Redcoats to Tommies: The Experience of the British Soldier from the Eighteenth Century 1783276029, 9781783276028

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Britain’s Soldiers
Recruitment
Experiences in the Military
The Soldier in Politics and Society
Military Identity and Memory
Part 1 Recruitment
1 Citizen Soldiers: ‘Military Spirit’ and Recruitment in Britain during the Wars against France, 1793–18151
2 From Party of Order to Gentlemen’s Plaything – Rural Identity and the British Yeomanry Cavalry
3 ‘Kitchener’s Mob’: Myth and Reality in Raising the New Army, 1914–15
Part 2 Experiences in the Military
4 Sun, Sea and Starvation: The Logistics of the British Garrison on Minorca, 1746–56
5 British Soldiers, Sieges, and the Laws of War: The 1807 Siege of Montevideo
6 ‘Something-to-smoke, at the right time, is a godsend’: Voluntary Action and the Provision of Cigarettes to Soldiers during the First World War
Part 3 The Soldier in Politics and Society
7 ‘Our Brother Officers in India’: The Military Lobby in Imperial Politics of the 1780s
8 ‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’, or, ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’: The Shift in Popular Perceptions of the Common Soldier in Late Victorian Britain, 1870–c.1910
9 Irish Military Cultures in the British Army, c.1775–1992
Part 4 Military Identity and Memory
10 ‘Fond of Shooting?’: The Social Bonds of the Indian Army Officer Corps, 1858–1901
11 The Social Reality of the British Army in Interwar Britain
12 The Military Culture and Traditions of an Unmilitary People
Index

Citation preview

KEVIN LINCH is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds. He specialises in the history of Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the interaction between Britain’s armed forces and wider social and cultural trends. MATTHEW LORD specialises in British military culture and counterinsurgency after 1945, particularly focusing on the interaction between politics and the honours system. He has worked as Lecturer in Military History at Aberystwyth University.

Cover image: G. D. Giles, ‘British Soldiers, 19th Century’, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, New York Public Library Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Redcoats to Tommies The Experience of the British Soldier from the Eighteenth Century

EDITED BY KEVIN LINCH AND MATTHEW LORD

CONTRIBUTORS: Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman, Gavin Daly, Peter Doyle, Edward Gosling, George Hay, Kevin Linch, Matthew Lord, Eleanor  O’Keeffe, Adam Prime, Michael Reeve, Jacqueline  Reiter, Robert Tildesley, and Christina Welsch.

Redcoats to Tommies

This book surveys and examines the history of Britain’s soldiers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It focuses on the lifecycle of a soldier, including enlistment and experience, and on identity, representations and place in society. It covers the diverse military forces of the British crown – the regular army, home defence forces, part-time soldiers, auxiliaries, officers, non-commissioned officers and rank and file – across times of conflict and peace and their wider relationship to families, communities, government and society. Additionally, it considers both British troops, and, recognising Britain’s soldiers as a transnational phenomenon, forces raised outside of Britain and Ireland. By assessing the evolution of Britain’s soldiers across three centuries, the book highlights continuity and change and gauges how far the basic fundamentals, principles and priorities of army life have endured or been transformed during the existence of a continual standing army. The book includes up-to-date research from a new generation of early-career researchers and reflections from established scholars.

EDITED BY KEVIN LINCH AND MATTHEW LORD

Redcoats to Tommies

Britain’s Soldiers Social and Cultural Histories of Britain’s Military, 1660–1914 ISSN 2732-4397 (print) ISSN 2732-4400 (online) Series Editor Kevin Linch What was it like to be a soldier in Britain’s army in the redcoat era? While there is much written about wars, battles, tactics and fighting in this period, there is relatively little serious research on the nature of everyday military life. This new series aims to publish a range of interesting new books which explore a variety of questions about soldiering in this period. Subjects covered will include who were the soldiers and the officers? how did their careers develop? their cultural attitudes, including the changing nature of masculinity; the growth of professionalism; how soldiers related to their families and wider society; changing approaches to military discipline and organisation; and much more. The series will cover all the different forces of the British crown – the regular army, militia, home defence forces, part-time soldiers, auxiliaries; and officers, NCOs, rank and file, camp followers and military families. Besides studying the forces raised in Britain and Ireland, the series will also examine troops raised overseas including ‘foreign’ units and forces recruited in the colonies and the Empire. Soldiering had a lifecycle – from recruit, to life as a soldier, then discharge and returning to the community, all of which could be repeated – the series overall aims to provide rich detail on exactly what this life was like.

Redcoats to Tommies The Experience of the British Soldier from the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Kevin Linch and Matthew Lord

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2021 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 602 8 hardback ISBN 978 1 80010 225 5 ePDF

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: G. D. Giles, ‘British Soldiers, 19th Century’, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, New York Public Library Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Contents List of Illustrations vii List of Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction Kevin Linch and Matthew Lord

1

Part 1: R ecruitment 1

Citizen Soldiers: ‘Military Spirit’ and Recruitment in Britain during the Wars against France, 1793–1815 Jacqueline Reiter

19

2

From Party of Order to Gentlemen’s Plaything – Rural Identity and the British Yeomanry Cavalry George Hay

40

3

‘Kitchener’s Mob’: Myth and Reality in Raising the New Army, 1914–15 58 Peter Doyle

Part 2: Experiences in the Military 4

Sun, Sea and Starvation: The Logistics of the British Garrison on Minorca, 1746–56 Rob Tildesley

5

British Soldiers, Sieges, and the Laws of War: The 1807 Siege of Montevideo 103 Gavin Daly

6

‘Something-to-smoke, at the right time, is a godsend’: Voluntary Action and the Provision of Cigarettes to Soldiers during the First World War Michael Reeve

85

120

vi    C on t e nts

Part 3: The Soldier in Politics and Society 7

‘Our Brother Officers in India’: The Military Lobby in Imperial Politics of the 1780s 149 Christina Welsch

8

‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’, or, ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’: The Shift in Popular Perceptions of the Common Soldier in Late Victorian Britain, 1870–c.1910 Edward Gosling

9

Irish Military Cultures in the British Army, c.1775–1992 Timothy Bowman

169 192

Part 4: Military Identity and Memory 10

‘Fond of Shooting?’: The Social Bonds of the Indian Army Officer Corps, 1858–1901 Adam Prime

11

The Social Reality of the British Army in Interwar Britain Eleanor O’Keeffe

231

12

The Military Culture and Traditions of an Unmilitary People Ian F. W. Beckett

253

213

Index 270

Illustrations 1

‘Kitchener’s Man’. A soldier from one of the three original tranches of Kitchener’s army wearing the blue ‘sack-coat’ uniform that would become known as ‘Kitchener Blue’. This emergency uniform was manufactured en masse to clothe the mass of early recruits. (Author’s Collection) 76

2

‘Birmingham Pal’. A soldier from one of the Birmingham City Battalions dressed in a ‘Kitchener Blue’ uniform manufactured to the highest standards, with matching peaked cap and distinctive insignia. Uniforms of this type set the Pals apart from the poorly-equipped volunteers of K1–K3. (Author’s Collection)

3

4

5

79

Anonymous, ‘The Unhappy Contrast’, Print, 1791. British Museum 1868,0808.6009. www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_ online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery. aspx?assetId=90216001&objectId=1462715&partId=1. © Trustees of the British Museum.

153

J. W. Richards, ‘“A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One”’, Illustrated Chips, 22 November 1890, pp. 4–5. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection PENP.NT151

168

J. W. Richards, ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’, Illustrated Chips, 22 November 1890, pp. 4–5. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection PENP.NT151

168

6

J. B. Yates, ‘The Pleasures of the Recruiting Sergeant’, Judy, 24 March 1897, p. 143. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection P.P.5270.c. 176

7

Anonymous, ‘Military Sketch No.2 – A Poser for Childers’, Moonshine, 2 April 1881, p. 165. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection P.P.5272.p.

176

W. Reynolds, ‘Why Do Not Working Men Enlist?’, Funny Folks, 30 October 1880, p. 347. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection PENP.NT152

178

8

viii    I llu st r ations

9

Anonymous, ‘Tommy Atkins to the Front’, Judy, 25 March 1885, p. 142. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection P.P.5270.c. 181

The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Contributors Ian Beckett is honorary Professor of Military History at the University of Kent. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he was Chairman of the Council of the Army Records Society from 2001 to 2014 and has held chairs previously in the US as well as the UK. He is known internationally for his work on the history of the British army and on the Great War. Timothy Bowman is Reader in Modern British Military History at the University of Kent, where he teaches on the BA Military History and MA First World War Studies programmes. He is the author of a number of books and articles, including Irish Regiments in the Great War: Discipline and Morale (Manchester University Press, 2002) and, with Ian Beckett and Mark Connelly, The British Army and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a major study of the Irish soldier in the British army since 1680. Gavin Daly is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He has published widely on Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of war. He is the author of The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He is currently writing a book on sieges, violence, and the laws of war in the age of Napoleon, examining changes and continuities in customary laws of war, cultures of war, and moral and sentimental discourses over the long eighteenth century. Peter Doyle is Acting Director of Research at London South Bank University and a Visiting Professor in History in its School of Law and Social Sciences. His research interests involve the impact of terrain on military campaigns and in the British military experience in the world wars. He has been a visiting lecturer at the US Military Academy, West Point, on two occasions, is a frequent contributor to TV documentaries and is the Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary War Heritage Group. His most recent publications include Disputed Earth: Geology and Trench Warfare on the Western Front 1914–1918 (2017) and Remembering Tommy: The British Soldier in the First World War (2018, 2nd edition).

x    C on t r ibu tor s

Edward Gosling is a historian of the social and cultural position of the army in Britain in the long nineteenth century. He has lectured in history at the University of Exeter and the University of Plymouth. His doctoral thesis examined the popularisation of military service and the social status of the other ranks of the late Victorian British army. Prior to his doctoral studies, he read for an undergraduate degree in War Studies at the University of Kent and an AHRC masters at the University of Plymouth. George Hay is Official Historian for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He completed his PhD at the University of Kent and is a historian of the British army, the long nineteenth century and the amateur military tradition. Eleanor O’Keeffe is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Historic Royal Palaces. She is a historian of war, culture and society, with a special interest in remembrance and its relationship to mobilisation and identity. Her ARHC-funded PhD examined civic-military relations and the creation of military legitimacy in Glasgow and Newcastle, 1919–39. She won a Gerda Henkel Scholarship in 2013 from the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre for this research. She has since published on remembrance in the civic public sphere and on veterans’ associational life in Britain. She is currently working on an AHRC-funded project, ‘Lest We Forget’, which examines contemporary remembrance of the First World War through the lens of ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ at the Tower of London in 2014. Adam Prime is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Salford, lecturing in military and international history. Adam recently completed a PhD at the University of Leicester entitled ‘The Indian Army’s British Office Corps, 1861–1921’. The thesis studies both military and social aspects of a British officer’s experience on the subcontinent including race, masculinity, sport, training, officer–man relations and punishment. Prior to this Adam gained his BA(Hons) and MA from the universities of Salford and Chester respectively. Adam’s previous publication is a book chapter on the Indian army’s involvement in the defence of the Suez Canal in 1914 and 1915. A book of his PhD thesis is planned. Michael Reeve is a postdoctoral researcher. He received his doctorate in History from the University of Hull in June 2019. He now works at Leeds Beckett University as an Academic Skills Tutor and Lecturer in History. His research into early civil defence in the coastal urban setting is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Heritage Consortium). Michael has published on the social and cultural history of smoking and anti-German sentiment during the First World War, and has work forthcoming on depictions of war damage in popular culture.

Contr ibu tor s    xi

Jacqueline Reiter’s PhD from the University of Cambridge focused on the role of national defence in British political debate over the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Her first book, The Late Lord: The Life of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham (Pen and Sword, 2017), explored the life of a lesser-known but highly influential individual whose career bridged the gap between the military and the political at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her articles have appeared in History Today and the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, and she has blogged for the History of Parliament. She is currently co-writing a chapter with John Bew for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. She is also writing a book on Sir Home Riggs Popham and his impact on military decision-making. Rob Tildesley primarily works on eighteenth- and seventeenth-century military logistics and civil-military relations. He studied history at Glasgow University, where he was awarded the Cameron Highlanders Prize, before proceeding on to the University of St Andrews to complete an MLitt in Early Modern History. It was during this project that his research into the garrison on Minorca began and eventually turned into a final thesis project while studying there. He is currently studying at Wolfson College, Oxford, for his DPhil in history with a focus upon military logistics during the Wars of the Spanish Succession. Christina Welsch is currently Assistant Professor of Britain and its Empire at the College of Wooster (Ohio, USA). Her work explores the development of the British East India Company’s armies in the eighteenth century, tracing the political entanglements of British and Indian soldiers and officers in imperial, British national, and South Asian networks. She is in the process of revising her dissertation, ‘The Sons of Mars and the Heirs of Rustam: Military Ideology, Ambition, and Rebellion in Southern India (1746–1812)’, into a monograph on the politicisation of the Company’s armies.

Acknowledgements The chapters in this edited collection are the product of a conference held at the University of Leeds in July 2018 on the theme of ‘Redcoats, Tommies, and Dusty Warriors: British Soldiers c.1650 to the Present’. We would like to thank all the contributors at the conference who made it such a stimulating two days. What follows provides a selection of the excellent and exciting new research on the history of Britain’s soldiers from the establishment of a permanent army by the British state in the seventeenth century; sadly we could not accommodate more of this work. Thanks must also be given to the School of History at the University of Leeds in helping support the conference. The editors gratefully acknowledge the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to reproduce ‘The Unhappy Contrast’ (1791). Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Boydell & Brewer for their encouragement in bringing this collection to press, and particularly Peter Sowden for his support throughout.

Abbreviations BEF BL CCA DGVO DORA EIC GOC GPO HLI HO INV IPP IWM KOSB NAM NAS NCO NRS ODNB OOBB OTC PD PH PIP PRONI QOCH RA RCOS RE

British Expeditionary Force British Library Canterbury Cathedral Archives Director General of Voluntary Organisations Defence of the Realm Act East India Company General Officer Commanding General Post Office Highland Light Infantry Home Office papers Irish National Volunteers Irish Parliamentary Party Imperial War Museum King’s Own Scottish Borderers National Army Museum National Archives of Scotland Non-Commissioned Officer National Records of Scotland Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Ordnance Office Bill Book Officer Training Corps Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Day Parliamentary History to 1803 Penny Illustrated Papers Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders Royal Artillery Royal Corps of Signals Royal Engineers

x i v    A bbr e vi ations

RSF RSM TA TAA TF TNA TTR UDR USC UVF VAD WO WYAS

Royal Scots Fusiliers Regimental Sergeant Major Territorial Army Territorial Army Association Territorial Force The National Archives Tobacco Trade Review Ulster Defence Regiment Ulster Special Constabulary Ulster Volunteer Force Voluntary Aid Detachments War Office papers West Yorkshire Archive Service

Introduction Kevin L inch a nd Mat the w L or d

I

n 1979, Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ single ‘Oliver’s Army’ reached number two in the UK singles chart. Written as a commentary on the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s and the presence of soldiers of the British army on the streets of Belfast, it also made references to the long history of the British army, not least in its title where the army was linked to Oliver Cromwell and so to the professional, red-coated soldiers of the New Model Army of the 1640s and 1650s. As an Irish singer-songwriter, Elvis Costello was not typical of most people’s grasp of the history of Britain’s military. Indeed, the serious lyrics of ‘Oliver’s Army’ were hidden under a catchy pop melody, and its success had more to do with the latter than its anti-war and class-conscious messages. Nevertheless, it did – and still does – speak to the long history of the British army. This is most evident in the self-conscious concern with lineage and heritage in many popular histories of the army, and the army’s own portrayal of itself; a type of military genealogy for which it has become famous.1 Despite this sense of lineage and heritage, historians have often tended to segregate the experiences and lifecycle of the British soldier into distinct, and perhaps artificial, phases reflecting the broader and rather disjointed development of the British army as a whole. For instance, the relationship between the soldier and British society is commonly accepted to have transitioned from one of suspicion and hostility in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to one of jingoistic acclaim at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it is accepted that since the end of conscription in 1963, contact between soldier and civilian has increasingly disappeared, leading to a reduction of the military footprint within society and a consequent degree of alienation between soldiers and civilians.2 Whilst this notion of separate ‘ages’ of development certainly has its merits, it also tends to distract Arthur Swinson, A Register of the Regiments and Corps of the British Army: The Ancestry of the Regiments and Corps of the Regular Establishment (London, 1972); see also the British army’s website: https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/corps-regiments-and-units/.

1

Martin Shaw, Post-Military Society: Militarism, Demilitarisation and War at the End of the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 1991).

2

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historians from considering longer-term trends and experiences common to soldiers across several centuries and which, in an institution with a pervasive sense of its traditions, are often more prominent than historians acknowledge.3 This book takes a broader perspective of the themes and issues that run through the history of Britain’s land forces from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. This edited collection’s purpose is to provide an opportunity to survey and examine the history of Britain’s soldiers across a wide time frame, bringing together different scholars, approaches, and perspectives in, what we hope, will be a highly interdisciplinary and broad historiographical perspective. By considering the experiences of the soldier across three centuries, this collection will gauge whether the basic fundamentals, principles, and priorities of army life have endured or transformed during the existence of a continual (arguably professional) standing army.

Britain’s Soldiers With the recent First World War centenary and the bicentenary of the Napoleonic Wars culminating in 2015, interest in ‘Tommy’ has never been higher. However, we should be careful about falling into assumptions about who we are discussing when we refer to Britain’s soldiers. Frequently, but not exclusively, histories of Britain’s military have defaulted to talking about British full-time soldiers of the army. Redcoats have been traditionally associated with the numbered, regular regiments of the army that were stationed and fought across Europe, the Caribbean, North America, and India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;4 likewise for ‘Tommy’ in the twentieth century but dressed in khaki and across yet more of the globe.5 Outside of these stand the units of the amateur military tradition, such as the militia and yeomanry in Britain and Ireland, the armed forces raised for and from Britain’s colonies (most notably the East India Company (EIC) army), and the ‘foreign’ units within the army.6 All of these works have deepened our understanding of the history of Britain’s military forces (as distinct from British military history) and Field Marshal Lord Carver, The Seven Ages of the British Army (New York, 1984).

