The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  Dick’s appointment as brigade major came to an end in October 1933 and it was time for him to return to some regimental soldiering. The 12th Lancers were still in Egypt, so on 13 November Dick and Lettice, with the two children, their nanny and a draft of 48 new recruits for the regiment, embarked on the TS Nevasa for the voyage to Alexandria.

  Chapter 9

  The Colonel

  Dick had been away from the 12th Lancers for six years, during which time the regiment had been through the enormous changes demanded by mechanization. The conversion had begun in May 1928, when B Squadron lost its horses and commenced training with the 3rd Armoured Car Company of the Royal Tanks Corps. On 1 January 1929 the squadron took over the armoured cars on which it had learnt, Rolls Royces of the 1920 and 1924 patterns with the Vickers .303 machine gun as their sole armament. These were mechanically very reliable, and once fitted with sand-tyres specially developed by the regiment they proved highly desert-worthy. The last of the horses, apart from the officers’ chargers, went at the end of 1929, replaced by the Rolls Royces, augmented in a few troops by the slower and less reliable Crossleys. Now the regiment was fully mechanized, although it still needed nine months before all squadrons were fully trained. Apart from some lorries, none of the vehicles had wireless sets, communication taking place by semaphore.

  In September 1931 Charrington had handed over command to Paul Hornby, the last commanding officer to have served in the regiment before the Great War.1 Hornby had spent twelve years away from the regiment, in the Somaliland Camel Corps and the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the Great War and then back to Somaliland and the Sudan Defence Force, before returning in 1926. Dick had hardly had time to get to know him before leaving for Staff College, so there was initially none of the close relationship which he had formed with his two predecessors, although they subsequently got on very well and Dick particularly admired Hornby as a trainer of men. On his arrival at Helmieh, on 26 November 1933, he was immediately appointed to the command of A Squadron and at 0545 hrs on the very next morning set off on a three-day reconnaissance of the roads in the Nile Delta, bivouacking at night. The winter months were ideal for training schemes of all sorts, the focus being on reconnaissance, both in the Nile Valley and further out in the desert, where it was clear that armoured cars were of much greater military value than horses, and on building road blocks, protecting convoys and cooperating with the RAF – all functions which would take on great significance when war came. Dick himself had to learn not only to drive the vehicles but to act as the gunner.

  Lettice disembarked in Egypt already many months pregnant and on 24 February 1934 their third son, Jonathan, was born at the Anglo-American Hospital. Some weeks beforehand Minnie and Lucia arrived to help Lettice after the birth, the two of them also taking advantage of their visit to see something of the country. Dick took his mother up the Nile for a few days to Karnak, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings and Lucia went on an expedition with a number of friends to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. Minnie later travelled up to Palestine and Syria, where Dick joined her briefly to visit Damascus, Baalbek and Beirut, before breaking away to take part in staff exercises in Palestine.

  In May Dick and Lettice went home on leave, but he was back in Egypt by the end of July, Lettice joining him later without the children, who remained at Stowell with their grandmother. Lettice had a friend with her, Bryony Johnson, and the three of them took a week in Palestine and Trans-Jordan, where they visited Petra. At the end of November the 12th Lancers’ long stay in Egypt came to an end when they were relieved by the 11th Hussars, who took over their armoured cars.

  To complete the exchange, on their arrival at Tidworth the 12th Lancers took over the 11th Hussars’ former barracks and their armoured cars, which in this case were Lanchesters. These had six wheels instead of four, which gave them good cross-country performance in the softer conditions of England, and they mounted three machine guns, including one .50 calibre. However, although generally robust and better armoured than the Rolls Royces, they proved to be unsuitable for one of the key functions of an armoured car regiment, reconnaissance – they were too big to turn round on narrow roads. In an attempt to remedy this deficiency a rear driving position was installed, but it made the vehicle very unwieldy.

  In January 1935 Dick began a ten-week course at the Senior Officers’ School in Sheerness, a ‘hideous place’ according to his diary. The SOS had one very important function, to prepare majors for command of a battalion or regiment, in which it was largely successful. It also attempted to provide them with a common military doctrine, but in this it was markedly less effective. The school ran a pack of beagles, which provided some good exercise over the featureless country of the Isle of Sheppey, intersected by its numerous ditches, but Dick took every opportunity to get away for some proper hunting at the weekends.

