Yeomen of England

by Ken Tout

  Farmers and anyone who had a horse suitable (14.5 hands at least) were asked to bring them to Kettering and, after being inspected by our Veterinary Officer, Captain Parks, any chosen were commandeered; in some cases, from men with perhaps only one horse, a true friend. Our officers were very sympathetic to all who lost their horses, many of whom were members of the Pytchley. Quite a lot of our horses had hunted with the Pytchley and were a grand lot, which enabled us to keep our horses to the end of the war rather than being converted to infantry, although we did not yet realise that we would be doing an awful lot of walking.

  Cyril Day on horseback before the 1914 outbreak of war. (NYA)

  There was competition for the horses once officers had taken their pick. Cyril Day had an opportunity to move up to the front of the queue:

  Some very good horses came to us from hunting stables. I happened to be on guard over them the first night so picked one out to suit myself, to which animal I afterwards became very attached. I named it Mary after my mother and sister. We picketed the horses for the first time on Derby racecourse. Again I was on guard the first night and was worked hard trying to control the horses as they kept breaking loose, not everybody being skilled at pegging down the lines.

  About this time a not quite so humble trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, Siegfried Sassoon, was offering his thoroughbred horse, ‘Cockbird’, to his squadron leader in the hope that the horse, relieved of a trooper’s equipment burden, would have an easier life when going to war. Yeomen would later see many majors’ horses savagely mutilated by machine-gun fire. Indeed, even the steeds of brigadiers and major generals were at risk in the total trench war.10

  Haldane’s reforms had fallen short of conscription or of compelling Yeomen to signed on for overseas service. Within Dixon’s own regiment in 1908, when first invited to volunteer for overseas service under the Haldane system, only 10 per cent of the regiment had responded. Now with a great continental war imminent and Britain possibly threatened by German imperialistic ambitions, the response was different:

  We went from Kettering to Derby where we got our remaining horses. We were then lined up on parade and asked if we were willing to serve overseas; being Territorials we need only have served in the Home Defence, but, with very few exceptions we willingly volunteered for overseas. Those who volunteered, the great majority, then went to Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire to commence training for our work abroad.

  Dixon noted the subtle change in training as the old, possibly rather light-hearted Yeomanry style and formal exercises dating from 1794 now changed into a much more rigorous system of battle preparation for both men and horses:

  We went through a severe course of military horse riding. Although most of the Yeomen were from the farming community and riders of the Pytchley and excellent horsemen, the military style was a little different. In fact some of the men were ‘born in the saddle’ and had, so to speak, ridden since babyhood. Now we had to ride our horses in a circle, start at the walk, then trot, canter and gallop with the stirrups crossed in front of the saddle, and on command we has to jump off and mount the horse in front! No mean task at a fast pace . On one occasion I fell off, only to hear the SSM shout ‘Who told you to dismount?’ We also had cross-country schemes and map-reading.

  Unfortunately none of the horses were able to write memoirs, but even in England they were beginning to suffer in a way that riding to the hunt did not inflict. On their behalf George noted that ‘a number of horses contracted Strangles [infectious streptococcal catarrh or equine distemper], a very unpleasant disease. Men were detailed to look after the sick horses and told not to mix them with those in good condition. With perseverance they recovered’.

  The men trained and ready for war now found that they were the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry (officially 1/1 NY), whilst some men had been left behind to form the 2nd (1/2) Northamptonshire Yeomanry stationed locally. This unit would send up reinforcements as the ‘1st Line’ needed them. There would also be a 3rd (1/3) Northamptonshire Yeomanry at Chichester which would be a more general training and holding unit from which men might be posted almost anywhere. The band would accompany the 1st Line but would normally serve as stretcher bearers.