3

Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London, 2002).

4

Alan Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939–1945 (New Haven, 2015); Richard Dannatt, Boots on the Ground: Britain and Her Army since 1945 (London, 2016).

5

Ian F. W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester, 1991); Kaushik Roy, ‘The Hybrid Military Establishment of the East India Company in South Asia: 1750–1849’, Journal of Global History, 6:2 (2011), 195–218, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1740022811000222; Mark Wishon, German Forces and the British Army: Interactions and Perceptions, 1742–1815 (Basingstoke, 2013).

6

Introduction    3

represent a shift from the nation-centric focus of works such as the twenty volumes of J. W. Fortescue’s History of the British Army.7 Yet the diverse histories of Britain’s land forces are usually disconnected, reflecting the different geographical, cultural, political, and racial contexts from which these armed forces sprang or to which they were deployed. Just as significantly, histories of Britain’s solders are usually compartmentalised by an established periodisation largely defined by centuries. And further splits are often made between times of war and peace. There has been a recognition that these divisions may be artificially separating the experience of soldiering, and missing opportunities to explore relationships between different forms of military service and different periods. Scholars have brought together studies about military traditions in Ireland, Scotland, and South Asia, as well as in eighteenth-century Britain.8 Recent work on the First and Second World Wars has also emphasised multi-national dimensions within ‘national’ armies.9 Additionally, the interconnectedness of strategic concerns and military experience across the globe through military service for Britain is becoming more established.10 To take these approaches further and more widely assess themes that run across three hundred years, this collection takes a broad definition of Britain’s soldiers, covering all those tasked with defending British military interests. This encompasses the regular army, home defence forces, part-time soldiers, and auxiliaries. The label of ‘Britain’s soldiers’ can therefore be applied to both local and professional units from across Britain, the territories that it occupied and governed overseas, and all soldiers raised for the defence of those. This collection, like others that have explored the social and cultural history of the army, does not limit itself just to those in uniform, and recognises that to more fully understand soldiers it is useful to also consider their relationships with and to other communities and groups. The army was rarely a homosocial institution, and for all the soldiers there were camp followers and military families, as well as relations. J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, 20 vols (London, 1899–1930).

7

Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996); Edward M. Spiers, Jeremy A. Crang and Matthew Strickland (eds), A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012); Daniel Marston, Chandar S. Sundaram and Stephen Philip Cohen (eds), A Military History of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (Westport, CT, 2006); Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (eds), Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815 (Liverpool, 2014).

8

Wendy Ugolini and Juliette Pattinson (eds), Fighting for Britain? Negotiating Identities in Britain during the Second World War (Bern, 2015); Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge, 2019); John Connor, Someone Else’s War: Fighting for the British Empire in World War I (London, 2019).

9

Bruce Collins, War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain, 1790–1830 (London, 2014).

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Undertaking such a wide-angled examination of Britain’s soldiers presents challenges. As is explored in the chapters that follow, the experience of soldiering came from and engendered disparate and diverse military traditions that emerged from broad strands of British and imperial life. To tackle these challenges, this collection focuses on the lifecycle of a soldier – enlistment, experience, identity, and representations and place in society – to assess the evolution of Britain’s soldiers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, highlighting continuity and change. Each of these is reflected in the division of this collection into four parts, where we endeavour to bring a range of perspectives onto this lifecycle from across the period that this book examines. Rather predictably, the confines of the twelve following chapters mean that we cannot cover the full diversity of soldiering in Britain’s armies. It is still mostly focused on the United Kingdom and British and Irish soldiers; despite this limitation, the wide chronological spread of material endeavours to show the value of the approach taken to exploring, reconstructing, and understanding Britain’s soldiers.

Recruitment The first theme of this collection focuses on the initial stage of a soldier’s lifecycle as he made the transition from civilian to soldier. Throughout most of the history of Britain’s land forces from 1660, recruitment was ostensibly a voluntary process, but we should recognise that the requirement for the male population of the British Isles to serve in the military was pursued, and enforced military service featured in Britain’s other land forces too. Acts of Parliament were used in the eighteenth century to forcibly enlist socially marginalised groups in Britain into the army, although their impact on the strength of the army was small.11 The militia, which was reformed in England in 1757 and introduced to Ireland in 1793 and Scotland in 1797, was the mainstay of the defence of the British Isles up until 1815.12 Technically, militia laws were meant to enforce a personal, selective military service on the male population, but this was sidestepped by the widespread use of substitutes – men who were recruited (often at a high enlistment bounty) to serve in someone else’s stead. The introduction of conscription in 1916 and 1939 for the armed forces was therefore

Stephen Conway, ‘The Mobilization of Manpower for Britain’s Mid-Eighteenth-Century Wars’, Historical Research, 77:197 (2004), 377–404; Stephen Conway, ‘The Recruitment of Criminals into the British Army, 1775–81’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58:137 (1985), 46–58, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1985.tb01978.x.

11

J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997).

12

Introduction    5

part of a much longer debate about the state’s encouragement and management of martial spirit and military human resources.13 It is also worth highlighting the varied means of recruitment used to recruit soldiers from outside the British Isles. The foreign regiments of the British army in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were generally volunteers recruited with the offer of a bounty too.14 The case of the Swiss De Meuron regiment that was ‘detached’ from Dutch service in 1796 was an unusual example of Britain’s involvement in the soldier trade, with the soldiers having no say in the arrangement.15 Enforced military service also underpinned the West India regiments that were established in 1797, as enslaved Africans were purchased in the West Indies to sustain their numbers. Although after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 this was no longer an option, their ranks were subsequently filled during the Napoleonic Wars by enlisting Africans taken from slaving ships.16 Whichever means were used to recruit soldiers, there was invariably a transition from civilian to military life for the individuals involved. Most of Britain’s soldiers were not born into a martial culture where soldiering was expected of them, nor did they come from an environment in which military training and discipline was widespread from a young age. As is highlighted in the final chapter of this collection, the population of the British Isles were generally an unmilitary people. The ‘martial races’ of the empire were more about racial discourse than the realities of what prompted South Asians designated ‘martial’ by colonial authorities to enlist.17 What linked the conscripts of 1916 and 1939 with the volunteer army of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the process of making soldiers, a process that can be approached through examining both the society from which the soldiers were drawn and the shape of the military forces that they joined. In our first chapter, Jacqueline Reiter Hew Strachan, ‘Liberalism and Conscription, 1789–1919’, in The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hew Strachan (London, 2000), pp. 3–16; Ralph James Q. Adams and P. P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–1918 (Basingstoke, 1987); Roger Broad, Conscription in Britain, 1939–1963: The Militarization of a Generation (London, 2006).

13

Kevin Linch, ‘The Politics of Foreign Recruitment in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, in Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era, ed. Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 50–66, https:// link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137296634_4.

14

Roger Knight, Britain against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793–1815 (London, 2013), pp. 142–3.

15

Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven and London, 1979).

16

Heather Streets-Salter, Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004).

17

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explores the ways politicians thought, debated, and endeavoured to change British attitudes towards military service during the war against France between 1793 and 1815, hoping to harness more of the nation’s manpower for national defence. As the wars dragged on and ordinary army recruitment failed to keep pace with the nation’s unprecedented requirements, the attempted solutions put forward under the Pitt, Addington, Grenville and Portland governments resulted in a conceptual shift in the term ‘citizen soldier’, a phrase that had previously had radical connotations but was harnessed by the decision-making powers and reflected in the proliferation of auxiliary forces designed to meet Britain’s needs. Measures to inculcate the nation’s rather nebulous (and very masculine) ‘military spirit’ were proposed to improve the nation’s conception of military service, thus avoiding the constitutional pitfalls of conscription while establishing a permanent plan for national defence. This proved to be a theme, and a challenge, that echoed throughout the nineteenth and especially the early twentieth century as governments sought to increase the number of soldiers it could call upon without detriment to the commercial, industrial and maritime base that was so important to the UK’s military power in other dimensions. Matching a military organisation to social and political contexts, and the interplay between them over time, is examined in the second chapter where George Hay focuses on the yeomanry. Raised in the French Wars between 1793 and 1815 as one of the auxiliary forces to supplement the land forces and inculcate a military spirit, unusually it survived into peacetime and, in a transmuted form, on into the British army of the twentieth century and today.18 The yeomanry represented a very particular form of alignment between social and military needs. Raised not just as an anti-invasion force, it was envisaged as a paramilitary force to suppress domestic disturbances, supplementing the army in this role. To ensure political reliability, it was designed to foster a class alliance between gentlemen officers and a rank and file of middle-class agriculturalists – so naturally its strongholds were to be in rural Britain. This image would come to define the movement during the nineteenth century, despite the existence of significant regional diversity and shifts over time. As the century progressed, this rural identity – real or imagined – was clung to at the regimental level, even after its significance had long passed with the establishment of efficient and capable police forces, and a reduction in political and other violence. Having been designed to deliver political reliability through careful construction, yeomanry service symbolised something else. Becoming intimately entwined with county society and the social occasions and leisure pursuits that came with it, the

Currently, many of the former county yeomanry regiments continue to have a presence in the army reserve: see for example ‘The Royal Wessex Yeomanry’, https://www.army.mod. uk/who-we-are/corps-regiments-and-units/royal-armoured-corps/royal-wessex-yeomanry/.

18

Introduction    7

yeomanry looked to elitism to carve out a niche among the British amateur military movements of the later nineteenth century. The importance of units and regimental identity, and their alignment with broader social and civilian contexts, is highlighted in Chapter 3, where Peter Doyle examines the history of ‘Kitchener’s Mob’, the hundreds of thousands of men who joined the army in 1914 and 1915 before the introduction of conscription. The ‘Pals’ battalions were the most famous outcome of this recruitment drive; indeed, the popular memory of these units as men who joined together and served together has reached almost mythic proportions. As is highlighted in the chapter, the organisation of the New Armies in the early stages of the First World War became increasingly socially and class based. The Pals represented, for the most part, urban, middle-class Britain, that combined close social connections with exclusivity, whilst the less famous service battalions were formed from working-class enlistees. As this chapter shows, one outward way that these distinctions were shown and maintained was in the dressing, equipping, housing and support of these different units. This theme of the broader interplay between soldiers and politics and society is further addressed in our third section.

Experiences in the Military Once in the army, soldiers faced considerable variety in their experiences serving as soldiers. Much about it depended on the context of the period we look at – times of war and peace being the obvious difference – but nevertheless we can pick out themes and trends that run across the centuries. The first is perhaps the most obvious, that being a soldier marked an individual out through their training in arms and the potential use of lethal force in pursuit or defence of the state’s interests. We should be careful, however, not to focus a discussion of experience solely on combat; many soldiers were away from the front lines, and even when in battle zones, continuous exposure to combat was neither necessary nor proved practical. In this second section, we focus on three studies exploring different aspects of the experience of serving within Britain’s land forces. One theme that is particularly marked in the history of Britain’s army (although not exclusive to it) was its peripatetic and extra-territorial deployments. Almost from its very inception in the seventeenth century, British units of the army were sent overseas to garrison Tangier, so beginning a long history of units serving across the globe, including the Caribbean, North America, and South Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and expanding to Africa, South-East Asia, Australasia, and Pacific Oceania through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.19 Although Collins, War and Empire; John McAleer, Britain’s Maritime Empire: Southern Africa, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, 1763–1820 (Cambridge, 2017); Peter Stanley, The

19

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post-Second World War decolonisation resulted in fewer permanent overseas garrisons for the British army, it still remained a facet of the service with deployments to the Falklands (both in war and peace), Gibraltar, Belize, Hong Kong (until 1997), as well as combat and peacekeeping campaigns across Europe and the Middle East. Nor was (and is) this experience peculiar to the British units of the British army. For instance, the regiments recruited from South Asia were increasingly used across the Indian Ocean region, culminating in the deployment of Indian army units in Flanders and France during the First World War.20 In Chapter 4, Rob Tildesley explores the history of the military garrison on the island of Minorca during the early eighteenth century. This garrison was famously taken by the French in 1756 during the early stages of the Seven Years War in Europe. This chapter identifies the difficulties of distance and communication, and the resultant neglect, of an overseas garrison. It explores the logistical support for this garrison in peacetime, looking at the food supplies and the network of agents that set up and operated this system, likewise with supplies of ammunition and other military material. Within this, the importance of the island’s fortifications are underscored, as are the challenges of maintaining them and ensuring they were ready for an assault. The chapter demonstrates the precariousness of these systems and how often decisions were determined by factors outside the garrison’s immediate control, with the result of compromised decisions and a weakened garrison that could not withstand the French invasion for long in 1756. Chapter 5 continues with the theme of overseas warfare – and siege experience – in examining the largely understudied case of the invasion of South America in 1806–07. Sieges remain the poor cousin to battles in military histories of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, symptomatic of a common assumption that sieges had become antiquated in an age of rapid movement and decisive battle. Yet this belies the frequency with which sieges still occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their continued importance to customary laws of war. Moreover, sieges have traditionally been approached from an operational point of view, rather than through the lens of social and cultural history. This chapter Remote Garrison: The British Army in Australia, 1788–1870 (Kenthurst, NSW, 1986); Kaushik Roy, ‘The Armed Expansion of the English East India Company: 1740s–1849’, in A Military History of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era, ed. Daniel Marston, Chandar S. Sundaram and Stephen Philip Cohen (Westport, CT, 2006), pp. 1–15, 198–200. Santanu Das, Indian Troops in Europe 1914–1918 (Ahmedabad, 2015); David Enrico Omissi, ‘The Indian Army in Europe, 1914–1918’, in Colonial Soldiers in Europe, 1914– 1945: ‘Aliens in Uniform’ in Wartime Societies, ed. Eric Storm and Al Tuma Alic (New York, 2016), pp. 119–39; Rob Johnson (ed.), The British Indian Army: Virtue and Necessity (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014).

20

Introduction    9

explores the largely forgotten British siege and capture of Montevideo during the ill-fated River Plate campaign of 1806–07. From surviving sources, it examines how British soldiers wrote about their siege experiences, with a particular focus on their treatment of enemy combatants and civilians. In terms of the evolution of customary laws of war, this siege is of particular interest, especially when compared to the more famous British sieges of the Peninsular War. In Spain, after storming the towns of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian, British troops spared the French garrisons but notoriously sacked the towns and committed atrocities against the Spanish inhabitants. Yet at Montevideo the opposite was true: a rare example of a besieged city taken by storm, where the enemy was initially given no quarter, but the inhabitants were spared the fate of sack. This case, then, provides an insight into not just soldier experience, but how experiences were shaped by the expectations, beliefs, customs, and behaviour of the soldiers themselves. The final chapter of this section discusses the importance of tobacco products to soldiers in the First World War. Unlike the experience of the Minorca garrison in the 1740s and 1750s, the expectation of what constituted ‘essential’ support to soldiers expanded in this conflict, such that soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front were provided with cigarettes in their ration packs, often exceeding the amount of food supplied. Those soldiers that did not smoke before they were sent to fight usually became smokers after only a short period under fire. Military figures, journalists and doctors alike saw the cigarette as a ‘special need’ of the fighting man; a way of dealing with the stresses and strains of war. Often provided through voluntary action, tobacco products for soldiers, especially cigarettes, were not only morale-boosting and integral to the physical and mental survival of servicemen, but also a mechanism through which civilians could outwardly prove their patriotic devotion by supporting the troops through donations of tobacco and other ‘comforts’. Furthermore, it became part of a repertoire of gestures that enabled servicemen and civilians to make sense of the wartime world, by maintaining a sense of continuity with pre-war civilian life. The cigarette itself was marketed in a way that drew together military-medical discourse, expressions of masculinity and nationalist tropes, with producers proving adept at adapting to the stresses of total war. Through a study of tobacco products for soldiers, we see both a way of exploring and understanding the soldiers’ experience and how the soldier was represented and identified within society.

The Soldier in Politics and Society Two critical media headlines that have recently featured the contemporary British soldier, in April and September 2019 respectively, continue to emphasise the eternally complex relationship between Tommy, politics and society. The first of these

10    K e vin L inch a n d Mat the w L or d

involved coverage of a social media video featuring soldiers using an image of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader, for target practice. Brigadier Nick Perry, responding to the criticism, acknowledged that, ‘I think at this time it would be helpful to remind ourselves of the importance, as soldiers, of remaining non-political’.21 Despite the very isolated nature of this incident, it could, nonetheless, have sent a problematic message into the public sphere as to the political leanings of British soldiers, despite the supposed political neutrality of the army as an institution. The second media headline involved two former soldiers of 3rd Battalion (3 Para) winning a racial discrimination claim against the Ministry of Defence. A ministry spokesperson responded that, ‘As a modern and inclusive employer, the Armed Forces do not tolerate unacceptable behaviour in any form.’22 This episode could, however, potentially project British soldiers as out-of-step with the supposed multicultural values of the modern society they are meant to protect, at a time when the army is attempting to increase its recruits from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. These headlines in turn raise long-standing questions, evident since at least the eighteenth century, of how far the British soldier is de-politicised and to what extent his/her values mirror those of wider society. Despite these evident long-term patterns, the historiography exploring the relationship between the army, politics and society has, like much literature on the British soldier, often been segregated into distinct stages of development. Hence, there has often been consensus that Britain’s continued reliance, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on a range of irregular militia and yeomanry units for national defence reflected a long-term discomfort amongst political elites about the potential for a standing army to threaten constitutional liberties.23 With the expansion of empire throughout the nineteenth century, followed by the rapid industrialisation of warfare at the turn of the twentieth, however, it is also acknowledged that the army’s place and influence within British politics was greatly enhanced, leading arguably to the creation of a ‘warfare state’ throughout the period of total war and subsequent Cold War.24 Consequently, senior officers had major influence over national manpower and budget usage.

