In 1900 a second lieutenant in a line infantry regiment earned about £95 per annum and an officer of similar rank in a cavalry regiment about £120 per annum, a figure that had not changed substantially since 1800 and was quite inadequate given the demands made on a subaltern’s pay. If we also consider that in 1903 Charles Booth published the results of his survey of London’s poor and estimated that a family income of between £46.80 to £54.60 per annum was the baseline below which a family should be considered to be living in poverty, we get some idea of how badly young officers were paid. It was a similar story in the ranks. In 1914 an infantry private was receiving less pay than all other trades in civilian life, the poorest agricultural worker was paid two shillings more than a soldier with two or more years service.
No surprise then that army pay and conditions was the subject of a parliamentary question raised in the House of Commons in November 1902. The Secretary of State for War, William Broderick, was asked whether he would consider the advisability of appointing a committee to inquire into the position, pay, and allowances of the combatant officers of the army. Broderick’s reply underlined the expectation that officers in the home army would have access to a private income, reinforcing the grip the wealthy landed classes had on the officer corps:
‘No change has taken place in the position of officers in the Army of recent years, and the demand for commissions shows that it is impossible to satisfy the large number of candidates available. Efforts are being made, especially in the cavalry, to reduce officers’ expenses, but I fear I cannot hold out any hope of a general reconsideration of the pay and pensions of officers.’
Nevertheless, the enquiry into officers’ pay did take place in the form of a select committee chaired by Lord Stanley in 1903, which unsurprisingly found that officers were grossly underpaid. Again rather predictably, the committee, bowing to political pressure, failed to make the recommendation that an officer should be able to live on his pay. This simply confirmed, as Broderick had the previous year, that a private income would remain a requirement for a commission in the army. However, it did agree that some items of an officer’s expenditure could be reduced.
When he joined the 17th Lancers, Second Lieutenant Wyndham arrived complete with two horses and equipment supplied at personal expense which, when added to the cost of uniforms and other equipment, including furniture for his accommodation, produced a startling figure of around £1000! For the Wyndham family perhaps this sum would hardly be noticed – although his father did think it excessive at the time – but for others it represented a considerable outlay. In recognition of this disproportionate financial demand the Stanley Committee, rather reluctantly it seems, proposed that the state could provide mounts for the cavalry and even some items of essential kit. It would take another eleven years before officers’ pay was finally increased in January 1914.
Once an officer had joined his regiment he was expected to adhere to the regimental code of ethics and behaviour and that included all the customs and standards imposed by his brother officers. Failure to keep within the acceptable social code and ‘fit in’ could, and did, result in social ostracism and ragging. There are numerous documented cases of excessive ragging which, by their very nature, could be quite brutal and degrading, being conducted by other officers in the regiment designed to force an individual to resign their commission. Some of these inevitably became public and were widely reported in the pages of The Times.
The infamous Guards Ragging Case of March 1906 involved a Second Lieutenant Arthur Clark-Kennedy who was an officer in the 1st Battalion Scots Guards. Clarke-Kennedy was subjected to a mock court-martial by the other subalterns in his battalion for allegedly being in a ‘dirty state’. It appears from the reports in The Times that he had been infected by scabies, possibly from his reported contact with London prostitutes and had just returned from an extended sick leave. ‘On changing into mess dress he went down to the anteroom where he noticed his brother officers received him very coldly and would not speak to him’. Later that evening after a court-martial in the billiard room he was found guilty of ‘being dirty’ with ‘the itch’ and subjected to an oil bath during which he had jam poured over his head and was then feathered. Later in the evening his room was broken into and he had to resort to jumping out of the window to avoid further punishment.
The official public enquiry was chaired by Lieutenant General Sir Gerald Morton and ‘attended by a small army of reporters who filled the body of the hall.’ The findings of the enquiry led to the removal of the commanding officer of the battalion and stringent reductions in leave and seniority for the subalterns who had been involved. The unfortunate Clarke-Kennedy resigned from the regiment.
A year later in 1907 there was a five day public hearing at Chelsea Barracks involving Lieutenant H Woods of 2/Grenadier Guards and his brother officers, who were alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to have him removed from the regiment. Woods maintained he was picked on because he was studious and did not gamble and go to the Guards Club. Woods, who had six years service and until shortly before the inquiry was considered to be a good regimental officer, was ostracised by the other officers in the battalion who considered him to be ‘unpopular’. The case drew in Lord Bernard Gordon Lennox, then a captain in the battalion, who was called as a witness for the defence. His evidence and that of other officers contributed to the case being dismissed. The army closed ranks and found no evidence of a conspiracy. Woods was found unfit to be a regimental officer and it was made it clear by the regiment that resignation was his only option.