  The regiment was now at full mobilisation capacity and Houghton Regis camp’s normal facilities were found to be inadequate. George Dixon slept in a Salvation Army hut. The local people were very kind and troopers were frequently invited to houses for tea, especially on Sundays. But the supply of peacetime Sundays was running short. Orders came to move to Hursley Park, ominously only 9 miles from Southampton docks and occupied by the 8th Infantry Division. As though in preparation for the as yet unknown trench warfare, the weather was very wet with about 6in of mud everywhere. It was very cold and everyone tried to get an extra blanket before they were ‘packed like sardines in bell tents and, for a day or two, played nap and crown-and-anchor’.

  Now the move of the reserve troops of the BEF was in full flow. The crown-and-anchor boards were packed away. For the first time since 1794 the regiment started out towards the experience of real bullets, shells, bombs, gas and other horrors which called for the blue and white plumes and silver chain-mail epaulets to be packed away with the playing cards, as Dixon and his comrades travelled into the unknown:

  We set out at night to ride the distance of nine miles to Southampton ready for embarkation.11 The horses were loaded in the bottom of the ship with fodder and equipment for them, which was a new experience for them and us and not without mishaps. We embarked on the 5th November 1914 and crossed the Channel to Le Havre – an uneventful journey. Horses and men were then entrained for Merville, the Headquarters of the 8th Division.

  One anonymous but excited Yeoman wrote:

  Forth went the soldier sportsmen

  The Pytchley pastures know,

  For they who rode to hunt the fox

  Ride out to hunt the foe.

  It must have caused surprise to officers and men when they learned that they were being posted to the 8th, which was an infantry division, whereas the regiment had trained as, and expected to be fighting in, a mounted brigade. Other county Yeomanry regiments would also find themselves in unexpected places alongside unfamiliar units carrying out unforeseen roles. Already it was becoming apparent that real war did not pay due respect to previously perfected planning or even the imperious dictates of generals.

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  1 Spencer family.

  2 Dixon, Memoirs, NYA.

  3 Robson, B., in Holmes, R., Military History.

  4 Hamilton, Gen. Sir I., 1906 report as GOC.

  5 The RGH Hon. Colonel, Maj. Gen. Denaro, still using this long title in 2007, in Lewis, Yeoman Soldiers.

  6 Spiers, E.M., in Holmes, op. cit.

  7 Lewis, op. cit.

  8 Dixon, op. cit.

  9 Day, War Diary.

  10 Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

  11 Dixon writing later says ‘56 years ago today’.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  COURSES NOT FIT FOR HORSES

  (1914–1916)

  It was to be a war of terrible suffering and deprivation beyond all previous imaginings. For soldiers with fifteen years’ service their Boer War memories would gradually become those of a rather good-spirited game compared with what would happen outside Ypres and on the Somme. And for those who cherished their horses the grief would be doubled.

  However, for younger Yeomen setting out across the sea to a foreign country, there was still a sense of excitement and adventure. Trooper Bertie Taylor, later to become Mayor of Wellingborough, was so excited by everything that was happening that he forgot to celebrate his twenty-first birthday on the ship. He did not remember until a week later when he received his first letters and a birthday card. The rather older Cyril Day took a more serious and somewhat laconic view of events:

  We landed in France at Harise [Havre]. Was very thankful unto our God for preserving our lives and giving us a safe passage over the sea.
Had to exercise the horses next morning but am sorry to say we were told to do several other unnecessary jobs just to fill in the time.1

  The 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry (1NY) numbered twenty-four officers and 459 other ranks on landing, with peacetime CO Lieutenant Colonel H. Wickham continuing in command. There was a standard of outstanding horsemanship which the regiment shared with several other county regiments related to their hunting links. Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, Sir Charles Lowther was Master of the famous Pytchley Hunt and was followed to war by almost all the hunt staff such as whips, second horsemen and grooms, as well as other hunt members. Typical of the officers was Lieutenant J.C. George who in 1918, whilst the regiment was in Italy, entered and won the Italian Grand National in Rome on his horse, ‘Siberian’. All the NCOs were Territorial soldiers of considerable experience and a majority of troopers were from farming stock.