  Whilst Dick was at Sheerness, he heard that he was to get command of the 12th Lancers in succession to Hornby in the coming September. His immediate reaction was to feel sorry for the only other candidate, Cuthbert Rawnsley. Rawnsley had joined the regiment two years before Dick, was senior to him on the Army List and had had a good regimental career, but Dick’s quality made him the obvious choice. He certainly had the support of Birdwood, as well as that of Mike Houston, who had recently been promoted to major general and appointed Inspector of Cavalry at the War Office, which brought him into regular contact with the 12th Lancers (still considered to be cavalry in spite of having lost their horses).

  Dick formally took command on 7 September. He and Lettice moved into Candahar House in Tidworth just in time for him to begin planting bulbs for the following spring. Lettice was in her element as the wife of the commanding officer and over the next few years – and indeed even after Dick left the regiment – would remain very closely involved with its affairs. She was instinctively interested in people of all ages, took the trouble to get to know about them and their families and kept in touch after they had moved out of her direct orbit. She was a natural enthusiast and a great organizer, so her new role played very much to her strengths. Within a month of Dick taking command she had formed a Wives’ Club which arranged concerts, lectures, jumble sales and even a ‘husbands’ night’, the success of which was only marred by the beer running out. Many generations of 12th Lancers and their wives looked up to her and considered her their friend, notwithstanding the increasingly elevated rank of her husband.

  For Dick the appointment came at a good time, just as the regiment moved into its autumn programme of manoeuvres. His first such exercise in command resulted in a letter of thanks from Sir Cyril Deverell, then GOC-IN-C (General Officer Commanding in Chief) of Eastern Command and destined to become Chief of the Imperial General Staf (CIGS) within the year, so he was already coming to the notice of some of the key people in the Army. Mechanization was still a matter of considerable debate and Dick attended a conference at Aldershot at which Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, Deverell’s predecessor as CIGS, spoke on the subject, saying that conversion to armour would now come fast for the cavalry. Dick never questioned the argument in favour of mechanization and he spent much time improving the regiment’s handling of its armoured cars and looking at new equipment. The deficiencies of the Lanchester meant that alternatives were already being considered and Dick went to the Morris factory to drive a prototype of the company’s new armoured car, being favourably impressed by its speed and handiness, a complete contrast to the lumbering Lanchester. (It had its own deficiencies, however, which would become apparent once it was in full use.)

  The end of November brought with it a major surprise: the 12th Lancers, less one squadron, would be returning to Egypt at the end of the year. This development arose as a result of increasing tensions with Italy, which had invaded Abyssinia at the beginning of the preceding month. The League of Nations condemned the invasion, but its sanctions against the aggressor were already proving futile, whilst the secret Hoare-Laval Pact, put together by Britain
and France to attempt to buy off Italy with the annexation of part of Abyssinia, would before the end of the year be cast aside due to adverse public opinion. In the meantime, there was a serious concern that Italy would seek to expand its African empire by moving against Egypt from Libya, where its local garrison had been significantly increased. At the same time, trouble was brewing between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine. There appeared to be no alternative to the War Office augmenting its establishment in the Middle East, at least on a temporary basis, and the 12th Lancers knew the territory well, so were an obvious choice to include among the reinforcements.

  Immediately putting aside the normal pattern of peacetime soldiering in the UK, Dick had a busy month bringing the regimental HQ and the squadrons destined for Egypt up to their full complement, deciding on which officers would remain behind at Tidworth, attending a long briefing at the War Office with his adjutant, Frank Arkwright, and re-equipping according to the appropriate tables for active service. The 11th Hussars were still in Egypt, so there were no spare armoured cars there and the 12th Lancers had to supply their own, which were duly prepared for shipping. On the last day of the year the regiment embarked from Southampton on the TSS Vandyck, a fine modern liner specially chartered for the voyage and much more luxurious than the usual troopships. They were seen off by the wives, who were not permitted to accompany them on what was seen as a temporary move.