Brigadier Nick Perry, quoted in Lizzie Dearden, ’British Soldiers Shown Shooting Jeremy Corbyn Target Prompts Army Investigation’, The Independent, 3 April 2019, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/soldiers-corbyn-shoot-target-practicearmy-mod-kabul-a8852156.html (accessed 17 September 2019).

21

Ministry of Defence spokesperson, quoted in BBC News, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-england-essex-49716541 (accessed 17 September 2019).

22

Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies’! The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Baltimore, 1974).

23

David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006).

24

Introduction    11

Despite this epoch-centric focus, some commentators have traced longer-term consistencies in the political influence of the regular soldier. Hew Strachan has recognised that British politics has long been subject to ‘militarism’ in the form of a ‘veneration of military values and appearances in excess of what is strictly necessary for effective defence’.25 Many questions relating to this longer-term relationship remain, however, unanswered. How far this influence has fluctuated over time and what conditions have been especially propitious in propelling the soldier into politics at any given moment are questions in need of further analysis. Similarly, the extent to which soldiers have acted as a unified institutional lobby or instead as simply an extension of their wider class interests, combined with their rate of success in influencing policy, remains unclear. In Chapter 7 Christina Welsch explores these issues through the political lobbying campaigns of East India Company officers in the late eighteenth century. She examines how, in a period when the EIC’s military hierarchy were threatened with supersession by Crown officers in India, the former took the unusual step of operating as a coherent military lobby. Their subsequent success in obtaining equal rank with Crown officers had a decisive legacy in situating the EIC soldier as a bastion of British imperial defence within popular and political culture, whilst also spurring this lobby into further political campaigns as the early nineteenth century progressed. In exploring this important milestone, Welsch considers broader questions about the soldier–state relationship, addressing the historical conditions which have propelled soldiers into the political arena and, in turn, made politicians more receptive to military influence. The relationship between the soldier and society is heavily interlinked with the place of the former within the political sphere. Historians have tended to accept that public perceptions of the soldier transformed from outright hostility in the eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century, when the redcoat acted as national policeman and defender of the established order, to nationalistic adoration at the high noon of imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century.26 The cultural and political conditions in which this transformation took place nevertheless remain difficult to pin down. Moreover, how far this radical transition in popular culture was complete, or whether strands of alienation endured throughout this period, remains debatable. Whilst, for example, the British soldier of the interwar years was respected in society following the sacrifice of the First World War, this did not

Hew Strachan, The British Army in Politics (New York, 1997), pp. 264–5.

25

Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the Nineteenth Century Military (Liverpool, 2016); Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain: From the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident (Abingdon, 1990); John M. Mackenzie, Popular Imperialism and the Military 1850–1950 (Manchester, 1992).

26

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necessarily increase the appeal of military service, even in the depths of the depression era.27 In Chapter 8 Edward Gosling examines the crucial decades of the late nineteenth century during which the cultural transformation in popular perceptions of the British soldier took its most decisive leap forward. Evaluating the broader political and social conditions in which this value shift developed, he considers the wider impact of political reforms on the British army throughout the late Victorian period, combined with the importance of ongoing colonial wars and advances within the print media. The result of these converging forces was to hoist Tommy Atkins onto a pedestal as champion of imperial expansion and embodiment of British masculine dynamism, an icon which all British men could aspire to emulate. Ultimately, Gosling lays the foundations for understanding the periodic desirability of enlistment in 1914 and the coincidingly more inclusive notions of precisely who could become a soldier in the twentieth century. It is impossible to truly appreciate the relationship between the soldier, politics and society without accounting for the diverse military traditions coexisting within both regular and irregular British regiments and within different regions of the United Kingdom.28 Whilst, for instance, enlistment in eighteenth-century regular English regiments could have been driven primarily by poverty and criminality, the momentum behind Scottish recruitment often rested with the necessities of survival and adaptation in the post-Jacobite age.29 Hence, whilst in one kingdom soldiers were primarily associated with poverty and desperation, in another they could be connected much more decisively with political circumstances. In Chapter 9 Timothy Bowman pursues these questions within the Irish military tradition across several centuries. He considers the use of enlistment in the British military infrastructure as a means of furthering wider political goals by each Irish religious-political community and assesses the extent to which these motivations coexisted with the more conventional economic necessities, as shared with recruits on the mainland. Hence, Protestant unionists continuously used their domination of the Irish military establishment in order to secure their settler state across several centuries. Correspondingly, Catholic nationalists often enlisted after 1914 to pursue their agenda of achieving Home Rule. Bowman’s findings underline how the

Brian Bond, ‘The Army between the Two World Wars 1918–1939’, in The Oxford History of the British Army, ed. David G. Chandler and Ian F. W. Beckett (Oxford, 2003), pp. 256–71.

27

Spiers et al., A Military History of Scotland; Bartlett and Jeffery, A Military History of Ireland; Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition 1558–1945.

28

Matthew P. Dziennik, The Fatal Land: War, Empire and the Highland Soldier in British America (New Haven, 2015).

29

Introduction    13

complex soldier–state relationship played out very differently according to the political, religious, social and historical contexts in different parts of the United Kingdom. Each of these chapters also addresses another crucial factor in the relationship between soldiers, society and the state: how this interaction was heavily influenced by class and rank. As Welsch demonstrates, it was unusual for British officers to form a coherent military lobby, detached from their own wider class interests, until the late eighteenth century. Bowman also highlights how senior Irish officers were likely to see themselves as citizens of the British imperial elite, as opposed to descending into the squabbles of Irish religion and settler politics. Evidently social standing, in both these instances, defined an officer’s interaction with politics and society more than professional or factional loyalties. As Gosling also indicates, the social and political voice of the common ranker was, until the late nineteenth century, often drowned out and his interests overshadowed within society by public scrutiny of the army as a single coherent institution. As each contributor demonstrates, therefore, class is vital to understanding the soldier–state relationship.

Military Identity and Memory The periodic traumas that have been inflicted upon the British regimental system across successive defence reviews since 1945 have often laid bare the complexities and emotional investment surrounding the military identity of the British soldier. These episodes, in which communities have often led highly publicised campaigns to ‘save’ particular regiments from the butcher’s knife, have also underlined how far regimental identity can be interwoven with deep emotional ties to specific towns, cities, counties and regions, evoking powerful historical memories and traditions. The abolition or amalgamation of a regiment can subsequently become embroiled in wider local and national politics. For instance, during the campaign of 1968 to save the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders from disbandment, the issue took on both a Scottish nationalist tone and a coinciding sense of wider British public outrage at this seeming manifestation of national military decline.30 Campaigns such as this, therefore, underline not only the importance of regimental spirit to the identity of the British soldier, but also how far this interacts with broader public conceptions of national character. A soldier’s identity is, therefore, invariably wrapped in a complex web of regimental, local, regional and national dynamics. Stuart Allen, ‘Beating Retreat: The Scottish Military Tradition in Decline’, in Scotland, Empire and Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, 2017), pp. 261–86; Aaron Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Edinburgh, 2014); Donald Fairgrieve, A Regiment Saved: The Inside Story of ‘Operation Borderer’ – The Fight to Save the King‘s Own Scottish Borderers (Edinburgh, 1993).

30

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The importance of regimental pride to the identity of the soldier for much of the institutional history of the British army remains a point of significant consensus amongst historians, especially since David French’s seminal work on this organisational culture.31 It is often acknowledged that the regiment (combined with a particular battalion) lay at the centre of the soldier’s lifecycle from recruitment to demobilisation. The regiment was the source of training, socialising, battlefield efficiency, discipline and sustenance.32 A soldier’s family was also integrated and existed within this infrastructure. However, the way in which regimental tradition and spirit was maintained and advanced, particularly amid regular reforms to the regimental system and creation of new battalions, remains difficult to assess from unit to unit. Moreover, the way in which different regiments created very different military identities – particularly their conceptions of martial masculinity – depended on their history, fighting ethos, leadership and local/regional recruitment grounds, which makes pinning down the military identity of the British soldier particularly challenging.33 In Chapter 10 Adam Prime considers some of these questions in relation to British-Indian officers in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Addressing the regimental culture of integration and ostracism within the commissioned ranks, he explores how a coherent brotherhood was created and sustained amongst officers. Familial ties to the British-Indian military establishment, combined with the comradely bonds induced by sporting activities, often proved important to the integration process. Correspondingly, a reluctance to engage in these elements of regimental life often led to ostracism. Through examining this unit culture, Prime addresses how regimental identity was sustained and promoted, whilst considering how this identity influenced a soldier’s sense of martial masculinity. Regimental pride could, however, only constitute part of the soldier’s sense of self. The way in which he/she interacted with the wider community beyond the barracks could also, in either a positive or negative capacity, influence identity. On the one hand, the surrounding community could provide a welcome sense of civic pride and support for the soldier, as events such as marches on festival days or the emotive ‘repatriation’ ceremonies of twenty-first-century Tommies through Royal

David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army and the British People c.1870–2000 (Oxford, 2005).

31

See, for instance, Carole Divall, Inside the Regiment: The Officers and Men of the 30th Regiment during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Barnsley, 2011); Carole Divall, Redcoats against Napoleon: The 30th Regiment during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Barnsley, 2009); J. C. Hockley, Squaddies: Portrait of a Subculture (Liverpool, 2016).

32

See, for instance, the distinctive hypermasculine culture of the Paras, in Helen Parr, Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (London, 2018).

33

Introduction    15

Wootton Bassett perhaps indicate.34 On the other hand, the long history of tension between units and local populations, exemplified in drunken pub brawls or the practice of forcibly billeting troops in local communities, could create ill feeling and reputations that could also influence military identities in a much more negative way. Moreover, the tendency of soldiers to marry into local populations could also leave a legacy of dividing the soldier‘s loyalty between regiment and family responsibilities which, in turn, could influence their identity.35 Consequently, the relationship between the soldier and the surrounding civilian population can be crucial in dictating the soldier’s sense of self and can interact both positively and negatively with regimental spirit. In Chapter 11 Eleanor O’Keeffe considers the importance of this wider civic community to the soldier’s identity. Examining the role and significance for the Scottish military calendar of social gatherings in interwar Glasgow, she assesses the place of this civilian interaction within the soldier’s identity and how it coincided with regiment spirit. She considers how military units would use these regular gatherings not only to intentionally project a middle-class or ‘middlebrow’ image of the soldier into wider society, thus improving their reputation, but also as an outlet through which to present the regiment’s public voice on a range of issues. This included providing commentary about ongoing political and cultural issues, through to sustaining memory of historical events of particular importance to the regiment. O’Keeffe subsequently emphasises the centrality of these social occasions to the identity of interwar soldiers and to the way they wished to be regarded by the wider community. The interaction between soldierly and civilian identities is, of course, a two-way process. Whilst British society often has an important influence on military identity, the nature of that identity also reveals much about British national character more broadly. It has been argued, as mentioned previously, that Britain developed throughout the early to mid-twentieth century into a highly militarised state in terms of government policy, funding and mobilisation of national assets.36 With civilian and military interests supposedly acting in an increasing amount of unison, it could be suggested that national identity also increasingly mirrored that of the soldier to an unprecedented extent. The end of conscription, however, saw society K. Neill Jenkins, Nick Mogoran, Rachel Woodward and Daniel Bos, ‘Wootten Bassett and the Political Spaces of Remembrance and Mourning’, Area, 44:3 (2012), 356–63; Michael Freeden, ‘The Politics of Ceremony: The Wootten Bassett Phenomenon‘, Journal of Political Ideologies, 16:1 (2011), 1–10.

34

Antony Beevor, ‘The Army and Modern Society’, in The British Army: Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hew Strachan (London, 2000), pp. 63–74.

35

David Edgerton, ‘Liberal Militarism and the British State’, New Left Review, 185 (1991), 138–69.

36

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slide quickly back into attitudes of detached admiration for the soldier at best to indifference or hostility at worst. This potentially indicates that longer-term cultural strands of anti-militarism, evident since at least the seventeenth century, survived the jingoistic era of empire and total war and will perhaps constitute a pivotal factor in how military and civilian identities evolve into the future. In the concluding chapter, Ian F. W. Beckett addresses whether the British have always been an ‘unmilitary people’. Considering the often indifferent and detached relationship between military and society, combined with the coexistence of many complex and competing regional and institutional traditions within British military culture, he paints a picture of long-term and enduring ambiguity in the development of a British martial identity. This complexity has, he argues, also been complemented by the lack of an enduring institutional memory and strategic culture within the British army itself. Through examining the long-term ‘unmilitary’ nature of British national character, Beckett ultimately underlines the importance of studying the lifecycle of the British soldier across several centuries in order to fully appreciate the long-term trends that have affected his/her identity and place within wider politics, culture and society.

Part 1

Recruitment

1 Citizen Soldiers: ‘Military Spirit’ and Recruitment in Britain during the Wars against France, 1793–18151 Jacquel ine R eite r

T

he French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars faced Britain with a constant need for new soldiers. Britain had begun the wars against France in 1793 as a commercial country reliant on a powerful navy for her defence. Ten years later, Britain entered a new war with Napoleon with a different attitude. Once the standing army had been seen as a threat to liberty, and the ‘citizen soldier’ was created as a safer alternative more commensurate with political principles of personal liberty and independence of thought. These terms were now redefined under the circumstances of French continental hegemony and frequent invasion scares. It was no longer viable to view large standing armies as a liability, nor was it politically sound to keep citizen soldiers independent of higher authority. The rapidity of this change in attitude, however, prompted a vivid political debate over the compatibility of citizenship and military service that shed interesting light on the changing concepts of ‘citizenship’ and ‘Britishness’ at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, a debate revolved around whether a larger professional force was required to defend the British Isles while simultaneously conducting offensive operations abroad, and how such a force might be raised. Under such circumstances – and as happened again during the invasion scares of the 1850s, and in the run-up to the First World War – the term ‘citizen soldier’ moved away from its radical roots and towards official acknowledgement that civilians could not only be relied on, but expected, to take up arms in defence of their nation. The impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon on the construction of Britishness has long been of interest to historians, who recognise that, while Britain outwardly appeared to withstand the storms of revolution and Napoleonic This chapter is based on my unpublished PhD thesis: J. S. M. J. Faulkner, ‘The Role of National Defence in British Political Debate, 1794–1812’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2006), https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/271636.

1

20    Jacque l in e R ei t er

continental hegemony, there were serious consequences for politics, society and ideas of ‘manliness’. In the past decade, Kevin Linch has argued that the wars with France ‘had a long-lasting impact on the British Army and its relationship to the state and society’;2 and Catriona Kennedy has identified the significant ‘production of a newly virilized and martial model of gendered national identity’ as a result of the considerable expansion of the British military force and its pervasive influence throughout all levels of British society.3 A nation priding itself on a small standing army, a locally based militia and a powerful navy, with commercial networks around the globe, saw almost 3–4 per cent of its population serving in some sort of military capacity between 1793 and 1815.4 As the war progressed, political debate increasingly revolved around how to increase the size of the regular army. The rapid growth of the army had important implications for the way civilians and soldiers interacted, and blurred the boundaries between the two conditions. By 1813, the army had risen to a peak of over 260,000 men (220,000 without foreign contingents), compared to about 48,000 at the start of the conflict in 1793.5 This reliance on a more regular body of troops placed firmly under central control was clearly at odds with Britain’s once predominantly commercial and naval sense of itself; it also had an obvious effect on the way that politicians portrayed the nation, and how British citizens portrayed themselves. Many believed that a military country like France could only be checked or defeated by a similarly military country, bringing Britain’s traditionally anti-militaristic stance into question. As part of this process, several terms that had been current in eighteenth-century political debate were re-conceived to fit new circumstances. Two of the most prominent – ‘citizen soldier’ and ‘military spirit’ – reflected the shift taking place in the portrayal of Britain’s national and political character. Once associated with the creation of the militia and expressing radical fear of standing armies and despotism, they were increasingly employed more by policy-makers than by dissidents.6 Kevin Linch, Britain and Wellington’s Army: Recruitment, Society and Tradition, 1807– 1815 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 2–3.

2

Catriona Kennedy, ‘John Bull into Battle: Military Masculinity and the British Army Officer during the Napoleonic Wars’, in Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830, ed. Karen Jagemann, Gisela Mettele and Jane Randall (London, 2013), pp. 127–46, at p. 127.

3

David Gates, ‘The Transformation of the Army, 1783–1815’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army, ed. David Chandler and Ian Beckett (Oxford, 1994), p. 133.

4

J. W. Fortescue, The County Lieutenancies and the Army, 1803–1814 (London, 1909), pp. 269, 275, 281.

5

Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’: The Anti-Army Ideology in 17th Century England (Baltimore, MD, 1974), pp. 152, 194; I. F. W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition,

6

Citiz en Sol dier s    21

‘Military spirit’ was something decision-makers found increasingly desirable to foster in the nation, since traditional methods of recruitment relying on bounties and recruitment parties were no longer sufficient to meet Britain’s increasing military commitments at home or overseas.7 The inculcation of a national ‘military spirit’ went hand-in-hand with the rehabilitation of the army itself. As for the ‘citizen soldier’, once at the vanguard of freedom from military despotism, he became ensnarled in the semantic battles of post-French Revolutionary political language. Discussions about what exactly made a citizen and a soldier, and how the two came together, were profoundly revealing about the way the defence debate helped shape Britain’s identity.

