cornet, ensign, and second lieutenant in fusilier and rifle regiments. Officers were now to be commissioned as sub-lieutenants and, subject to receiving favourable reports and passing an exam, would become lieutenants after serving for two years. Appointment as sub-lieutenant followed an open competitive examination in general academic subjects. There were fears that the army would be ‘officered by a race of weedy bookworms’, but ‘army entrance tutors’ – crammers – often whiskery retired officers who knew just what was required, nursed their charges over the hurdle to a commission, although many of them took several attempts. Garrison instructors were appointed to prepare sub-lieutenants for their promotion exam. However, the system worked so badly that in 1875 the Royal Military College Sandhurst, abolished in 1871, was re-instituted. Crammers, whose work ‘defeated the fundamental purpose of the examination as a quantitative assessment of potential’, now steered young men through the Sandhurst entrance exam, but it was noticeable that some of the best-crammed, who passed in high on the list, passed out rather lower.48

  A shift in the educational background of potential officers was also taking place at this time. In 1864 the Clarendon Commission, which had just investigated nine public schools (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester, Charterhouse, St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’) noted that:

  The number of public school boys who enter the army is not large. Of 1,976 candidates for first commissions within three years, 122 only had been at any of these schools. Of these 102 succeeded and 20 failed … of 96 who passed the first examination, 38 came directly from school, 58 had intermediate education. The public school candidates for Sandhurst during that same period were 23 out of 375; the proportion who succeeded being also here much above the average. Of 18 who succeeded, 11 came straight from school; of five who failed, only one.49

  The Taunton Commission, reporting in 1868, looked at endowed grammar schools and proprietary schools. Its conclusions, that education was poorly provided and endowments often misused, led to the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, which instituted notable improvements. Proprietary schools like Cheltenham, Clifton, Brighton, King’s College School and Rossall, and endowed schools like Marlborough and Wellington College joined the Clarendon schools in preparing boys for the army. In 1883 a third of the Woolwich and just over a tenth of the Sandhurst entry came from public schools. In 1896–1900 this had risen to over three-quarters and just over one half respectively, and was to climb further into the new century.

  A study of the major generals on the army’s active list in the summer of 1914, most of them commissioned from Sandhurst or Woolwich in the 1870s or early 1880s, concluded that 89 per cent had attended public school and the remainder had been educated privately. Thirty per cent of the public school-educated generals had attended Clarendon Commission schools – Eton was well ahead, with twelve generals, as opposed to Harrow’s seven. Amongst the second tier of public schools, Cheltenham had produced eleven generals and Wellington ten.50 Several public school headmasters had followed the trail blazed by Dr Pollock, headmaster of Wellington (and later Bishop of Norwich) who had established, in 1895, an ‘army class’ in which boys in their last eighteen months of school followed a course intended to give them a good pre-professional education. In some other schools this was called the ‘modern department’, though Dr Temple, headmaster of Rugby (and later, capping Dr Pollock, Archbishop of Canterbury) was not favourably impressed:

  This modern department is exceedingly liable to get filled up with a considerable number of stupid boys, because the stupid boys do not get on well in their Latin and Greek, and then there is a strong temptation both to masters and parents to put them over into what seems to be, and what is to a certain extent, a more easy system.51

  Officers would receive commissions as second lieutenants, now the universal starting point, regardless of arm of service, after attending the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich (for the artillery and engineers) or the Royal Military College (for officers of other arms). Militia officers could sidestep this requirement if they were able to pass the entrance exam after attending two summer militia trainings. The future Field-Marshal Henry Wilson made heavy weather of it. Having failed for Woolwich twice and Sandhurst thrice, he obtained a lieutenancy in the Longford Militia, and was crammed by Colonel Wilson at Darmstadt between his two trainings before passing into Sandhurst, a lacklustre fifty-eighth on the list. There was certainly little enough connection between the Sandhurst entrance exam and a man’s future career. Winston Churchill got into Sandhurst at his third attempt despite being crammed by the celebrated Captain James, and then only with marks so low that he could only be accepted by the cavalry: to be sure of the cheaper infantry one needed to pass in high. Very occasionally, if the army was seriously short of officers, youngsters who did really well in the entrance examination would be commissioned direct without the tiresome need to attend Sandhurst at all. Young Robert Baden-Powell, who became the hero of Mafeking and founded the Boy Scout movement, passed in amongst the top six in 1876, and found himself gazetted to the 13th Hussars immediately.