  After an unprecedentedly comfortable voyage, the troops disembarked at Alexandria on 10 January 1936 and entrained for Cairo, where they moved into their old camp at Helmieh. This was the home of the 11th Hussars, but that regiment had already moved to the Western Desert, leaving only a caretaker party behind. On 26 January C Squadron moved up to Mersa Matruh, followed by Dick and the RHQ, joining the Mobile Force – often referred to in moments of exasperation as the Immobile Farce – which was commanded by Brigadier Friend. Accommodation was in huts and tents and the facilities were, as usual, very sparse, but football, hockey and cricket pitches were soon constructed, sea bathing was encouraged and the officers arranged with the Alexandria Boat Club for some boats to be brought along the coast for them to sail. The largest of these was renamed the Vandyck, in honour of their pleasurable voyage out.

  Very shortly afterwards Mike Houston arrived in his capacity as inspector of cavalry, in company with George Weir, GOC British Troops in Egypt, and John Dill, then the Director of Military Operations at the War Office and already recognized as one of the up and coming soldiers of his generation. They were followed within a month by Deverell himself. The activities of the Mobile Force and others in the Western Desert were of considerable interest to higher authority in the light of uncertain relations with the Italians and much of the experience gained at the time would have beneficial consequences some years hence, when Italy actually invaded Egypt. This included desert reconnaissance expeditions, one of which, to Siwa Oasis, was undertaken by Dick and four of his officers – Harry and Frank Arkwright, Tony Warre and Arthur Gemmell. Houston also came along for the ride. The journey, in two Hillman cars and three Leyland lorries, took five days, ignoring the direct desert road and instead taking a circular route across some difficult passes and sandy desert which provided a challenge to the vehicles. In spite of some mechanical difficulties, the party arrived back without serious mishap.

  A number of more warlike exercises were mounted by the Mobile Force, which now included not only the 12th Lancers and the 11th Hussars in armoured cars and the 8th Hussars in light Ford trucks, but also two battalions of the Royal Tank Corps equipped with light tanks and a battery of the Royal Horse Artillery. Dick was impressed with Vyvyan Pope of the RTC, who commanded half the force against Friend with the other half in an exercise which saw Friend’s HQ put to flight and his own capture only avoided by a very fast retreat.

  In mid-March C Squadron went forward to Sollum, on the Egypt – Libya frontier, to be relieved at Mersa Matruh by B Squadron: they later swapped places. The troops preferred Sollum, as there were proper barracks 800 ft up on the escarpment where the weather was cooler, and the bathing was particularly good. Dick made a number of trips there, his friend John Combe of the 11th Hussars taking him on one occasion up to the frontier near Fort Capuzzo. Most of his time continued to be at Mersa Matruh, where RHQ was located. Unlike at Tidworth or even in Cairo, there was no possibility of creating a garden as there was nothing but sand. Dick, however, was insistent that the Prince of Wales’s feathers, the crest which had adorned the space outside the mess in each of the regiment’s stations, usually in white flowers, should be replicated and ordered that it should be made out of white desert snails, of which there were thousands to be gathered. Rodney Palmer of his RHQ pointed out him that the snails were probably alive, but a brief inspection seeming to indicate otherwise, Palmer was ordered to get on with the job and many hours were spent by a fatigue party collecting and laying out the shells. By the next morning the crest had disappeared – the snails, clearly of nocturnal disposition, having gone absent without leave, some even invading the colonel’s desk! Palmer was summoned for an explanation, but after a while even Dick saw the funny side.