A Shift in Balance: Army versus Navy In the somewhat understated words of Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack, ‘Britain had a complex relationship with its soldiers in the eighteenth century’, particularly in comparison to the much-favoured navy.8 During the 1780s, the development and growth of Britain’s navy had taken priority over that of the land forces. As late as 1793, the regular army numbered only 47,395, only 28,000 of whom were stationed in Britain and Ireland, whereas the navy had counted 145 ships of the line alone in 1790, three years before the war began.9 By July 1803, the navy had grown to a force of 361, including 72 ships of the line and 100 frigates.10 The army’s poor offensive record over several decades certainly contributed much to the decline of its reputation.11 The opening campaigns of the war with France did little to restore it: military defeats in France, Flanders and Holland, and naval 1558–1945 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 63–6; John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (Manchester, 1982), p. 59. Linch, Britain and Wellington’s Army, p. 34.

7

Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack, Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815 (Liverpool, 2014), p. 1.

8

‘Statement of effective troops in Britain, 1793–1804’, Castlereagh MSS, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), D/3030/1886; ‘Effective Strength of the British Army exclusive of Artillery on 1 January of the first four years of the present and last war’, Sidmouth MSS, Devon Record Office, 152M/C1806/OM/7; Daniel Baugh, ‘The Eighteenth Century Navy as a National Institution’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, ed. J. R. Hill (Oxford, 1995), pp. 120–60, p. 123.

9

‘Account of the Ships and Vessels in Commission, 22 July 1803’, Sidmouth MSS, Devon Record Office, 152M/C1803/ON/8; ‘Report on the State of the Navy, 1793–1804’, Castlereagh MSS, PRONI, D/3030/1903.

10

Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–85 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 25–6; Jeremy Black, Britain as a Military Power, 1688– 1815 (London, 1999), pp. 43, 194.

11

22    Jacque l in e R ei t er

victories at Ushant, St Vincent, Camperdown and the Nile between 1794 and 1798, drove in the point. Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, mourned ‘over the British Infantry, once the pride of my heart and the horror of our enemies, and now … reduced to a state which I am ashamed to mention’.12 Britain’s main contribution to the war consisted of naval operations and financial subsidies to the continental powers, which provided almost all the military clout in Europe until 1807.13 Eventually, however, the realities of a war fought in a state of frequent continental isolation against a power which repeatedly threatened invasion began to take their toll. The navy was all very well as an offensive force, and the occasional resounding victory helped maintain its reputation, but as a defensive force it was flawed. It is perhaps too strong to claim, as Kevin McCranie has done, that ‘operations by the British Navy proved nothing more than an irritant to France’, but James Davey takes it too far in the other direction in arguing that ‘the entirety of the British war effort [during the Napoleonic Wars] rested upon the Royal Navy’.14 John Jervis, 1st Earl St Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty in Henry Addington’s ministry, confidently declared of a potential French invasion, ‘I do not say they cannot come; I only say they cannot come by sea’, but he was in part reacting to criticisms of the navy’s increasingly patchy record in blockading the enemy in their ports along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts.15 The French managed to escape at least seven times from Brest alone between 1794 and 1802.16 The Times remarked ironically in 1798 upon ‘so many repeated instances of the good luck of the French in escaping the vigilance of our squadrons’.17 A squadron possibly intended for Ireland took advantage of ‘a thick Fog’ to break the blockade at Brest in 1799, and in early 1804 a storm dispersed the Channel fleet and left Britain vulnerable for three or four anxious days.18 To Henry Dundas, 26 June 1800, Melville MSS, National Records of Scotland, GD51/1/331/28.

12

J. M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793– 1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), pp. 3–4.

13

14

Kevin D. McCranie, ‘Britain’s Royal Navy and the Defeat of Napoleon’, in Napoleon and the Operational Art of War: Essays in Honor of Donald D. Horward, ed. Michael V. Leggiere (Leiden, 2016), pp. 476–99; James Davey, In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars (New Haven, 2015), pp. xx–1.

Norman Longmate, Island Fortress: The Defence of Great Britain 1603–1945 (London, 2001), p. 267.

15

‘Instances of the Escapes of the French from Brest during the Blockade’, undated, Melville MSS, National Maritime Museum, MEL/3.

16

Times, 24 September 1798.

17

Duke of Portland to Lord Cornwallis, 1 May 1799, Castlereagh MSS, PRONI, D/3030/756/a; Thomas Steele to Pitt, 3 January 1804, Pitt MSS, Cambridge University Library, Add MS 6958 Box 16, fol. 2995.

18

Citiz en Sol dier s    23

Understandably, the army benefited strongly from this heightened fear of invasion. Its vital role in defending the home base reduced the unsavoury political connotations associated with a large standing force.19 By 1803, the development of the army had begun to catch up with that of the navy. It had not been much reduced from the 150,000 regulars reported on 1 January 1802; in March 1803 it stood at 128,000.20 The militia, when fully embodied and added to the supplementary militia created in 1796, provided an additional 70,000 for national defence. Addington’s government also renewed the call made during the 1790s for volunteers. These, added to the well-to-do yeomanry, which acted as a police force, numbered 400,000 men at their peak. A series of acts passed through Parliament between 1803 and 1808, all designed to increase the nation’s manpower still further. The Levy en Masse Act (1803) and Training Act (1806) were probably the most ambitious, leaning on the ancient Crown prerogative of calling on all able-bodied men to defend the country in the event of an emergency. Neither act, however, was ever fully implemented. The Army of Reserve Act (1803), the Additional Force Act (1804) and the Local Militia Act (1808) proposed smaller forces, but significantly these were raised by ballot (or parish quota, in the case of the Additional Force) and explicitly tied to the regulars by being encouraged to recruit into second battalions. Radicals such as Sir Francis Burdett still harked back to the dangers of an alliance between the standing army and the Crown, but living under the shadow of invasion caused this ideological debate to be fought in more practical terms. An 1804 pamphlet argued: ‘At a time, when it is so much insisted upon, that the independent states of Europe are obliged to become more military in consequence of the more formidable state of France … England must conform’.21 So long as France remained militarily potent, politicians would have to relax old prejudices against the army to allow Britain a chance to defeat her on land.

A Commercial Nation at War With the threat of invasion from 1794 onwards, Britain’s strategic options were constrained by the need to secure the home base. As Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, noted, if anything happened to the offensive force abroad ‘we should be

Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, pp. 28, 30, 176; Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’, pp. 2–5, 151, 160–1, 180, 188–90.

19

Memorandum on the regular force, March 1803, Castlereagh MSS, PRONI, D/3030/1769; ‘Return of the land forces 1801–1808’, Sidmouth MSS, Devon Record Office, 152M/C1808/OM.

20

James York, Proposals Tending to Augment the Force of this Country, and Encourage the Martial Spirit of the People (London, 1804), p. 2.

21

24    Jacque l in e R ei t er

destitute of any considerable Proportion of effective Regular Infantry for Purposes of Home Defence’.22 In a way the nation was paying the price for the past century’s success in trading and colonial expansion. That expansion had not only stretched slender military and naval resources to breaking point, but had also damaged Britain’s international reputation, fostering the mistrust of potential continental allies who suspected that Britain simply wanted to exploit the war with France for commercial and colonial advantages. The events of the 1790s exacerbated these suspicions, particularly the limited commitment of British troops on the continent while tens of thousands of men were sent to the West Indies.23 This distrust was amply reciprocated by many Britons, who feared that they were being used by the allies as a bank from which to draw subsidy money for their own (not necessarily war-related) purposes. Worse still, the circumstances of war were unfavourable to British commerce and enterprise. A succession of trade disputes – from the Armed Neutrality of 1800 (which shut off supplies of Baltic timber) to the War of 1812 with the United States, not to mention the vulnerability of convoys to privateers – greatly increased fears that finance and commercial enterprise were being fundamentally undermined by the length of the conflict. The financial crises of 1797 and 1809–11 raised the spectre of national bankruptcy; the Continental System, ushered in by the Milan and Berlin decrees of 1806–07, effectively blocked British exports to almost all of Europe and seriously damaged several industries, particularly textiles.24 Just as seriously, protecting trade in wartime was a distraction for the already-overstretched navy.25 More seriously, some believed Britain’s over-reliance on its commercial character might have damaged the country’s ability to defend itself. ‘We are become a Nation of Merchants and Shopkeepers, and have lost all Military Spirit’, lamented Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch.26 Past invasion scares had drawn attention to the impact of commercial ‘luxury’ and ‘effeminacy’ on the manliness of the nation; the fight was on to show that Britain had not been ‘feminised’ by her long love-affair with commerce and luxury. A draft newspaper article from 1803 declared:

‘Memorandum as to Defence’, 15 July 1804, Camden MSS, Kent Record Office, U840/ O211/2; Castlereagh MSS, PRONI, D/3030/2481.

22

Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder, p. 13.

23

Norman Gash, Lord Liverpool (London, 1984), p. 90; H. V. Bowen, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 72–8.

24

Roger Morriss, The Channel Fleet and the Blockade of Brest, 1793–1801 (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 11–12, 241–2.

25

To Henry Dundas, 31 March 1797, Melville MSS, National Records of Scotland, GD51/883.

26

Citiz en Sol dier s    25

We have been ridiculed by France, as une Nation boutiquière, a nation of shopkeepers; and Europe has in some measure assented to the sneer: too long, indeed, have we been looked upon by Europe as a people disposed to commercial pursuits, and [by] their concomitant affluence to slothful, luxurious, and unwarlike habits.27

As Catriona Kennedy has pointed out, such worries about British ‘effeminacy’ did not automatically translate into an attempt to militarise the country, and tension remained between concepts of civilian and military masculinity.28 But many were becoming convinced that military strength, rather than commercial enterprise, was required. France’s military success had been bought at the price of commercial stagnation, since all her male citizens from eighteen to twenty-six had been ‘forced to become a soldier’ and therefore ‘taken out of the habits of industry, and of social and civilised life’;29 but there was a growing feeling that this might not necessarily be a bad thing. If commerce throve on liberty, it was also associated with bankruptcy and financial uncertainty, whereas military strength increasingly became associated with public sacrifice, duty and national involvement.

‘Military Spirit’, Conscription and the Manpower Problem The result of all this was a drive to raise the ‘military spirit’ of the nation. This was not an entirely novel reaction: throughout the eighteenth century, whenever invasion had been threatened, the need to increase ‘military spirit’ had been invoked by radical theorists who feared the feminisation of the nation through commerce and luxury.30 The difference in the 1790s and 1800s was that the same impulse was now also found at the top of the political hierarchy. As expressed in Parliament and the press, the concept of ‘military spirit’ echoed the ideas of Britishness held by its exponents: it was inclusive, it was deferential and it vaguely accorded with ideas about the national past. Above all, however, it was conservative and practical, and ultimately aimed at raising the profile of the regular army. ‘Military spirit’ did not seek a complete reversal of Britain’s traditionally commercial identity. On the contrary, it was a defiant expression of the nation’s ability to adapt to new continental circumstances in a way that would complement rather than destroy her commercial character. ‘In time coming we must be a Compound Mixture of Merchants, Manufacturers, Farmers, and Warriors, and I have no doubt these various occupations may be so arranged as rather to improve than injure each Newspaper cutting, 31 December 1803, probably by Hiley Addington, Sidmouth MSS, Devon Record Office, 152M/C1803/OZ/199.

27

Kennedy, ‘John Bull into Battle’, pp. 128–9.

28

Times, 20 July 1803.

29

Wilson, The Sense of the People, pp. 165, 188.

30

26    Jacque l in e R ei t er

other’, wrote Henry Dundas, the Secretary of State for War.31 Most advocates saw it as channelling Britain’s commercial energies in a different direction: ‘We were not mere merchants who could traffic, but could not fight; not mere soldiers who could fight, without excelling in other arts.’32 Significantly, it took account of the fact that Britain was a composite of several nations. Thus, the Anti-Jacobin Review deliberately drew attention to the combined Scottish, Irish and English spirit which had secured victory at Alexandria in 1801, ‘when Sir Ralph Abercromby was seconded by Lord Hutchinson, and aided by Sir Sidney Smith!’33 Military spirit was not exclusively Scottish, as J. E. Cookson and John Robertson have argued, though it continued to be a favourite with Scotsmen.34 It was common to all Britons, whether descended from Highlanders or the victors of the Spanish Armada. Ultimately, however, the great advantage of ‘military spirit’ was its role in sustaining the high levels of manpower required to fight a defensive and an offensive war simultaneously. The need for a strong regular army which could fulfil both of these roles was widely acknowledged. Even concentrating purely on defence would require large numbers. The issue was simple: ‘It has now indeed become self-evident, even to the great Body of the People, that the period has at length arrived, when Great Britain must either become a Nation of Soldiers, or cease to be a Nation at all.’35 To this end, almost everyone could agree on the need to promote the nation’s military spirit. The real problem was how to do it. The most obvious solution would have been to imitate France and impose conscription, but this was not done. The reasons for such reticence had nothing to do with novelty or the lack of the requisite bureaucratic framework.36 The politicians who felt confident enough to pass the Levy en Masse Act rendering the entire able-bodied male population liable to military training, and who had access to a variety of information provided by the census and other sources, were unlikely to To Alexander Dirom, 7 August 1797, Melville MSS, National Records of Scotland, GD51/888/2.

31

Speech by Lord Limerick, 22 November 1803, Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Day (London, 1812) (PD), I, col. 1527.

32

Anti-Jacobin Review, 16:1 (September 1803), 101.

33

J. E. Cookson, ‘The Napoleonic Wars, Military Scotland and Tory Highlandism in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Scottish Historical Review 78:205(pt 1) (1999), 60–75, pp. 60, 73; John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 1–2.

34

Major William Stewart to Castlereagh, 8 April 1808, Castlereagh MSS, PRONI, D/3030/2622.

35

Gates, ‘The Transformation of the Army’, pp. 134–5; Black, Britain as a Military Power, p. 272; C. D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic War, 1803–15 (Manchester, 1992), p. 2; J. R. Western, The English Militia in the 18th Century (London, 1965), pp. 290–1.

36

Citiz en Sol dier s    27

be fazed by a step which would simply have meant continuing what they had already been doing, albeit at a higher level. It would have required little more than an adaptation of the naval impress; as Castlereagh noted, ‘Compulsion’ was ‘the Soul of the Navy’, and there was no reason for ‘abdicating it with respect to the Army’.37 Direct conscription into the regulars would also help overcome a number of the issues associated with the competition for recruits between the army and the auxiliaries. The men recruited to substitute for principals balloted into the militia were frequently those who would otherwise have entered the army: ‘Hardly one [man] serves [as a militia substitute] who is not taken from that class from which the regular Army is recruited’.38 William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville, who had experienced the difficulties of finding men in the 1790s, reluctantly conceded the necessity for some form of mandation: ‘I heartily wish it were possible to avoid any compulsory recruiting for the Army, but I know not how it could be done, & an Army somehow or other to be sure we must have’.39 William Windham was even more outspoken, declaring in 1803 that ‘he would not court popularity, nor discredit his own judgment by decrying [compulsion] as unconstitutional’.40 It is clear that the Cabinet seriously discussed the possibility of conscription, and that the reason it was not implemented seems to have been simply that ministers were concerned about the quality as well as the quantity of troops.41 In 1804, the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of York, explained that what made crimping ‘the most baneful of practices’ was the introduction into the army of ‘a number of persons perfectly unacquainted with the Military profession and in many instances ineligible in point of Character’.42 It seemed much wiser to draft trained men from the Army of Reserve, Additional Force and militia than to pluck them directly from the farms and cities. These bodies were, however, quite small, and it was therefore necessary to accustom the British to the idea of military service. If the whole population of Great Britain were already trained to arms, then, as Windham recognised, the lower orders would represent ‘an inexhaustible fund to recruit from’.43 Notes by Castlereagh on the Training Act, April/May 1806, PRONI, Castlereagh MSS, D3030/2393.

37

Anti-Jacobin Review, 19:2 (October 1804).

38

To the Marquess of Buckingham, 19 June 1803, Huntington Library, California, Grenville MSS, fol. LIV-83.

39

PD, vol. 1, cols 1701–2.

40

Memorandum by Lord Westmorland, February 1802, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Hobart MSS, D/MH/H(war office)/Bundle G/I46.

41

To Henry Addington, 27 February 1804, Devon Record Office, Sidmouth MSS, 152M/ C1804/OM/5.

42

PD, vol. XI, cols 676–7.

43

28    Jacque l in e R ei t er

Service in defence of the nation was, following France’s example, considered one of the first duties of the citizen. Whilst outside of the government in 1803, Henry Dundas proposed a form of national service for all young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one: If this plan is adopted we then become in reality an armed nation, & every individual when he enters into life by his arrival at Manhood, does it with the sentiment implanted in his breast that the defence of his country, as it was almost his earliest education, so it is his first duty.44

Dundas’ plan was particularly useful because it would create ‘a Nursery for the recruiting every other branch of the Military Service’.45 The attempt to inculcate military spirit, therefore, was not only based on the need for manpower; it was also designed to make army life so central to the normative values of Britons that they would come to see military service as commonplace. In this respect it complemented the military academies founded at this time for the education of future officers, as well as the fact that the nation’s more ‘martial’ characteristics – its love of pugilism and ‘manly sports and exercises’, its belligerent xenophobia, its patriotism – were increasingly praised in its youth.46 Windham lauded ‘those qualities of body and mind … on which we were now, it seems, to place our chief dependence’, which were fed by bull-baiting and ‘those athletic sports and hardy contests, which heretofore made the delight of the common people, and which … trained them … to every generous and manly sentiment’.47

The ‘Citizen Soldier’ and the Duties of Citizenship The attempts to portray republican France as Britain’s inveterate enemy (politically, commercially and morally) also resulted in refining the concept of citizenship. Political language dramatically portrayed the struggle between the two nations as a duel to the death, particularly during periods of continental isolation. Richard Temple-Nugent-Grenville, Earl Temple, declared in an especially apocalyptic speech that ‘the suns of England and France can never shine together in the same hemisphere … The cry of the armies … of the councils, and of the people [of France], is still To Charles Yorke, 27 June 1803, Melville MSS, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, MEL/6. Melville repeated his plans to Castlereagh in 1808: Melville to Castlereagh, 9 April 1808, Melville MSS, National Library of Scotland, 3835, fols 58–62.