It could be argued that the culture within the officer corps developed from the public school ethos of team spirit, loyalty and gentlemanly honour. The army’s values still championed the leisurely lifestyle of the gentry and an officer was expected to be a gentleman and a gentleman was by definition educated at a public school. At school important links were made that could be used later on in the army to provide a common point of contact between junior officers and their more senior colleagues. With typical disregard for surroundings and circumstances the old Etonian tradition of celebrating Founder’s Day with a dinner was continued during the Great War. Old Etonians of all ranks gathered together on 4 June in every theatre of war, an occasion which frequently saw the most senior Old Etonian officer in the brigade invited as the guest of honour.
One of the characteristics of the major public schools at the time was the degree to which they were essential to the recruitment of candidates for the officer corps. There is no doubt that between 1890 and 1910 the public school hold on the military academies tightened. In 1910 for instance, eighty-five percent of entrants to Sandhurst were drawn from the major public schools while at Woolwich the figure was slightly higher at eighty-eight per cent. Is it any wonder then, that for many, the officers’ mess was merely a grownup extension of public school where those who did not ‘fit in’ were ostracised?
The public school emphasis on team games and sport taught those cherished virtues of self-reliance, loyalty, courage and selflessness which were replicated on the battlefields of the Empire and later, in 1914, on the ‘playing fields’ of France and Flanders. By the 1860s boys at Eton and Harrow were spending up to twenty hours each week playing cricket and other team games, the whole emphasis it seems being on character building and a determination not to let your team down. There is no better illustration of this than the occasion in the late 1860s when Clifton College were playing Marlborough at rugby football. Clifton played the (soon to be outlawed) hacking rule and Marlborough did not. Appealing to the Marlborough referee for the carnage to end, the Marlborough side were told to win the game first and adjust the rule book afterwards. They did exactly that. For the Marlborough players the game represented a basic fundamental of the battlefield: despite injury, suffering and being at a disadvantage, you fight on unselfishly, thinking only of your team and victory. Whether it be on the playing fields of Marlborough or holding the line in the trenches at Zandvoorde, sur
render was unthinkable.
Bernard Gordon Lennox’s school career at Eton was marked largely by his sporting achievements. As keeper, or captain, of the school Fives team in 1896 he won the school Fives championships that year with JC Tabor as his partner. He was also a member of the Oppidan Wall and Mixed Wall Game and the Field XIs. Eton has two games of football peculiar to the school, the Field Game played by the whole school and the more famous Wall Game which is played between a team of Collegers (scholarship holders) and a team of ‘Oppidans’ (the remainder of the student body). However, it was cricket that was probably the game he enjoyed playing most and although he did not represent Eton at the sport he was a regular member of the Household Brigade XI. In 1903 he made an appearance for Middlesex in the County Championship and in August 1912 he captained the public schools side against the MCC at Lord’s. His last major appearance was as a member of the I Zingari Cricket Club when he toured in Egypt with the side during March 1914 scoring twenty-four runs against the Egyptian national XI.
Some form of military training had been provided in public schools since 1860 but it was not until the Haldane reforms of 1908 that this was placed on a more formal basis. In 1908 the new Officer Training Corps (OTC) organised the existing school units into a Junior Division and a Senior Division which prepared university undergraduates for direct entry commissions. OTCs were directed to provide a standardized military training and Certificate A was introduced to test and certify proficiency. Certificate A was still in use when my father gained his in 1941 at Wellington College prior to joining the RAF. Holders of Certificate A were looked upon favourably when applying to Sandhurst and Woolwich and could alternatively obtain a direct commission into the Special Reserve or the Territorial Force. In 1914 nearly eighty per cent of public schools had OTC units and once the war began, membership became almost 100 per cent in all schools.
Overall Sandhurst probably supplied the most suitable education for potential cavalry and infantry officers but Haldane, in creating the opportunity for university students to become members of the University Officer Training Corps (UOTC), was obviously looking to attract the sons of the professional upper middle classes to train for regular and reserve commissions. The university route into the army was not a new one; all Haldane did was place it on a more formal footing by facilitating military training through the UOTC. Previously, up to 1894, university students were admitted on special terms to Sandhurst and Woolwich, a process that was streamlined a year later when they were able to be commissioned directly into the army providing they had successfully passed their degree.
The university route into the army was one that Robert Edward Rising took advantage of. After leaving Charterhouse in 1890, he began life as an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge in October of that year. Whether he intended to complete his degree or not, his period as a student was a short one, as he was admitted to Sandhurst after his first year at Trinity in September 1891. William Petersen was also a Trinity College student who graduated with a degree in History in 1913. Petersen had also been in the UOTC before being commissioned in May 1914 into the Essex Royal Horse Artillery, a territorial unit based at Colchester. William had clearly not considered the army as a career, preferring to serve initially as a part-time soldier but the events of 1914 short-circuited his plans to become involved in the Petersen family shipping empire.
Another university entrant into the army was Henry Bligh Fortescue Parnell who was a 16-year-old schoolboy at Eton when he succeeded his father, Major General Henry Parnell, as the 5th Baron Congleton in 1906. ‘Harry’ Parnell was a New College Oxford graduate and having spent three years in the UOTC was commissioned straight into the Grenadier Guards.4 Like Regy Wyndham and Bernard Gordon Lennox, he was also born into a family with a strong military tradition. His father had spent nearly half a century in the army and fought in the Crimean War and at the Battle of Inyezane in 1879 during the Zulu Wars. In 1895 he commanded the Malta Infantry Brigade for seven years until his retirement in 1902.