  Woolwich, founded in 1741, had always trained gunners and sappers. In 1798 Colonel John Gaspard Le Marchant was granted permission to open a military school with a senior department training staff officers and a junior department preparing young men for commissions in the infantry and cavalry. The junior department began life at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire in 1802 but moved to its new site, at Sandhurst on the London to Exeter coaching road, far enough, at least in theory, from the capital for cadets not to be ‘distracted’ by its bright lights, in 1812. This was the very year that Le Marchant, by now a major general, was shot dead in the moment of victory at Salamanca. Old College, with its elegant Georgian grand entrance, and the broad stone steps up which the academy adjutant rides his charger on commissioning parades, is the oldest part of the establishment. Both Sandhurst and Woolwich had always been fee-paying: successful graduates of Woolwich were commissioned into the non-purchase arms, while those who passed out highest from Sandhurst were awarded free commissions. However, parents who could afford the difference between the cost of Sandhurst and the price of a commission had often been inclined to opt straight for purchase.

  Historian Edward Spiers observes that despite the end of purchase the ‘social composition of the officer corps proved resistant to change’ and we must now consider what this composition was.52 Let us begin by jettisoning all those easy clichés. From the very beginning the social pattern of officer recruitment was complex, and was conveniently misrepresented by the opponents of purchase at the time and by the uncritically credulous since. The case of Arthur Wesley, cited above, is an example of how the well-connected could exploit the system, but is in no sense typical. This was not an army that withered, as William Napier maintained, under the cold shadow of the aristocracy. There was nothing in Britain that approached the French ‘aristocratization of the army after Louis XIV’, culminating in the 1781 regulation that required a potential officer to show four generations of patrilineal noble descent.53 Nor could any British monarch have behaved like King Frederick William I of Prussia who, as his son Frederick the Great wrote approvingly, ‘weeded out from the officers of every regiment such people whose conduct or birth did not accord with the gentlemanly standards of their profession’.54 It must be said that even in old regime France and Frederician Prussia the rules were broken. The brave and capable François de Chevert, an orphan born in Verdun in 1695, died a lieutenant general (the highest rank below marshal of France) in 1769. Fre
derick found employment for numerous generals from decidedly non-noble backgrounds, including one who had no idea who his father might have been. When the 50-year-old Private David Krauel was the first man into the Ziskaberg fortification at Prague in 1744 old Fritz at once ennobled him as ‘Krauel von Zizkaberg’.

  Nothing in the English language resembled the nobiliary particles ‘von’ or ‘de’, much misused though these were. Nor is there any meaningful comparison between burgeoning continental aristocracies and the tiny British peerage, where, with rare exceptions, a father’s title was inherited only by his eldest son, and most offspring of junior peers had to make do, like Arthur Wesley, with a simple ‘Honourable’. One exception was that of the daughters of those Victorian paragons Roberts and Wolseley, who were allowed to inherit their father’s peerages by ‘special remainder’. There were 154 lords temporal at Westminster in 1687 and still only 171, with sixteen representative Scots peers, by 1714. Across Queen Victoria’s reign the total, including designated bishops, the lords spiritual, fluctuated between 421 and 577. A peerage of this size, even if it paid proper attention to perpetuating its line, could scarcely keep the army officered.

  An officer’s commission dubbed him esquire – a status between gentleman and knight, unless he could lay claim to a higher title. Although any aspirant for a commission had to produce a certificate saying that he was indeed a gentleman, there was no conclusive agreement as to what a gentleman actually was or, indeed precisely who might sign the certificate. In 1762 Lord Barrington, dealing with the question of ‘a subaltern, late of the 5th Regiment, named Gillingham’, noted that the young man’s father was a master brickmaker who had ‘intended to breed up his son to his own business, but the young man would not be satisfied without going into the army.’ Barrington thought the brickmaker a man ‘of very good character’. There was no doubt that his son was a fit and proper person to be an officer in a senior regiment of foot, commanded by Lord George Bentinck, and indeed ‘the late King had consented to Gillingham’s having a commission in an old regiment’. Barrington was investigating the matter simply because Gillingham’s commission had been obtained by illegal trafficking by an intermediary who had broken the rules.55