44

To the Lord Advocate, 11 August 1803, Hope of Luffness MSS, National Records of Scotland, GD364/1/1136/1.

45

Times, 18 July 1803.

46

Parliamentary History to 1803 (London, 1818–20) (PH), XXXVI, col. 1639.

47

Citiz en Sol dier s    29

“Delenda est Carthago”’.48 These opinions did not subside with the fall of republican principles, since French politics were now seen as ‘despotic’ rather than republican. Depicting the war as a struggle for survival made it possible for the politicians to foster an inclusive version of citizenship in which most Britons could play a part.49 ‘Citizenship’ as a term was nominally complicated by the fact that the French Revolution had reinforced its connection with radicalism and democracy. ‘Citizen’ in the 1790s meant something completely different from what it had meant in the 1750s or 1770s, when defence had last been a priority. ‘Subject’ was sometimes reckoned a more pertinent term to describe the political status of Britons, who lived in a deferential and monarchical society where the vote was depicted as a privilege rather than a right.50 Several historians have followed this lead and identified citizenship exclusively with the franchise, among them Linda Colley, Kathleen Wilson and Robert Dozier.51 This does makes sense, as eighteenth-century ‘citizen soldiers’ were almost exclusively found in the ranks of the militia formed in 1757.52 This citizen soldier was assumed to be politically active, the sort of person who fitted easily into the middle layers of the social hierarchy. He was either already involved in active citizenry, or aspired to be; in the words of Matthew McCormack, a citizen soldier was ‘a citizen first and a soldier second, with a strong emphasis upon his rights rather than his obligations to the state’.53 But by the late 1790s, as the ideological raison d’être of the war faded and the threat of invasion became more immediate than that of insurrection, the politicians recognised that the people called upon to defend the nation would not necessarily be enfranchised or propertied. Real citizenship was not a matter of wanting more than it was practicable to give, but of accepting one’s place in the political system and the willingness to take arms to defend it. ‘I am no PH, XXXIII, cols 992–3.

48

E. V. McLeod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Aldershot, 1998), p. 204; Richard Glover, Britain at Bay: Defence against Bonaparte, 1803–14 (London, 1973), p. 44; but see also Peter Spence, The Birth of Romantic Radicalism (Hampshire, 1995), pp. 22–3; Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, 2004), p. 6.

49

Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870 (New York, 2000), pp. 43–4.

50

Robert Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington, KY, 1983), p. 177; Linda Colley, ‘Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), 97–117, 113; Wilson, The Sense of the People, pp. 18, 71–3, 280.

51

Contrary to what Austin Gee argues, the term ‘citizen soldier’ did not specifically refer to the French army, though it could be used in that sense: Austin Gee, The British Volunteer Movement, 1794–1814 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 170–1.

52

Matthew McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford, 2015), p. 5.

53

30    Jacque l in e R ei t er

ways afraid of the general bugbear of arming too many people’, Dundas argued. ‘I am much more afraid of their inertness & want of military feeling the moment the pressure of danger is past’.54 Greater involvement in defence was not simply ‘a calculated risk’ on the part of the government that the lower orders would not demand too much in the way of political returns.55 It showed the people the government was making an effort to defend them, and it showed the government the people were happy with the status quo. This was not simply a case of the upper classes allowing the more loyal of the lower orders to fight for them. Duty was an integral part of both active and inactive citizenship, and in times of national peril the citizen’s duties became more important than his rights. Strategic references to the networks that linked the king, the upper levels of society and the people reinforced the important message that they were all connected and that everyone had a stake in the survival of the whole system. This was a very optimistic view of the British nation, and it is no accident, perhaps, that William Pitt – the perennial optimist – was its foremost exponent. No doubt many radicals and reformers did latch onto participation in defence as a means to extract concessions from the government. In 1795 Major John Cartwright, the political reformer, wrote that ‘arming the people and reforming Parliament are inseparable’.56 By and large, however, the men who formulated defence policy did not consider this to be a major problem. The modern implications of citizenship did not yet exist: there were still no passports and no official definition of what it meant, in state terms, to be British.57 ‘Citizenship’ in Britain was only partly a method of self-identification; it was also a defiant statement that, unlike the French Jacobins, the British accepted the boundaries of their rights. When Pitt used the term ‘fellow-citizens’ to describe the volunteers, therefore, he did not simply mean the propertied, but all those ‘who have rushed forward to the post of danger, when the safety of their country was menaced’.58

Problems of Adaptation The arguments for an ‘armed nation’ were advanced by a variety of prominent politicians, including Pitt, Charles James Fox, Windham, Addington, Castlereagh and To the Duke of Montrose, 15 November 1796, Melville MSS, Scottish National Archives, GD51/876/2.

54

Colley, ‘Whose Nation?’, pp. 104, 108, 115; Gee, The British Volunteer Movement, pp. 4, 207.

55

Quoted in J. H. Rose, William Pitt and the Great War (London, 1912), p. 280.

56

Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens, pp. 16–17.

57

PD, I, col. 1155.

58

Citiz en Sol dier s    31

Dundas, and it is not true that the issue had no political impact.59 On the contrary, there was considerable high political debate on the issue of how far Britain should be allowed to alter in response to the conflict. The main issue revolved around the role of the much-enlarged armed force that was required to combat a French assault. Did a large standing army now represent ‘the only defence of any modern & civilised state’, or was ‘the Austrian or Prussian system which has failed on the Continent’ best avoided altogether?60 Not everyone was comfortable with keeping up with the military developments of France, which had transformed the country ‘into a military despotism, which acknowledged no law but the sword’.61 Would Britain follow the same route if she adhered too closely to her enemy’s example? Many felt Britain should use her existing strengths to combat France. Taking men away from trade, commerce and agriculture was considered unacceptable when the nation was suffering commercially because of the war and Napoleon’s blockades. Government energy would be better spent if it kept a small but efficient regular force to defend British holdings around the globe, returning to the original basis of the 1757 militia at home and relying on the navy for everything else.62 While successive governments were more flexible than this, they also remained cautious, and what was approved in theory did not necessarily translate into practice. Conscription was dismissed as impractical; martial law was considered, but only as an emergency measure; even the Levy en Masse Act was suspended, though vigorously defended as constitutional in Parliament. Yet comprehensive solutions to the defence problem were required, and the politicians increasingly argued that Britain’s dangerous situation meant risks were worth taking. It was a gamble, of course, precisely because Britain had always been paraded as being everything that France was not. France was aggressive, expansionist, despotic; Britain was defensive, conservative, pro-liberty.63 Alexander Hope described the French as ‘in prosperity full of fire and activity; in adversity desponding and cowardly’, more reliant ‘upon stratagem than valor’. The British, on the other hand, J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 215, 220, 243.

59

Lord Buckingham to Pitt, 28 March 1798, Pitt MSS, Cambridge University Library, Add MS 6958, Box 12, fol. 2319; Henry Brougham to William Wilberforce, 17 July 1804, Pitt MSS, Cambridge University Library, Add MS 6958, fol. 3129.

60

Thomas Amyot, Speeches in Parliament of the Rt. Hon. William Windham … (London, 1812), vol. 1, pp. 65–6.

61

62

William Morton Pitt, Thoughts on the Defence of these Kingdoms … (London, 1797), pp. 1–2; Lord Buckingham to Lord Fitzwilliam, 1 June 1799, Fitzwilliam MSS, Northampton Record Office.

63

Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London, 1997), pp. 127–33; Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 195–200.

32    Jacque l in e R ei t er

were ‘sanguine, animated and persevering’, and ‘of a nature too bold and generous to seek conquest by stratagem’.64 And yet France had successfully repelled an invading force in the 1790s: nor was it lost on observers that France, as an ‘armed nation’, had been successful in all its undertakings. As the conflict lengthened, advocates of the armed nation advanced their position more stridently: Britons should wholeheartedly re-invent themselves as a military people. They scoffed at the arguments that taking men from the fields at harvest-time would lead to famine. Dundas felt that opposing invasion was more important than maintaining the annual farming cycles: ‘What will the Harvest signify if we allow an Enemy either to reap or destroy it[?] If we neglect our defence for the purpose of saving our Corn … those who stay at home to reap may not be permitted to enjoy’.65 Many future generations might also have to live with the French menace, and it made no sense to pretend that everything would ever return to the way it had been before the war. There was a definite tendency to harness characteristics which had contributed to France’s success, and to learn from the enemy to defeat them – in the words of patriotic song-writer Charles Dibdin, ‘to improve “ça ira” into “God save the King”’.66

Military versus Civilian An even more extreme point of view arose from this debate over military spirit and citizenship. At the same time as Britons were being encouraged to defend their country, a parallel opinion was forming that deemed it dangerous to oppose a potential French invasion with anything but a highly disciplined, trained soldiery. The result was an effort to develop a concept of a professional soldier in which the amateur ‘citizen soldier’, or a citizen who was also a soldier, had no place. This marked the most obvious move away from the citizen soldier’s radical heyday, when he had stood as a counterbalance to standing armies and Crown influence – a position which, by 1803, had been relegated in Parliament to isolated radicals. The barracks debate cut to the heart of this shift in attitude. The Mutiny Act of 1689 had provided for the billeting of soldiers all around the country. One of the main advantages of this arrangement was that the soldiers would continue to live

64

Alexander Hope, ‘Military Memoir for the Defence of the Eastern District’, 1797, Hope of Luffness MSS, National Records of Scotland, GD364/1/1083/1, fols 27–8.

65

Lord Melville, ‘Plan for rendering more effectual the Services of the Yeomanry Cavalry in the internal Defence of the Kingdom’, 1803, Hope of Luffness MSS, National Records of Scotland, GD364/1/1136/3.

66

Charles Dibdin to Addington, 6 July 1803, Sidmouth MSS, Devon Record Office, 152M/ C1803/OM/343.

Citiz en Sol dier s    33

among civilians and be less likely to become oppressive tools in the government’s hands. Following the French Revolution, however, the political mood turned against this view: ‘Jacobinical principles’ seemed rife among the civilian population, and the government’s greatest fear was that they would infect the army.67 Windham was the most outspoken on this point: ‘If they thought that there were men who night and day were preaching up bad doctrines in this country, was it unconstitutional in the government to withdraw the soldiery from being infected by them?’68 Despite Foxite arguments that barracks introduced ‘an invidious distinction between a citizen and a soldier in this country, a thing at all events to be avoided’,69 Windham had considerable government support. Pitt himself maintained that objections to barracks did not address ‘what we ought to do’, but rested ‘merely’ on the fact ‘that the opinion of Mr Justice Blackstone was against standing armies’.70 The short-term threat from the French was more important than maintaining an obsolete tradition that was out of step with political realities. Accordingly, a new Barracks Department was created, and by 1797 there were over eighty barracks in Britain. By 1805 there were over 160, with the capacity to house up to 130,000 troops.71 The natural corollary to all this was the fear that encouraging military training throughout the population might put weapons, and the ability to use them effectively, into the hands of republicans and revolutionaries. Such a position was most often expressed by politicians who were not in government. Pitt was more sanguine: From an army to consist of the round bulk of the people, no man who knows the British character could have the least fear – if it even were to include the disaffected; for, they would bear so small a proportion to the whole, as to be incapable of doing mischief.72

The popularity of the volunteer movement, which encouraged ordinary men to bear arms without being subject to regular army discipline, was deeply troubling to many such observers. The prospect of implementing the Levy en Masse Act, under which all men regardless of status were to receive such instruction, was even worse.

James Douet, British Barracks, 1600–1914: Their Architecture and Role in Society (London, 1998), p. 62; J. R. Breihan, ‘Army Barracks in the North East in the Era of the French Revolution’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th series, 18 (1990), 165–76, p. 166.

67

PH, XXXII, col. 935.

68

Speech by Mr Courtenay, 22 February 1793, PH, XXX, col. 485.

69

Times, 23 February 1793.

70

Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, pp. 22, 25; Bowen, War and British Society, pp. 45– 6; Stephen Johnson, From Bailey to Bailey: A Short History of Military Buildings in Sheffield (Sheffield, 1998), p. 2.

71

PD, I, col. 1644.

72

34    Jacque l in e R ei t er

Some wondered whether, once the invasion was over, ‘the poorer class so armed would return again cheerfully to their former Labours & Clothing? Whether the Taxes could be easily & regularly raised from a People in Arms?’73 One of the great debates over the usefulness of volunteers touched on the ability to discipline them, since they were not subject to martial law except in cases of invasion or rebellion. These doubts were fed by the behaviour of the volunteers during the famine of 1800, when many units refused to follow orders to attack their rioting fellow citizens. In Devon and Cornwall several units joined the riots themselves.74 Such behaviour left its mark, and throughout the period there were frightening tales of volunteers resigning in mass, refusing to implement unpopular orders, using their meetings to discuss political events and electing their own officers.75 To have armed bodies deliberating was the politician’s worst nightmare, reminiscent of the politicisation of the Irish Volunteers in the 1780s, who campaigned for complete legislative independence, freedom of trade, and parliamentary reform before being suppressed by the Lord Lieutenant.76 It was an uneasy reminder of the danger of entrusting arms to a nation just emerging from the suspension of Habeas Corpus and a string of other oppressive measures designed to maintain control from above. What was needed to defeat the French was not large bodies of civilians who were free from central control, but a regular army that was not politically active and which responded to strict rules of discipline. At the same time as the connection between soldiers and citizens was loosening, the professionalisation of the regular soldier was experiencing a significant boost. The practical reasons behind the unwillingness to implement conscription made the government eager to increase voluntary recruitment into the army by improving the image of the regular force. The series of army reforms undertaken by Windham in 1806, and by the Duke of York as Commander-in-Chief from 1794 to 1809, were integral to this process. The army was often viewed as filled with lesser creatures, ‘vagabonds, and even criminals from the jails’, ‘collected from the dregs of the

Sir John Macpherson to Lord Hobart, 1 September 1803, Hobart MSS, Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/MH/H(war office)/Bundle G/I191.

73

See correspondence in the Home Office MSS, The National Archives, esp. HO42/55, HO42/61 and HO43/12; Sidmouth MSS, Devon Record Office, 152M/C1801/ OM/34.

74

G. A. Steppler, Britons, to Arms! The Story of the British Volunteer Soldier and the Volunteer Tradition in Leicestershire and Rutland (Stroud, 1992), pp. 74–8; Fortescue, County Lieutenancies, p. 199; John Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales 1790–1810 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 50–1.

75

Allan Blackstock, An Ascendancy Army: The Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 44–9.

76

Citiz en Sol dier s    35

people’, who were unfit to be citizens.77 One of the priorities of the campaign to raise the stock of the army was to change this attitude. From 1806, soldiers were no longer recruited exclusively for life, but were encouraged to continue serving with the lure of greater bounties and stronger pension schemes at the end of an extended career. With Windham’s backing, the solution to the manpower problem became ‘a general improvement of the conditions of the service in such a way as should not be attended with too great an expence, nor be inconsistent with the discipline and well-being of the Army’.78 As he explained, ‘the general principle is to raise the value and estimation of the service, and to attract the soldiers to it, as well by the credit in which he sees it held, as by the advantages which he may expect to find there’.79 A consequence of this increase in military expertise, however, was that armed service was placed out of the reach of ordinary citizens. The volunteers, and even the militia, were increasingly viewed with contempt, not simply because of their unreliability, but also because of attempts to pass them off as ‘real soldiers’ when they could never be anything more than ‘a sort of military carnival’.80 In some ways this was ironic, since some of the army reforms seemed designed to strengthen the bond between soldiers and citizens. Windham had even envisioned giving old soldiers the franchise as a reward for life service, which suggested a direct link between soldiering and political participation of the kind traced by Colley and others.81 Yet what Windham was trying to do in the 1800s was to accustom the population to the idea of soldiering as a career, and to give them added incentives to pursue it. His proposals were, in fact, in tune with a growing assumption from 1803 onwards that a citizen could not be a ‘real soldier’ by definition. The ‘real soldier’ was no vagabond peeled off the streets: if he ever had been, he had cleaned up his act. Firmness, steadiness, perseverance, endurance: these are the characteristics of the British soldier; zeal, alacrity, and enterprise; these are the characteristics of the British officer; common to both are loyalty and fidelity without a stain, combined with the most fearless and determined courage; the ancient and hereditary bravery of the British and Irish nations; ‘the unconquerable mind, the spirit never to submit or yield’.82 Lt. Col. Alexander Dirom, Plans for the Defence of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1797), p. 127; J. C. Worthington, An Address to the Rt. Hon. William Windham … (Southampton, 1806), p. 69; Morton Pitt, Thoughts on the Defence of these Kingdoms, p. 4.

77

PD, IX, col. 893.

78

Memorandum by Windham, 27 March 1806, in The Later Correspondence of George III, ed. A. Aspinall (Cambridge, 1967–68), vol. 4, pp. 416–19.

79

Worthington, An Address, pp. 108–9.

80

Windham to Lord Grenville, 1 April 1806, British Library, Add MSS 58930, fols 75–6.

81

Speech by Charles Yorke, 8 June 1801, PH, XXXV, col. 1449.