  Senior officers of the NY were later to assume that their continuing role as a horsed regiment was due to the quality of their horses. Be that as it may, a considerable number of their horses did come from prime hunting blood lines, as a poet had written:

  In the Pytchley country you want a good horse;

  for on a bad one you will see nothing;

  on a fair one you will lose your nerve;

  but on the best you will be able to enjoy yourself

  as you can nowhere else in the world.2

  Recruiting had brought into the regiment some young soldiers like Bertie Taylor; however, the average age was higher and there was a clear distinction between the 1NY of 1914 and the 1NY of 1944, the latter regiment having the majority of its tank crews aged under 22. The first ten fatal casualties of the 1914 regiment had an average age of 25.8 years, the youngest at 23, while the equivalent ten in 1944 averaged 21.9 years with the youngest 19.

  Although the regiment was a fairly early arrival in terms of the huge British forces which would later assemble, the first formative actions of the war had ended when 1NY landed. After Mons, the Allied armies had retreated to the Marne and then advanced again to form what would be the approximate Western Front for four years. Whilst early infantry units had suffered catastrophically in huge numbers during the fluid campaigns, the war had now become stagnant and the British Army as a whole would endure the higher aggregates of casualties caused by static trench war.3

  The NY men soon discovered the realities of the so-called Great War of 1914–18. A mounted regiment experienced very rare, if any, spectacular cavalry charges and underwent much undignified hard labour; most tasks, if not justified by the demands of patriotism, might have been categorised as slave labour: heaving barbed wire, digging trenches, burying the dead or acting as reserve infantrymen at a moment’s notice. There would certainly be no massed cavalry manoeuvres as the regiment was attached to the 8th Division of infantry whose battalions were all regulars, the only divisional exceptions being the mounted regiment, the field ambulance and the signals detachment.

  Lieutenant Colonel H. Wickham commanded the NY when embarking for France, 1914. (NYA)

  George Dixon summed it up, as routine supplanted and submerged from youthful expectations:

  1939 adaptation of Kitchener’s famous 1914 recruiting poster. (NYA)

  We were soon occupied in taking up barbed wire and anything else required in the front line. We would ride our horses to within a mile or so of the front line trenches. Then, while some were detailed to look after the horses, the others would start the walk to the trenches in the dark. We would go in snake-like formation, our round mess tins fastened to the back of the men in front to enable the line behind to follow more easily. The barbed wire would be in large circles and very awkward to carry in narrow trenches with mud a foot deep. Shells and rifle bullets were continually dropping. The Germans soon got to know our route. If exposed we had to keep dropping flat and stay silent. We also had to dig trenches for the front line men to retire to. We each man were given a task, dig about six feet long, three feet wide and four feet deep, with the dirt thrown up to form a parapet.

  Len Clark noted in his diary many details of the discomfort and inconvenience of this kind of life, so different to the fairly prosperous farmhouse which was his home, and indeed to the annual camp under canvas in the lush pastures of Althorp House or Rockingham Castle:

  November 25th, 1914. We took up quarters at Lestrem. The horses were stabled in many places where cover could be found. My Troop were billeted at the village school. This we shared with a number of Belgian refugees, but they were in possession of the schoolroom and we had to climb a ladder and exist in the space under the roof. With no means of securing a fire it will be easily imagined how bitterly cold it was. We still have to sleep with an arm through the sling of the rifle. We had no bread to eat today and only biscuits and bully beef for dinner. Sometimes a loaf, when we get it, has to be divided between four men.

  Diarist George, now Corporal Dixon, who spent most of the war trying to believe that ‘the bullet would hit the other fellow’, had an early narrow escape from death when the bullet did hit the other fellow who was taking George’s place on duty:

  We had our first casualty on one of the expeditions up the line. A trooper, Fred Sumner, was killed, hit by a shrapnel ricochet from the German front line. I think he was the first casualty in the regiment. I was not digging that night so he asked me if he could ride my rather special horse. I said, ‘Yes, providing you clean the saddle when you come back’. But I had to collect the horse and clean the saddle myself. We buried him in a small garden belonging to a farmer near where we were billeted [but later moved to Vieille-Chapelle New Military Cemetery].