So was the Edwardian Army that went to war in August 1914 a more professional body after nearly a century of reforms? The answer has to be yes. The officer corps was still a very select, elitist body and regardless of a growing influx of officers from the well-heeled professional classes such as Robert Rising, the wealthy upper and landed classes retained its overall monopoly, a state of affairs that continued well into the late 1960s.
The South African War taught the British Army a number of much needed lessons. The last of the so-called ‘gentleman’s wars’, it provided a necessary transition from the old style colonial battlefield tactics to the more advanced use of aircraft, high explosive and poison gas that was to come after August 1914. Needless to say, military training had improved considerably since 1902 and was now embodied in the first of the four editions of Field Service Regulations which opened the way to imposing, what David French describes as, ‘order on chaos’.5 The infantry of 1914 were able to maintain a rapid rifle fire of fifteen aimed rounds per minute which was much superior to any of the major European conscript armies and they were well versed in the principles of fire and movement. Because of reluctance from government and to an extent the military leadership, to provide the army with enough machine guns, more attention had been placed on the British soldier becoming proficient in the use of the rifle. British musketry in South Africa had been largely ineffective against the sharp shooting Boers who delivered a harsh lesson to British infantry tacticians.
The other important lesson from the South African War, the ability to mobilize quickly and effectively, had also been absorbed and by 1914 national mobilization was taken very seriously and practised regularly with annual field exercises for all arms becoming the norm. Fortunately the cavalry had also been issued with the Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle and cavalry troopers had become as proficient as their infantry counterparts in its use. It is almost providential that the far sighted Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien had insisted on this in 1909 when he succeeded Sir John French in the Aldershot Command. Smith-Dorrien was an infantryman and expected the cavalry to shoot and fight as infantry if called upon to do so. That time would soon arrive and the cavalry’s dismounted actions in the battle for Ypres would become crucial in maintaining the integrity of the front line.
The British Regular Army that mobilized in August 1914 had an establishment of 260,000 men made up from thirty-two cavalry regiments and 154 infantry battalions supported by artillery, signals, medical services and supply companies of the Army Service Corps. Of this establishment only 150,000 men were able to be formed into a BEF of six infantry and one cavalry division, although this was increased to seven divisions by October 1914. Each infantry division of 18,000 men, usually commanded by a major general, comprised three infantry brigades, each commanded by a brigadier general. Brigade commanders in 1914 had four battalions at their disposal, a body of men and equipment that would take up to two and-a-quarter miles of road and up to two hours to pass a given point. Cavalry divisions were formed from a number of cavalry brigades, each of which contained three or four cavalry regiments with their supporting horse artillery units. Cavalry tactics were now standardized in a new edition of the Cavalry Drill Book and Cavalry Training, both of which had contributions from Sir Douglas Haig.
The quality of the very best British infantry battalions and cavalry regiments that fought with the BEF in 1914 was very much to do with a regimental system that fostered morale and a loyalty to the ethos of the regiment. Many of these fighting units were also characterized by exceptional commanding officers, typical of whom were Noel Corry, who commanded 2/Grenadier Guards until early September 1914 and his successor, Wilfred Smith.6 Both these men were considered to be outstanding commanders and held the respect of every officer and man in the battalion. Cavalry commanders such as Gordon Wilson of the Royal Horse Guards and Algernon Ferguson of 2/Life Guards were of the same ilk; strategically able, good cavalry commanders and first-class managers of men and resources.
/> The battlefield self-sufficiency of infantry battalions and cavalry regiments fighting with the BEF, demonstrated so well during the retreat from Mons, was largely brought about by the battalion organisation of four fighting companies, or squadrons in the cavalry, that could, and often did, operate independently. In the First Battle of Ypres this professional ability and leadership of individual commanders from the most junior officer upwards would make a significant contribution to the outcome of many engagements. Robert Rising’s Distinguished Service Order (DSO) was awarded in these very circumstances, while commanding his company in the face of overwhelming odds at Langemarck. Bernard Gordon Lennox directed operations and held the guardsmen of his Number 2 Company together during the engagements at Landrecies and Villers-Cotterets and again in the Zillebeke front line. Commanding a troop of Life Guards, Regy Wyndham looked upon the welfare of every man in the troop as his prime responsibility both in and out of the firing line and earned their undying respect. Harry Parnell led his platoon of Grenadier Guardsmen with a bravery and battlefield aptitude that inspired his men to stand firm on 6 November in the face of considerable odds. In doing what they saw as their duty, all of these men demonstrated a personal bravery and leadership that bolstered the courage and confidence of the men under their command.
Aristocrats Go to War: Uncovering the Zillebeke Cemetery Page 5