82

36    Jacque l in e R ei t er

This perfect soldier acquired his prowess by a number of means which were out of reach for the volunteer and militiaman: service abroad, exposure to danger and the habit of obedience. Windham described him as follows: There is, moreover, a sort of soldier character, arising from a thousand causes, and acquired insensibly in the course of regular service, which will easily be distinguished by discerning eyes, and will furnish in general a marked discrimination between the militia soldier, and the soldier of the line.83

The militia and the volunteers thus lacked the ‘military character’ the army had acquired in abundance through discipline and service; they simply performed ‘a sort of mimicry of military evolutions’, and Lord Cornwallis thought ‘the same sense of subordination, and an equal zeal and energy, cannot be expected from the officers in general of troops of this description, as may be naturally looked for amongst those who have chosen the Army as their profession’.84 The emphasis on discipline, obedience and a professional mindset suggested that to transform a citizen into a soldier at all was to question the British constitution’s basis of liberty and freedom. Because martial law and discipline played such a strong role in creating the soldierly mind, the citizen soldier was both an oxymoron and a physical impossibility. By this logic, volunteers could never be effective because they ever must continue half labourers, half farmers, half mechanics, half tradesmen, half gentlemen, &c – and they can never be so adroit, and so productive as they would otherwise be, in these latter capacities, because, they are besides obliged to be half soldiers.85

Naturally enough, military men were most adamant on this point. A pamphlet written by one argued that the creation in time of danger of an amphibious force partially partaking of the military character, but incessantly maintaining the nature, and appuying [sic] itself on the rights of the citizen, is … a body affording no real protection to the state.86

PH, XXXVI, cols 1612–13.

83

To the Duke of Portland, 1 November 1800, in Correspondence of Charles, First Marquess Cornwallis, ed. Charles Ross (London, 1859), vol. 3, pp. 299–300; Brig. Gen. Sir William Stewart, Outlines of a Plan for the Reform of the Land Forces (London, 1806), p. 13; Reflexions on the Invasion of Great Britain by the French Armies; on the Mode of Defence; and on the Useful Application of the National Levies (Birmingham, 1803), p. 14.

84

85

Worthington, An Address, p. 115.

86

Lt. Col. R. T. Wilson, An Enquiry into the Present State of the Military Forces of the British Empire, with a view to its Reorganisation, addressed to the Rt. Hon. William Pitt (London, 1804), p. 10.

Citiz en Sol dier s    37

The implications of this were significant. If citizens could not be soldiers, then it was pointless to encourage volunteering and to continue expanding the militia. Military spirit raised the profile of the army and accustomed people to the idea of joining it, but it failed in its purpose if it encouraged citizens to believe they could dispense with the army altogether. The best solution under these circumstances was to maintain the militia and volunteers on the basis of property – effectively their original foundation – and to encourage the growth of a professional soldiery, ‘the most valuable portion of our military force’, by recruitment.87 This was the path pursued by Windham and, eventually, by Castlereagh. The growth of a large professional army, however, entailed problems for demobilisation once the war was over. Sooner or later the military man would have to be rehabilitated into society, and a strict separation between soldiers and citizens would become an economic disadvantage. The soldier was ‘as little fitted, or rather as much unfitted, by his habits, for any other profession, as he who has been bred a weaver is for the trade of a shoemaker or a carpenter’.88 The need to deal with a sudden influx of professional fighters after 1815, who were largely unskilled to deal with everyday tasks, was one of the more serious problems faced by the post-war government. Perhaps these issues could be ascribed to lack of forethought on the part of the policy-makers, but they could not be expected to foresee the total collapse of the Napoleonic regime on the continent. In theory, Britain might always need a large fighting body, as a result of which the economic question might never arise, and the peace of Amiens had already shown that a large professional force would probably be needed even in peacetime. An 1806 memorandum recommended that the organisation of the regulars ‘ought to be formed with a view to Peace as well as War’.89 The prospect of future unemployment for the vast army that was being created was a secondary problem for politicians who saw it as their task to solve the immediate manpower problem. Their policies for Britain’s defence, and their language on the subject, reflected this emphasis.

Conclusion Crucially, very few objections to these political defence programmes challenged the idea that Britain had to become more militaristic in the face of the French threat. There might be differences over how military spirit was to be encouraged in practice, G. D. Buchanan, Observations on the Character and Present State of the Military Forces of Great Britain (London, 1806), p. 85.

87

A Vindication of Mr Windham’s Military Plans: with Remarks on the Objections of his Opponents (London, 1806), p. 64.

88

Lord Westmorland, memorandum on the armed forces, February 1802, Hobart MSS, Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/MH/H(war office)/Bundle G/I46; notes on the Army, probably 1806, by Castlereagh, Castlereagh MSS, PRONI, D/3030/2049.

89

38    Jacque l in e R ei t er

but the need to cultivate it was not in doubt. ‘The question is not now whether we shall become a military nation’, an anonymous pamphleteer wrote in 1806: ‘that is already decided: but what sort of military nation?’90 Continental circumstances, and the creation of different kinds of military service, raised the profile of the regular forces to the point where many saw them as the only reliable body for defence. The result was a recasting of ideas about the armed services, British identity and the practical application of citizenship. ‘The true character of the English People is not only egregiously mistaken by the Enemy, but is even misapprehended by some amongst ourselves’, reported the Times at the height of the invasion scares of 1803. We seem to be regarded as a Nation corrupted by wealth, and immersed in luxury; depraved by sensuality; and by indulgence and vanity rendered totally effeminate. There can, however, be no greater mistake … It is true, we are a wealthy, but still we are a moral nation, and are neither sunk in sloth nor sensuality. The courage of Britons has never been found deficient, either by sea or land.91

Age-old sensibilities, however, could not be trampled wholesale and rough-shod. Political circumstances as well as identities were also changing. After 1801 individual ministries were frequently too weak to push their particular interpretation of how Britain should respond to the invasion threat, and continued military stagnation did not help. The change in the attitude towards Britain’s armed services was not therefore as stark to contemporaries as it might have been, and it was blunted even further after the return of peace in 1815. But the change was there: the peacetime army was still strong, the yeomanry were not disbanded (as will be explored in the next chapter), and perhaps Victorian militarism would have been less appealing if Britain had simply trusted to her ‘wooden walls’ in the fight against Napoleon. Indeed, when a sustained external threat of invasion returned with Napoleon III’s seizure of something approaching absolute power in 1851, mid-Victorian politicians immediately reverted to the precedents set by their Georgian counterparts. The 1852 Militia Bill owed much more of a debt to Castlereagh’s Local Militia Act than to the original militia system of the 1750s; and the government again made a call for volunteers under the terms of legislation passed in 1804. Mid- to later nineteenth-century governments relied more on a centrally-controlled militia than on the volunteers, which remained limited in size and local in emphasis; and the organisation and training of the volunteers was more closely tied to that of the regulars, as well as made subject to the Mutiny Act. These were unpopular moves, but they were the logical development of ideas that had been forming in the minds of the politicians between 1793 and 1815. By A Defence of the Volunteer System, in Opposition to Mr Windham’s Idea of that Force; with Hints for its Improvement (London, 1806), p. 57.

90

Times, 18 July 1803.

91

Citiz en Sol dier s    39

1909, five years before the start of the First World War, Sir John Fortescue could summarise the lessons to be learned from the political reactions to recruitment in the Napoleonic Wars as follows: England cannot, any more than any other nation, fill the ranks of her Army in a great war without compulsion … Compulsory personal service for home-defence has been tried and not found wanting. The ultimate end for which all our military organisation must exist is the maintenance of the Regular Army, our only offensive land force. The true basis of such an organisation is National training.92

The blurring of the boundaries between soldier and citizen between 1793 and 1815 had set a precedent. Britons, without fully abandoning their commercial nature, had been forced to get in touch with their military side; like revolutionary Frenchmen, they had adapted to survive. This chameleonic strategy was necessary for Britain to weather the long French wars, as future decision-makers also recognised.

Fortescue, County Lieutenancies, p. 290.

92

2 From Party of Order to Gentlemen’s Plaything – Rural Identity and the British Yeomanry Cavalry George Hay

A

s an island nation, Britain has always looked to the sea as its first line of defence. Nonetheless, the fear of invasion and internal disorder also stimulated a number of waves of defensive movements on land. Amateur soldiering in Britain is a long-established tradition driven largely by the country’s enduring distaste for compulsion and the maintenance of a large standing army.1 The bodies falling under this banner have been many and varied, and can be traced back at least as far as the sixteenth century, but they exploded in number and strength during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with France. This explosion had a number of drivers, from state encouragement to self-interest, but two particularly interesting aspects of this broad movement were its voluntary nature and the way forces were raised to meet the needs and circumstances of distinct groups within British society.2 One of those forces, raised in 1794 as a direct reaction to internal and external threats to the state, is the focus of this chapter: the Yeomanry Cavalry, unique not only in establishment, composition and role, but also because it was the sole survivor of the final peace with France in 1815. This chapter explores the central importance of rural identity to this force and how this underpinned the legislation under which it was raised. It will go on to explore how and why this identity held relevance throughout the long nineteenth century, both as something created and fostered by regiments as well as recognised and manipulated from the outside. The Yeomanry Cavalry represented one of a number of attempts by William Pitt’s government to harness loyalism at home and mobilise the broader population in For a full exploration of this phenomenon, see I. F. W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester, 1991).

1

The exception to this was the militia ballot, although that in its own right was a long way from the French levée en masse of the Revolutionary period or mass mobilisations in the United Kingdom in the following century.

2

Rur a l Iden ti t y a n d t he Br i t i sh Yeo ma nry Cava l ry    41

support of the state during the War of the First Coalition. Uniformed, drilled and armed at least under central government direction if not always direct funding, these men took on responsibilities in the state’s interest. Nonetheless, this mobilisation was never a one-sided arrangement and very much relied upon give and take between citizen and state. Eschewing compulsion meant accepting service from citizens in a multitude of ways, each fitting social or regional needs. Conditions of service and expectations of contribution naturally varied between these forces, driven by what was offered by citizens and what was seen to be politically expedient – and safe – to accept by the standing government. For the yeomanry, the nature of its service was laid down in 1794 and was, from this perspective, unique. Like all other voluntary auxiliary forces, it was liable to turn out in the event of invasion in defence of the country; unlike the others, however, it was also designed to be called upon to aid the civil power ‘for the suppression of riots and tumults’.3 Although all of these forces promised to mobilise loyalism through their very existence, the yeomanry would frequently demonstrate this loyalty during and after the war by directly confronting domestic challenges to the constitution and standing authorities. The auxiliary military forces of this era thus came in more than one shape and their duties varied. However, it is through the prism of policing that the authorities measured capability and reliability, and here they without question saw a hierarchy. The militia, though providing the bulk of the anti-invasion force, had shown a tendency to identify with local grievances and revolt in sympathy with civilian hardship in the 1790s, leading to a general mistrust of its use in keeping order.4 Fencibles – wartime emergency units – would see extensive service in Ireland and on mainland Britain, and would amount to some 25,000 men. They were, however, expensive, predominantly coastally based and only on the strength for the duration of conflict with France. While the volunteers had played some part in policing during the Napoleonic period, they had been incorporated into the local militia in 1808 and would be mostly disbanded by 1814.5 Furthermore, after reincarnation in 1859 as the Rifle Volunteers, the political implications of introducing a policing clause to the Volunteer Act ruled it out in light of the social diversity of the force’s membership and suggestions against its political reliability.6 The primary reason for the yeomanry’s survival beyond 1815 was, then, its supposed reliability and the special role it played in support of the civil power. ‘Plan for More Completely Providing for the Security of the Country’, 14 March 1794, PH, vol. XXXI, p. 89.

3

Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, p. 72.

4

A. Gee, The British Volunteer Movement, 1794–1814 (Oxford, 2003), p. 3.

5

I. F. W. Beckett, Riflemen Form: A Study of the Rifle Volunteer Movement 1859–1908 (Barnsley, 2007), pp. 146–9.

6

42    G e org e H ay

The significance of the yeomanry’s role in support of the standing authorities has often been stretched too far, casting the force as a villain and unthinking tool of conservatism. In truth, the regular army did the bulk of the state’s dirty work when it came to controlling disturbances during the period and, bar a couple of infamous calamities, for the most part the yeomanry demonstrated restraint in this role.7 However, it was an essential tool to the magistracy in those areas distant from central government and out of the immediate reach of the few domestic strongholds of the professional army in the early nineteenth century. To a very large extent this meant rural Britain but the significance of this geographic distribution went beyond simple local need or coincidence. Instead, it was always planned that the yeomanry would be a rural force and that this rurality would be intrinsic to its reliability; it just so happened that it would become the defining feature of yeomanry service in the future. Despite the title of this chapter, there was no clearly defined or steady shift in the yeomanry’s identity through the long nineteenth century, from something official to something self-serving. In reality, what is seen is a series of coexisting states, the importance of which changed to meet the different ends of individuals, regiments and the state. The first epoch of the evolution of yeomanry identity, however, was without question one deliberately constructed at the state level and driven by the need for unswerving loyalty.

Rurality as Reliability Writing to the Duke of Buccleuch in 1797, Henry Dundas – Secretary of State for War – made a number of statements that revealed the Pitt government’s thinking about the role and purpose of the yeomanry. Fear of invasion and domestic insurrection was running high that year following an abortive French landing at Fishguard and the Spithead and Nore naval mutinies.8 Over the next few years, these fears drove the introduction of a number of repressive Acts to curtail radicalism within Britain but, reflecting on the part the yeomanry might play in soothing these concerns, Dundas stated: If the form and substance of this constitution is to be protected against the various combinations forming to disturb both, it must in a great measure depend on our being able to raise and keep up in the country after the establishment of peace the spirit of Yeomanry Corps, and thereby forming a connexion between the gentlemen of rank and the Yeomanry.9 For a lengthy exploration of this topic, see G. Hay, The Yeomanry Cavalry and Military Identities in Rural Britain, 1815–1914 (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 137–70.

7

Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, p. 79.

8

See, for example, the Unlawful Oaths Act 1797 (37 Geo. III, Cap. 123) and Unlawful Societies Act 1799 (39 Geo. III, Cap. 79). Copy of letter: Lord Melville to Duke of

9

Rur a l Iden ti t y a n d t he Br i t i sh Yeo ma nry Cava l ry    43

Though the use of the term ‘spirit’ was more an endorsement of policing by presence than violent confrontation, the statement leaves little to the imagination – especially when the definition of the term ‘yeoman’ came loaded with meaning. In its medieval context, the word could be used broadly for various kinds of freeholder, though it usually meant an owner-occupier of land and property, and probably a farmer. More significantly for this context, however, was the legal definition: a freeholder who was entitled to vote in parliamentary elections.10 In another, later letter, Dundas hammered home what this really meant: the yeomanry was to be raised from those ‘living in the country and not infected with the poison of the large towns’.11 Looking beyond Dundas’ gentlemen of rank – perhaps a natural ally of the state – the image conjured up was one of a sizeable, largely independent group, socially somewhere short of the minor gentry. In other words, to be a yeoman was to enjoy a position in rural society of some privilege that would be equally threatened by violent or dramatic changes to the British way of life. The reasons behind arming and trusting such a group require little explanation when the origin of the threat was revolutionary France. In an effort to bring this vision into reality, various enticements were introduced by central government to bring these men into the service. Households providing a man for yeomanry service were relieved of paying horse duty and the man put forward was automatically exempted from hair powder duty and the militia ballot, until the repeal of all three in 1869, 1874 and 1875 respectively.12 Although the last attempted ballot had failed in 1831, exemption from the horse duty in particular very clearly had value to the individual and the yeomanry. So much so, in fact, that its eventual removal later in the century, according to one observer, made the ideal class of man more independent of the force.13 Horse ownership has always fallen largely into two categories, which could effectively be divided into beasts of burden and objects of leisure – the owners of both, but especially farmers and the independently wealthy, were just the men Dundas sought to put in uniform. Despite this vision and these enticements, reality rarely came close to Dundas’ ideal in relation to the rank and file. In fact, its real relevance to the movement can be easily challenged by an exploration of individual motivations and the actual social composition of regiments. However, despite the very evident government intent Buccleuch, 10 June 1797, National Records of Scotland (NRS), GD51/1/887/1. 10

J. V. Beckett, ‘The Peasant in England: A Case of Terminological Confusion?’, Agricultural History Review, 32:2 (1984), 113. Copy of letter: Lord Melville to General Vyse, 14 July 1803, NRS, GD364/1/1136.

11

Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, p. 87.

12

The last attempted militia ballot failed during the reform upheavals of 1831. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, p. 131; comments of Sergeant James Milne. British Parliamentary Papers: C. 1352, 1875: Stanley Committee on Certain Questions that have Arisen with Respect to the Yeomanry Cavalry, p. 166.

13

44    G e org e H ay

to manipulate the composition of the yeomanry, membership was, in one respect, self-regulating as a result of the demands and expense of service. Although there are examples of units being formed around country estates, with wealthy landlords putting their farming tenantry in uniform as if a nod to feudalism, the majority did not follow this trend and typically exhibited a great deal of diversity and change over time.14 This diversity reflected local needs and interests, as well as local employment and power distribution, meaning that an attempt at generalisation across the long nineteenth century would in many ways be limiting. Nonetheless, a breakdown of the composition of the other ranks aggregated across the century demonstrates that the force was never a purely agricultural movement and, although half were farmers or farmers’ sons, the remainder was made up of the varied ranks of merchants, professionals, small business owners and artisans.15 Drilling down further, purely urbanised corps like the short-lived Manchester and Salford Yeomanry at the beginning of the century – responsible for the Peterloo Massacre – or the rise of city troops and squadrons in long-established rural regiments, shows just how complicated the landscape was. The one significant and clear constant in these returns, however, is the fact that the yeomanry began and remained an overwhelmingly middle-­class movement.16 The officer corps of the force was more easily constructed to embody this loyalty, partly because the nature of service and its respective costs on the individual limited the pool of potential candidates. In fact, so limited was this pool that, as a movement, the yeomanry was perennially short of numbers throughout the long nineteenth century. It is impossible to separate significant financial burden from yeomanry officership during the period, which was partly a result of limited central funding as well as something perpetuated locally. When the force was raised in 1794, the Duke of Richmond wrote to his near neighbour, the Earl of Egremont, highlighting the problem of finding people of ‘rank and character to undertake to lead … [corps], who from their influence over those who engage as privates could supply the want of military law, and maintain respect and the necessary degree of subordination’.17 In other words, commissions were carefully controlled and reserved for those with the status – both social and financial – to meet the needs of the service. Not only did a An example is the Macclesfield Troop of the Earl of Chester’s Yeomanry, which was made up of the Earl of Harrington’s tenants from Gawsworth and Bosley. F. Leary, The Earl of Chester’s Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry – its Formation and Services, 1797–1897 (Edinburgh, 1898), p. 43.