  Christmas 1914 was famous for the mutual peace which descended on the front lines as opposing troops came out of their trenches and, in some instances, played football or sang carols in the open. For Len Clark it was memorable mainly because of the cold:

  Friday December 25th – All was quiet in the line … We had no bread issued again and dinner consisted of biscuits and bully with a small portion of Christmas pudding. During the day we were each issued with the Princess Mary’s Christmas Box. During the evening I sat by the fire in the Estaminet of Monsieur Lessage-Leroy to try to thaw some of the cold out of my bones, but without even the price of a glass of beer or cup of coffee as pay was so irregular, as was the food for our meals. However, I am pleased to bear testimony to the fact that our horses were never on short rations of oats or hay.

  Cyril Day had received a parcel containing a plum pudding and someone bartered locally for a ‘goose fowl and we enjoyed it very much. I wrote a letter and read the Christian Pathway (sent by Mother) in the evening.’ Cecil Knight went to see a cock fight in the morning but, perhaps troubled by his conscience, went carol singing in the evening with a group of mates and raised 125 francs. George Dixon caused a minor disaster with his limited knowledge of French:

  Twelve of us pals from home decided to have a supper with the contents of parcels from home, at a place called ‘Marie’s Café’.

  I was given the task of taking the plum puddings to the café and giving instructions for them to be brought in hot, with hot custard. Whether it was the Belgian language, or that they were like me in their cooking abilities, we ended up with cold pudding and cold custard. The fellows were not a bit kind about it.

  Serious warfare resumed immediately after the Christmas pause. Many men, like George Dixon, were still finding it difficult to adjust to the vile conditions of freezing weather and inadequate sanitary provision:

  My mother knitted me a body belt and sent it out with strict instructions that I was not to cast it off or I would catch cold. I HAD to cast it off or it would have walked off, it got so lousy with the filth of the trenches. We had periodic baths, big circular baths which took several of us at a time. Blankets were fumigated regularly to keep down the filth. A favourite place for the lice was in the double seams of our breeches; we would often open the seams and run a lighted candle along them and burn the blighters. A nice evening
’s entertainment!

  Religiously inclined Cyril Day approached the new year in a sombre mood:

  Jan 1st, 1915. All the Regiment were trench digging, one of our gun team fellows who was minding the horses a way back was hit with a bullet in the knee. It was raining. I didn’t feel up to the mark. The work was hard and bullets were flying about a bit. One of our Regiment was killed and several others wounded. I thought what a solemn matter it was to be brought so suddenly before the Judge of all the earth. Was thankful to get back to billets.

  If the Northants lads were now disabused of any notions of charging at the gallop with guidons flapping in the breeze, other Yeomanry regiments were also finding themselves posted to places or duties not previously imagined. Some, like the Leicesters, had already been in action in France at Ypres; the East Riding Yeomanry had sailed away for Macedonia and then been diverted to Egypt; several other units were also destined for the Middle East; the Bedfordshires still formed within a cavalry brigade, the 9th, but operated mainly dismounted; the Lothian and Border Horse found themselves split up into individual squadrons acting as infantry divisional cavalry; while the Inns of Court stayed in England as an officer training unit. Some units did what might be described as a circular tour: the County of London Yeomanry served in four countries before eventually arriving in France and becoming E Battalion of the Machine Gun Corps; the Mongomeryshires rode their horses in Egypt before dismounting as part of the 25th (Montgomery Yeomanry and Welsh Horse) Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers; the Lancashire Hussars served as squadrons in France before becoming the 13th (Lancashire Hussars) Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment; the 2nd Lothian and Borders eventually traded in their horses for cycles and found themselves in Ireland; and one squadron of the Hertfordshires, after many adventures, was posted to the 15th Indian Infantry Division in Persia.