  Before being put on notice to go to Egypt, Dick had been looking forward to the polo season, in which it seemed that the regiment stood a serious chance of winning the Inter-Regimental Cup for the first time since 1914. The move to Egypt had temporarily dashed his hopes, but with his own short leave imminent and having placed his best players amongst the officers left behind at Tidworth, it now seemed possible to compete. Leaving Lumsden in temporary command, he set off by plane to Brindisi on 30 May and then took the train to Paris and another plane from there to Croydon. The next two weeks were spent getting in as much practice as possible with the team, the other members of which were Andrew Horsburgh-Porter, George Kidston and Dick Hobson. Because of the likelihood of missing the season, both the regiment’s and Dick’s own ponies had been sold before they left for Egypt, but Hobson still had his and the generosity of other officers ensured that the 12th Lancers were well mounted. The team met the 3rd Hussars in the first round on 22 June, winning easily 14 – 1. A much closer match with the 16th/5th Lancers resulted in an 11 – 7 victory, followed by a good fast semi-final against the Royal Inniskilling Dragoons, won 8 – 4.

  The opposition in the final came from an unexpected quarter, the Royal Navy, which had never won before – indeed a cavalry regiment, or possibly the Royal Horse Artillery, was always expected to take the honours. As underdog the Navy was the firm favourite of both Press and public, its team including Lord Louis Mountbatten. The day of the final was exceptionally wet. The 12th Lancers appeared to have the advantage in the first chukka, despite only scoring one goal. Honours were even in the second, but the third and fourth chukkas went the Navy’s way and at the end of the fourth a collision between Hobson and Heywood-Lonsdale of the Navy cost the former a 40-yard hit and the latter a damaged knee. The Navy secured the goal and were now leading 4 – 1. For the last two chukkas the Lancers threw caution to the wind and attacked incessantly, rewarded by three goals to bring them level at the start of the sixth. Keeping up the pressure they ran out 6 – 4 winners, the last two goals being scored by Dick himself. The celebrations involved drinking four bottles of champagne from the cup and, although the Press made capital out of Heywood-Lonsdale’s injury, subsequent letters from him and Mountbatten made clear that it had not affected the result.

  Three days later, after further celebrations with the Norfolks at Arundel Castle, Dick set off back to Egypt, travelling straight on to Mersa Matruh in time to make the necessary preparation for the regiment’s return to Cairo, as a decision had been taken to evacuate all but the frontier gendarmerie from the Western Desert in a goodwill gesture to the Italians. The 12th Lancers moved into barracks in Abbasia formerly occupied by the 8th Hussars. As relations with the Italians had improved, the units brought out during the Abyssinian crisis were now ordered back to the UK. Dick decided nevertheless to bring Lettice out for a short
stay and she was in Cairo for rather less than a month, returning to England in haste and earlier than planned when the boys fell sick with what was suspected to be tuberculosis: happily it was a false alarm. The regiment itself sailed from Alexandria on the Laurentic at the end of November and arrived back in England just in time for the abdication of its former Colonel-in-Chief, Edward VIII.

  1937 was a complete contrast to the year in Egypt, the rhythm of peacetime soldiering reasserting itself very quickly. The major change was the replacement of the Lanchesters with the Morris armoured cars Dick had seen earlier. His appreciation of their nimbleness was deserved, but in every other way they were inferior. They had an open turret, and armour which was even lighter than the old Rolls Royces, whilst the main armament was the ineffective Boys anti-tank rifle and the secondary armament the Bren gun, a good infantry weapon, but unsuitable for the role. The other ranks were unimpressed and called the vehicles ‘suicide boxes’. Dick, as usual, made the best of a bad job and instituted a training regime to take account of the cars’ virtues and deficiencies, which was to bear fruit when they eventually saw action in 1940.

  It was by now clear that Dick was a commanding officer of the highest quality. To the subalterns he was an awesome figure who did not suffer fools gladly. Some, like Rodney Palmer, were never entirely comfortable in his presence, while Kate Savill later said that he was always rather alarmed by him: ‘I usually expected criticism and it was often a delightful surprise and relief when instead of a rebuke one got a friendly smile instead.’2 George Kidston remembered that he worked his officers for longer hours and much harder than most regiments, at the same time allowing them to participate in whatever sport they enjoyed, but recalled that he could be very frightening to anyone who failed to do his job properly. He demanded the highest standards of even the more senior officers, encouraging one who was not taking his work seriously to send in his papers and threatening another with dismissal if he did not move from his house, a long way from Tidworth, to be close to the regiment, as his frequent absences were having an adverse impact on the efficiency of his squadron.