14

Hay, The Yeomanry Cavalry and Military Identities, table 1, pp. 84–5.

15

For a full exploration of the social composition of the yeomanry in the long nineteenth century, see Hay, The Yeomanry Cavalry and Military Identities, pp. 73–107.

16

Letter: Duke of Richmond to Earl of Egremont, 17 June 1794, West Sussex Records Office, PHA/53.

17

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potential officer need to demonstrate his financial credibility to the satisfaction of a commanding officer, until 1871 he would also need to meet the general approval of the Lords Lieutenant – if indeed the two were separate – who until this time issued commissions directly.18 The way in which control over leadership was administered locally meant that reliability could be built into the officer corps, something made particularly clear by the prevalence of county administrators within its ranks. Taking a snapshot in 1850, it can be shown that, of the 828 serving officers, five were lords lieutenant, 111 were deputy-lieutenants, 255 were justices of the peace and 65 were members of Parliament. Put simply, more than half of the yeomanry’s officer corps had a stake in county administration or in upholding the law locally.19 Similarly, social status derived from the ranks of the aristocracy and baronetcy added further to this exercising of established power in the provinces, with up to 20 per cent of the officer corps of some regiments coming from such backgrounds in the 1860s. The bulk of the rest can be shown to have been dominated by the squirearchy, which is to say principal landholders of an area who did not enjoy a title.20 The increasing presence of the nouveau riche as the century progressed and what this meant for the yeomanry socially will be explored in greater detail later, but these controls over access – the demands of money and influence – changed little before the First World War. Though, again, the movement contained nuance in the form of political reformers and an increasingly Liberal presence in Parliament, much like the rank and file, all these individuals had a clear interest in the maintenance of stability and resisting dramatic change to the British way of life. Industrialisation and developing communications in the United Kingdom go some way in explaining government thinking and the actual composition of the force. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain saw growing but isolated urbanisation served by poor and slow communications. The development of the railways would not fully take root until the 1840s, and it would not be until the 1870s that transport opened up the far reaches of the country.21 Prior to this, the After this date, the power to sign commissions was transferred to the Crown via the War Office, although the Lords Lieutenant maintained the right to suggest first commissions.

18

Arthur Sleigh, The Royal Militia and Yeomanry Cavalry Army List, April 1850 (reprinted by Naval and Military Press).

19

A. D. Gilks, ‘A History of Britain’s Volunteer Cavalry, 1776–1908’ (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2005), pp. 101, 109–10; List of the Officers of the Yeomanry Cavalry of Great Britain, 1837, Dorset History Centre (DHC), D/DOY/A/7/4; Sleigh, The Royal Militia and Yeomanry Cavalry Army List; and List of the Officers of the … Corps and Troops of Gentlemen and Yeomanry (War Office, 15 May 1795).

20

M. Freeman and D. Aldcroft, The Atlas of British Railway History (London, 1988), pp. 21 and 33.

21

46    G e org e H ay

provinces remained off grid and were therefore much further from the regular army and its limited domestic presence. The revolutionary potential of the United Kingdom has been extensively debated for this era, with the post-Napoleonic period and the 1840s considered particularly volatile, but it is the methods devised to prevent it that are particularly interesting.22 Just as the idea of a large, domestic standing army was unpopular in Britain, there was also a long-established and determined distaste for the idea of standing police forces. This left magistrates reliant on an antiquated system of parish constables and urban watchmen to do their bidding. This distaste was partly born out of the potential for an extra burden on the local rates but more significantly the idea that police might be used to force unpopular laws on the provinces or to otherwise forcefully control them from the centre. Such ideas were, of course, inspired by the French maréchaussée and the later Napoleonic Gendarmerie.23 For provincial elites, a dispersed professional army, or, better still, locally-raised auxiliary units, offered a cheaper option to deal with any potential violence and promised not to infringe on the concept of English liberty. In other words, this arrangement allowed populations to police themselves. From the government’s perspective, the yeomanry was designed to be a latent, middle-class paramilitary force of the countryside, capable of crowd-breaking and deterring insurrection by its very existence. Its rurality would separate its volunteers from the grievances and radical politics of the urban world, and thereby make it inherently reliable. In some respects this came to pass in the provinces, where it was typically officered and led by established or traditional elites. These were the same men who filled the ranks of the magistracy and lords and deputies lieutenant, concentrating in one small group the responsibility for law and order, as well as the means of maintaining it. Local appeals to would-be recruits could adopt violently anti-revolutionary rhetoric, such as in Himley in Staffordshire where the troop of yeomanry called on the support of ‘All Enemies of Blasphemy and Rebellion – all Lovers of Church and King … to check REVOLUTION or RADICAL REFORM [and] to maintain PEACE and GOOD ORDER’.24 Such language combined with its unique composition has understandably seen the force associated with extreme conservatism. No doubt more powerful for recruitment, however, was the perceived threat to livelihoods, property and life.

J. Stevenson and R. Quinault (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History, 1790–1920 (New York, 1975), pp. 22–3 and 37.

22

Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (London, 1996), p. 3; and Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1999), p. 42.

23

Circular: Raising Yeomanry in Himley, SRO, D1300/4/1/2.

24

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As with the social composition of the rank and file, this conservatism – at least through a party political prism – was more nuanced. Not only did the yeomanry go on to be funded and employed by Whig administrations, but its representation in Parliament via its officers demonstrates that its politics varied. Nonetheless, perhaps what matters most is that neither of the main political parties would tolerate violent demands for reform and thus found a force like the yeomanry an essential tool in the anti-revolutionary arsenal – both due to its ability to put down a riot and by the very fact that men were voluntarily and openly supporting the state. As Major-General Sir Charles James Napier – military governor of the northern district during the Chartist crisis – stated in 1839, calling out the yeomanry demonstrated to ‘the disaffected that the loyal are both able and willing to put them down if they resort to physical force’.25 This clearly made the yeomanry unwelcome in some autonomous boroughs, where the people saw it as an interfering county – or rural – organisation, preferring to be confronted by the regular army.26 In this respect, the slow development of the professional police forces played a significant role in the yeomanry’s continued existence and the maintenance of its rural identity. What is often called the ‘Voluntary’ Act of 1839 allowed counties and incorporated boroughs to raise forces for the preservation of the peace, but only 80 per cent of the latter would do so by 1842 – most of which were very small – while rural England was policed by as few as 1,700 constables that year.27 It would not be until the 1856 County and Borough Police Act that the counties were forced to raise constabularies, and it would still be some time before they were capable of usurping the armed forces’ role in support of magistrates in the event of emergencies. Understandably, the use of the yeomanry in aid of the civil power reduced as professional policing developed, something that also coincided with a general reduction in political violence. This naturally whittled away at the yeomanry’s raison d’être, but it did not do away with it – despite efforts of two Whig administrations in 1827 and 1838, or the looming agricultural depression on the horizon. What allowed the yeomanry to continue to exist through the second half of the nineteenth century, at least from the perspective of those who served, was a retreat to its rural strongholds. Here it bolstered its significance as part of the county establishment and as a vehicle for social mobility.

Lt.-Gen. Sir William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, vol. II (London, 1857), pp. 30–2.

25

This was reportedly the case during the Chartist disturbances in Birmingham in 1839 and the colliers’ strike in Coventry in 1842. The Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, 27 July 1839 and 22 August 1842.

26

S. H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 88–9.

27

48    G e org e H ay

Rurality as a Reflection of Class and Authority Alongside securing reliability, the envisaged composition of the yeomanry inadvertently lent itself to establishing the force as a socially elite institution. Not only was its rank and file explicitly designed to appeal to the middle classes, its officer corps was carefully controlled and looked to traditional elites for leadership. From the outset, these elite social foundations served a purpose beyond reliability and, in many circumstances, saw regiments become social hubs within the counties. The frequency with which the organisation contributed to the social calendar in the provinces says a great deal about its significance in this respect. Subtle evidence for the pageantry surrounding yeomanry service can be found as early as 1801, when enterprising businesses used newspapers to advertise theatre services for camps, just as other entrepreneurs advertised venues, the services of bands and articles of dress. Similarly, yeomanry regiments themselves advertised for the services of entertainers and caterers, but this trend was not only seen in the annual cycle of training.28 In fact, annual camps were just one example of a multitude of events that drew together polite society in and out of uniform, all under the auspices of yeomanry regiments. As the mounted arm of the auxiliaries and often the only armed force in a district, the yeomanry was frequently called upon to provide escorts to dignitaries. Examples include a multitude of British royals and, in the case of the Northumberland Hussars, the Shah of Persia and the King of Siam.29 For those counties that stood between London and the ports this was a particularly frequent duty. The West Kent Yeomanry, for instance, escorted King William IV in 1821 and 1836, Queen Victoria in 1858 and 1864, the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1866 and 1898, King Edward VII in 1905, and the Queen of Spain in 1906.30 Although in 1888 Queen Victoria allegedly declined an escort from the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars due to ‘her objections to the indifferent horsemanship’, it did not prevent the continued use of the force in this role.31

The Bury and Norwich Post, 8 July 1801; Caledonian Mercury, 2 February 1826; The Leicester Chronicle, 24 September 1836; The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 2 November 1839; The Ipswich Journal, 28 January 1843; The Era, 12 June 1886; and The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 16 May 1899.

28

Charles William Thompson, Records of the Dorset Yeomanry (Dorchester, 1894), pp. 128, 133, 152, 158, 159, 168, 172 and 177; Howard Pease, The History of the Northumberland (Hussars) Yeomanry (London, 1924), pp. 60 and 65; and The Yeomanry Record – An Illustrated Paper Devoted Entirely to the Interests of the Yeomanry, 15 (September 1897).

29

Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. Edmeades, West Kent (Queen’s Own) Yeomanry – Some Historical Records, 1794–1909 (London, 1909), pp. 29, 40, 64, 67, 68 and 117.

30

D. de Rothschild, The Rothschilds at Waddesdon Manor (London, 1979), p. 47.

31

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Escorting a reigning monarch or other dignitary was an opportunity seemingly seized upon and valued by regiments, and often resulted in desirable ‘royal’ prefixes to titles. As a matter of course, the escorted parties also guaranteed significant audiences, which, in turn, guaranteed public exposure. Public exposure served a number of purposes and offered various benefits, but at the personal level it provided an opportunity to be seen in uniform in a position of authority and in exalted company. Though the task might be largely symbolic, the occasion thrust the force into the public eye and no doubt helped to cement or maintain an individual’s position in county society. The significance of this visibility also had a tangible impact on uniforms. Not only notoriously expensive, many were extravagant and aped regular patterns. However, such was the cachet in certain circles that, unlike the Rifle Volunteers, yeomanry officers appear to have worn their regimentals without fear of prejudice at civic occasions and even in Parliament into the 1920s.32 Where they perhaps came into their own, though, was at regimental events or, better still, county events hosted by regiments. Such occasions allowed an officer to access a traditionally closed society while visibly espousing Victorian militaristic values and conforming to civilian understandings of respectability. It is here that an officer might use his position to demonstrate class and authority or rely on it as a means of staking a claim to such a position. The opportunities to host events as a regiment were many and varied, but there were also many ways in which the force infiltrated social events in wider rural society. Balls and dances might coincide with annual camp or be deliberately planned outside of it, but in most cases they relied on senior officers – and typically leading men of the county – as a nucleus to proceedings. Whatever the inspiration, seasonal events were designed to draw in more than just the regimental audience. Examples in the regional press are common, such as the ladies ball at the Mansion House in Doncaster organised by Lord Grantham and the Yorkshire Hussars in 1821. Later in the century, the Staffordshire Yeomanry’s annual ball in 1891 secured the presence of the mayor, councillors, barristers, and the leading families of the district.33 Busier still, following the Second Boer War and the large expansion of the yeomanry, the East Kent Mounted Rifles entertained the district to, or were present at, no fewer than ten dances between November 1902 and March 1903.34 Although in some form most of these events were an established part of the social fabric of county society by the time the yeomanry was formed in 1794, it is clear that, as the nineteenth century progressed, the force became an important locus around which Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 21 January 1886, vol. 302, para. 45; The Times, 4 February 1859, 7 February 1911 and 11 February 1920; and Beckett, Riflemen Form, p. 96.

32

John Bull, 28 May 1821; and The Dart, 30 January 1891.

33

Diary: F. S. Maxted, 1902–20, Canterbury Cathedral Archives (CCA), CC-W/13/3.

34

50    G e org e H ay

rural society moved. Not only did the yeomanry absorb notable individuals into its senior ranks, it provided additional pomp, swagger and glamour to proceedings through uniform and assumed military capability. To be a yeomanry officer – and even to serve in its ranks – almost universally meant an association with the socially elite of rural Britain. For would-be officers, this milieu would have been well-understood, both from the perspective of what might be achieved as well as how much it might cost. Commenting during the 1880s, at a time when yeomanry numbers overall were at their nadir, one observer still noted that ‘the English country-gentleman is par excellence the leader of such a body’.35 What might be desirable, however, is not always what is available – at least not in the expected form. As already stated, although the senior ranks of the officer corps of the yeomanry were typically dominated by an established, titled elite, the bulk of the junior ranks were made up of the squirearchy. Nonetheless, with declining internal and external threats, and with the value and profitability of land much reduced, landowners and their willingness to participate changed during the long nineteenth century. As industrial and commercial interests bore more fruit, the institution increasingly provided opportunities to a parvenu class of social climbers, rich in money yet poor in influence. The idea of literally buying into county society was not new and both predated the existence of the yeomanry and did not require its involvement to realise success. There is evidence of a long history of purchasing land as a safe form of investment, as well as in the pursuit of status. Although debate still surrounds the extent and success of this movement, particularly in light of the reduction in land value from the 1870s, it has been shown that the composition of landed society changed. Not only did an increasing number of new peers from the 1880s become ennobled following land purchases and probationary periods in the ranks of the gentry, it is generally agreed that an investment in rural Britain promised prestige and political opportunities.36 Given its rural roots and evident influence with principal landowners and personalities, it is no surprise that many men also looked to the yeomanry as a step in the same direction. A commission might similarly elevate a new squire socially, and was frequently pursued alongside other positions of local power. In just one example in the 1850s, Lord Saye and Sele wrote to the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire to

Meeting regarding Yeomanry organisation, 30 December 1881, The National Archives, WO32/7237.

35

W. D. Rubinstein, ‘New Men of Wealth and the Purchase of Land in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Past & Present, 92 (1981), 91; R. E. Pumphrey, ‘The Introduction of Industrialists into the British Peerage: A Study in Adaptation of a Social Institution’, American Historical Review, 65:1 (1959), 8; and T. Nicholas, ‘Businessmen and Land Ownership in the Late Nineteenth Century Revisited’, The Economic History Review, 53:4 (2000), p. 782.

36

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secure a deputy-lieutenancy and a yeomanry commission for his son.37 Not only did the force offer corporate identity, a commission provided a position of authority. It demonstrated a man’s willingness and ability to hold positions of social responsibility, thereby opening doors to the offices of the magistracy, lieutenancy or Parliament. Although more common in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in certain regions – particularly those rich in industry and, by association, large populations and working-class disaffection – new money had a long-established place within yeomanry regiments. Before the 1820s, for example, the Queen’s Own Royal Staffordshire Yeomanry had three master-potters, a Liverpool businessman and the brewers Worthington and Bass serving within its officer corps.38 In the Northumberland Hussars from the 1880s, notable Tyne industrialists William Watson-Armstrong (later Baron Armstrong and great-nephew of the famous engineer and manufacturer) and Philip Eustace Smith (a director of Smiths’ Dock Company and British Ropes Ltd) would both play leading roles in the regiment.39 In Yorkshire in the 1870s, the three nineteenth-century regiments contained two ‘iron masters’ (Arthur C. Armitage and Herbert H. Taylor), two machinery manufacturers (Sir Andrew Fairbairn and Andrew Lawson) and a mill industrialist ( Jonas Foster).40 Though in all these cases the presence of employers suggests the possibility of self-interest as a driver for service, there are other, more obvious examples of yeomanry regiments providing a backdoor into county society. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than within Britain’s Jewish community, where latent anti-Semitism often saw successful individuals barred from these opportunities. It was in the Buckingham Hussars that F. H. Cripps made inroads into the influential circles of the county, an approach that had its origins in the middle of the nineteenth century.41 With the son of the newspaper magnate Sir Edward Levy-Lawson commanding the regiment from October 1902, followed shortly afterwards by his own son, and a number of generations of the Rothschild family also serving, the prevalence of Jewish names in the regiment led to its less than flattering sobriquet, the ‘Flying Foreskins’.42 Letter: Baron Saye and Sele to Duke of Marlborough, 29 May 1852, Oxfordshire Records Office, L/M VII/ii/1.

37

M. R. Hales, ‘Civilian Soldiers in Staffordshire, 1793–1823’ (PhD thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 1995), p. 204.

38

The Times, 28 December 1900 and 17 October 1941; The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 27 December 1900; and The Times, 18 March 1936.

39

T. Baines, Yorkshire Past and Present, vol. II (London, 1870), pp. 194–5; and The Army List, 1876.

40

F. H. Cripps, Life’s a Gamble (London, 1957), p. 64.

41

The London Gazette, 17 October 1902; Huw Richards, ‘Lawson, Edward Frederick, fourth Baron Burnham, ODNB (Oxford, 2004); Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, p. 189; and T. M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 155–6.

42

52    G e org e H ay

This phenomenon of purchasing rural Englishness and the influence that came with it was also reflected in the growing presence of industrial and business money in the peerage. Alongside their new titles, Earl Egerton, Viscount Ridley, Baron Knaresborough and Baron Ashcombe, as well as sons of both Baron Hindlip and Baron Joicey, all obtained yeomanry commissions before or after being ennobled or rising in the ranks of nobility between 1886 and 1905.43 It is clear that for an increasing number of men who had made their fortunes through the purple of commerce or grime of industry, officership in the yeomanry acted as an established method of securing a position within county society and polite company. The identity of the yeomanry, and particularly of its officer corps, was then very much bound up with British class consciousness. Under specific circumstances it could reflect on an individual’s commitment to raise himself within a closed society, and obtaining a commission might well be viewed as his first step of acceptance within it: here rurality did not mean parochial, it meant elite. Claiming membership to these social groups was not a condition for yeomanry officership, but the dominance of land and wealth in the officer corps was to a great extent the measure of the force’s existence and longevity. Although it would be unfair and unwise to think that yeomanry officers did not think they had an important role to play in civil or national defence – even later in the century – there is little doubt that the bulk were aware of the potential social benefits that were unique to yeomanry service. Beyond the desire for social elevation, the yeomanry naturally had other attractions, including for those who served within its ranks. Like all of the volunteers this included an annual period of training, not only offering sport, leisure and a break from the monotony of everyday life but, in the case of many yeomanry regiments, privileged access to officers’ estates. As Dorset Yeomanry recruits were told in 1909, ‘you should have about 15 days’ change of air and scenery every year with no cost’ and ‘you will make a great number of new friends who will help you all through life, as your fellow yeomen are connected with the same trade and business’.44 This change of air and scenery, as well as the properties of cavalry, produced another largely unique opportunity in the connection between rurality and leisure.

Rurality and Leisure The importance of leisure to all the post-Napoleonic voluntary military movements is impossible to overestimate. From the Rifle Volunteers’ musketry competitions on Wimbledon Common to inter-unit football and cricket fixtures played by others, at times sporting pursuits arguably provided greater motivational value to soldiers than The Times, 18 March 1909; and Army List.

43

Dorset Yeomanry Regimental Orders, 15 December 1909, DHC, D/DOY/A/11/3.

44

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belief in home defence or prevention of insurrection. While those Rifle Volunteers’ meetings and the establishment of the National Rifle Association were and remain synonymous with the movement for obvious reasons, for the yeomanry, similarly specific leisure activities linked men to the army as well as to the countryside. In much the same way as it did for officers, the overlap between the events of polite society and yeomanry service held benefits for the rank and file. F. S. Maxted, an NCO of the East Kent Mounted Rifles, recorded at length the dances and balls he attended in uniform between the Second Boer War and First World War, and described his first annual camp as ‘the best holiday [he] had ever had’.45 As with all the auxiliaries, these camps presented their own attraction – whether benefiting from access to otherwise closed spaces like country parks or simply because of the atmosphere and companionship. Looking back on his first experience with the Sussex Yeomanry, Siegfried Sassoon’s George Sherston – a thinly veiled Sassoon – described it as ‘a mounted infantry picnic in perfect weather’.46 Just as these annual events provided social spaces for the elite, they offered the middle-class rank and file a break from the monotony of daily life while in the company of friends. Within the genial atmosphere of camp and other regimental occasions came the availability of sporting opportunities. These were many and varied, and could be dictated by locality. Regimental photographic collections often provide the best insight into what was on offer, with game shooting and fishing comparatively common in some Scottish regiments. Similarly, there is some evidence that game shooting was actively kept up by some regiments on operations as late as the 1940s.47 Nonetheless, sports conducted on horseback were naturally the preserve of the mounted arm, many of which were designed in their own right as a form of training or seen to aid horsemanship. From polo to tent-pegging, there were long-established activities with a cavalry bent, but of greater interest to yeomen were those embedded in county society and which thereby provide the surest evidence of an enduring rural identity across the whole movement: racing and hunting. Throughout the nineteenth century, sporting journals such as Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, The Racing Times, Horse and Hound and The Sporting Gazette show these links to have been ubiquitous and practically unavoidable anywhere in the country. They regularly carried news of yeomanry races, point-to-points and hunt meetings, many of which required competitors to meet certain training or other standards to enter. In the comparatively famous ‘Yeomanry Cavalry Handicap’, run at Diary: F. S. Maxted, 1902–20, CCA, CC-W/13/3.

45

Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London, 1929), pp. 231–4.

46

Photographs include Scottish Horse officers fishing on the Blair Atholl estate and officers of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry duck shooting in Palestine in 1940. P. J. R. Mileham, The Yeomanry Regiments: A Pictorial History (Tunbridge Wells, 1985), p. 50.

47

54    G e org e H ay

Musselburgh outside Edinburgh, all jockeys had to provide signed proof from their commanding officer or adjutant confirming that their horse had been drilled at least four days in any Scottish yeomanry corps while in quarters, and that the jockey was a yeoman of similar experience. Such was the significance and popularity of this event, it forced the Sporting Gazette to question its legitimacy in light of what it believed to be the proper Edinburgh race meeting later in the year.48 Elsewhere, other yeomanry races grew into county institutions with bold claims made about attendance in local and sporting newspapers, with one report from Essex in 1837 claiming that 3,000 people had been present.49 Such crowds were also seemingly undeterred by the force’s transgressions and involvement in policing, with the Cheshire Yeomanry entertaining spectators on the Seaforth Sands, north of Liverpool, in June 1820 – less than a year since it had cleared the field at Peterloo.50 What is abundantly clear is that, across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, and throughout the long nineteenth century, yeomanry races were as popular with crowds as they were with yeomen themselves. Writing this overlap between field sports and yeomanry service into fiction was sportsman, editor and novelist, Robert Surtees, who effectively suggested them to be inseparable. Given his background, however, it was foxhunting that dominated his writing. In the novel Handley Cross, one of Surtees’ lesser characters in the hunt inherits a farm, secures a cornetcy in the yeomanry and proceeds to consider himself elevated in society.51 In Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, Surtees’ protagonist enjoys the company of an ex-yeomanry officer who insists on riding with the hunt in his archaic uniform.52 It is perhaps in these novelised and humorous vignettes that Surtees comes closest to pinning down the contradictory nature of yeomanry identity: on the one hand intimately and enduringly connected to the countryside; on the other exaggerating and manipulating those connections for personal ends. Nowhere was this sometimes fabricated rurality more evident than on the hunting field. Described as a socially unifying force but also ‘one of the sturdiest props of the landed interest’, hunting requires organisation and a good deal of open countryside to be successful.53 Given the representation of that landed interest in the yeomanry, it is hardly surprisingly that the two should come together, especially The Sporting Gazette, 1 August 1863.

48

The Essex Standard, 9 June 1837.

49

The Morning Post, 28 June 1820.

50

Robert S. Surtees, Handley Cross; or the Spa Hunt – a Sporting Tale (London, 1843), p. 51.

51

Robert S. Surtees, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (London, 1860), pp. 78–82, 112–13.

52

This refers specifically to hunting on horseback, typically with hounds, be that for fox, deer or other quarry. B. A. Holderness, ‘The Victorian Farmer’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.), The Victorian Countryside (London, 1981), vol. II, p. 21.

53

Rur a l Iden ti t y a n d t he Br i t i sh Yeo ma nry Cava l ry    55

when access to land could provide another means to curry favour. Siegfried Sassoon was an avid sportsman in his youth and in his depiction of that time through his first novel he shows himself taking to foxhunting in an attempt to find a greater connection to the countryside.54 Many hunts were closely bound up with local tradition and customs, often long-established and revolving around the habits of notable families. Not only did this open opportunities for would-be officers and social climbers, it also increasingly drew in new sportsmen who made the most of improving rail communications to access new grounds or to escape the city in search of the rurality chased by Sassoon. This gave those who could not afford to stop for the hunting season access to the shire counties, while ‘carted deer’ packs like those of the Rothschilds meant guaranteed sport in easy reach of London. Having always boasted its openness, the hunting field was the ideal access point to the great and the good without the expense of buying land; better still, unlike shooting, this sacrosanct ‘openness’ meant a day-tripper would rarely part with any money for his sport beyond travel.55 In many ways, then, the opportunities presented by the sport and the changing composition of the hunting field bore a remarkable similarity to the yeomanry experience of the long nineteenth century. It is no great surprise that this environment saw many a huntsman turn yeoman, and vice versa. Nowhere is this unity better demonstrated than in the pack of drag hounds maintained by the Royal West Kent Yeomanry, or the structure of the reformed Essex Yeomanry in 1902, whose four squadrons centred on the four hunts of the county.56 The special conditions created to raise a yeomanry force to serve in the South African War under the title Imperial Yeomanry saw this process operate openly, with many hunts directly providing manpower. This included Lord Longford’s ill-fated Irish Hunt Contingent, which came in the form of a whole company of Masters of Foxhounds in the 13th Battalion, Imperial Yeomanry.57 In much the same way, it was with a degree of inevitability that Sassoon found himself joining the Sussex Yeomanry on the outbreak of the First World War, alongside many of his

Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, pp. 84–5, 105–6.

54

A ‘carted deer’ was semi-tame and transported to the hunting field. The hounds were trained not to harm the creature. Though frowned upon by the elite hunting community, it produced guaranteed sport. D. Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege: A Social History of English Foxhunting, 1753–1885 (Hassocks, 1977), pp. 39, 58 and 61.

55

The Essex and Suffolk Hunt, the East Essex Hunt, the Essex Hunt and the Essex Union Hunt. The Standard, 20 January 1892; A. F. F. H. Robertson, ‘The Army in Colchester and Its Influence on the Social, Economic, and Political Development of the Town, 1854– 1914’ (PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1991), p. 261; and Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege, p. 105.

56

T. Pakenham, The Boer War (London, 1979), p. 436.

57

56    G e org e H ay

hunting colleagues.58 Hunting in Victorian and Edwardian Britain has been shown to be a method of confirming the country gentleman’s proximity to nature and as a unifying force within a local population. Furthermore, it has also been demonstrated that eligible gentlemen of business and other backgrounds saw hunting as a purchasable aspect of ‘rural Englishness’. Not as socially or geographically elitist as game shooting, the sport was open to those who could ride and wanted to chase these ideals and this rural identity. It is no surprise that this led to a blurring of boundaries between the two institutions.59 There is little question that mounted sports such as hunting made for better horsemen, and this alone could be reason enough for a cavalry soldier to engage in them. However, these ties also served different purposes and existed to make a statement; a statement not solely about horsemanship but about politics, class, masculinity and sporting values. So powerful and enduring were these statements and connections that, just as with game shooting, there is evidence of regiments hunting while on operations.60 There is a separate point to be made about the place of the yeomanry within the auxiliary forces, particularly after the re-raising of the volunteers in 1859, and the ways in which leisure was pursued. Range shooting – though infinitely more suitable for the infantry – carried none of the pomp of mounted sports. Though rural volunteers were certainly an important element of that movement, their own identity was somewhat subsumed by the whole.61 In contrast, the yeomanry – almost regardless of date or origin – was defined by the fact that it was a rural movement, an image woven through almost all of its activities.

Conclusion Nations, ethnicities, organisations and individuals are often defined by events or shared characteristics, labels which might be self-defined or – as with the British division of the Indian subcontinent into martial and non-martial races – applied by others. In any circumstances these labels can have a powerful bearing on an individual’s prospects, making them either desirable or the very opposite. In a regimental context, however, identity is historically a set of tenets drilled into newcomers to Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, pp. 231–3.

58

A. Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History, 1850–1926 (London, 1991), p. 242; and G. E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London, 1976), p. 181.

59

A painting by Lionel Edwards – noted for his equine and rural scenes – shows the Scottish Horse hunting with hounds on the Salonika front in 1917, amidst shell bursts. Mileham, The Yeomanry Regiments, p. 64.

60

Beckett, Riflemen Form, pp. 52–8.

61

Rur a l Iden ti t y a n d t he Br i t i sh Yeo ma nry Cava l ry    57

provide the shared underpinnings of esprit de corps, the glue that holds soldiers together under stress and trying conditions. Through the long nineteenth century and through to the present day, that constructed identity has often been built on powerful and enduring ideas about history, legacy and honouring past achievements. Such identities may well have influenced and channelled would-be recruits into different branches or regiments of the British army during this period, but in the realm of the auxiliaries this scenario becomes more complex. Relying on civilians to sacrifice time and often money, these circumstances allowed individualism to flourish regionally and between the different branches to create identities driven by the pursuit of diverse ends. Nonetheless, temporarily putting individualism aside, there is little question that the Yeomanry Cavalry was designed through legislation to be a rural movement. Such a vision is clear from the words of policy-makers and the language of the statutes that enshrined that vision in law. It would bind two rural classes together; two social groups, in many ways aloof in their own dispersed society, with shared concerns and separated from the radical politics of towns and cities. On balance and as a national movement, it would never actually fully reflect these ideals, showing far greater diversity than it is often credited for. It was not exclusively a gentry or farmers’ movement, and nor was it only to be found in the countryside. However, there is no question that it was, by crude average, a middle-class movement throughout this period, which in many ways delivered the same ends. This core of social elitism was instilled by the statutes that governed it, which, when combined with the changing social and political landscape of the long nineteenth century, very quickly allowed the yeomanry to morph from an anti-revolutionary tool into something of greater social significance. Carefully controlling its membership at all levels, as a movement it saw its rural identity – and the class and leisure trappings that came with it – venerated and upheld. Real or fabricated, the connection between the yeomanry and the countryside defined the movement. Though it may well have earned Punch’s scorn as the ‘country gentlemen’s rather costly plaything’, this identity was an important factor driving membership, either because the values of those who joined were already inculcated by lifestyle or because it was something they aspired to.62 Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the rural identity of the yeomanry came to mean different things: born out of the pursuit of reliability, it was taken on by regiments themselves who proceeded to closely guard it – in part as a form of exceptionalism, in part as a driver of unity and esprit de corps.

Punch, 14 July 1877.

62

3 ‘Kitchener’s Mob’: Myth and Reality in Raising the New Army, 1914–15 Peter Doy l e

‘There’s old Kitchener wants you’, he says, ‘for your King and your Country need you’, says he. ‘Them as goes now’, says he, ‘will be bloomin’ British heroes.’1 The Old Army was the nation in miniature. The New Army is the nation itself.2 Recruitment for the Pals Battalions became a focus for barely disguised snobbery.3

P

opular memory holds that the volunteer army raised by Lord Kitchener in the opening weeks of the First World War was formed in the wake of a great recruiting campaign; that thousands lined up outside the recruiting offices; and that Kitchener’s Army, as it came to be known, was an army of Pals battalions whose engagement on the Somme in 1916 was to have far-reaching implications for the British nation.4 This volunteer army is generally presented as a coherent whole, albeit one collected into battalions raised locally and identified with specific communities. While there is a large literature that examines matters of recruitment, there are still aspects that need examination, and particularly so since, as Jay Winter has put it, ‘The men who joined Kitchener’s armies in 1914–15 … lived in what was probably the most class-conscious nation in Europe’.5 This chapter re-examines the motiva A. Neil Lyons, Kitchener Chaps (London, 1915), p. 47.

1

‘A general’ from E. B. Osborne, The Muse in Arms (London, 1918), p. vi.

2

John Hartigan, ‘Volunteering in the First World War: The Birmingham Experience, August 1914–1915’, Midland History, 24 (1999), 176.

3

The famous novel by John Harris, Covenant with Death (London, 1961), memorably refers to the destruction of the Sheffield City Battalion on 1 July 1916: ‘Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history’; see also Dan Todman, The Great War, Myth and Memory (London, 2005), p. 46.

4

Jay Winter, ‘Army and Society: The Demographic Context’, in A Nation in Arms. The British Army in the First World War, ed. Ian F. W. Beckett and Keith Simpson (Barnsley, 2014 [1984]), pp. 193–210, p. 194.

5

M y t h a nd R e a li t y in R a i sing the Ne w A rmy, 1914–15    59

tions for the volunteer army in 1914, specifically considering the raising of battalions in the industrial cities of England, leaving aside the complex issues relating to Ireland and the formation of a Welsh Army Corps. While much has already been made of the demography of the first to join ‘Kitchener’s Mob’ in August–September 1914, there has been a tendency to homogenise the first volunteers.6 This has veiled clear distinctions between the first to join and those who were carried along within the Pals battalions, particularly in relation to social class and regional identity.

Kitchener and His Armies At the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, Lord Kitchener was universally perceived as a national hero: The Times confidently proclaimed ‘abundant testimony to the confidence his name inspires in the public at this tremendous crisis’.7 H. W. Wilson saw him as ‘The Man who gets things done’.8 Appointed Secretary of State for War in Asquith’s government, Kitchener’s maiden speech made it plain that he took the commission only in the spirit of doing his duty for his country.9 Nevertheless, the Secretary of State was faced with a problem. With the six regular divisions of the British Expeditionary Force already committed to the Western Front, there was little left in reserve.10 Echoing the need for a larger wartime army discussed in Chapter 1, Winston Churchill recalled Kitchener’s first words to Parliament: ‘We must be prepared to put armies of millions in the field For example, Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (London, 1985), pp. 30–1; Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 2004), pp. 138–9; Charles Messenger, Call to Arms: The British Army 1914–18 (London, 2005), p. 96; ‘All sectors of the economy were represented, as were all social classes’, David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2005), p. 202. The term ‘Kitchener’s Mob’, depicting the heterogeneous nature of the New Army, derives from James Norman Hall, Kitchener’s Mob: The Adventures of an American in the British Army (London, 1916), p. 1.

6

Quoted in Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma: The Life and Death of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, 1850–1916 (Stroud, 2016), p. 231.

7

H. W. Wilson and J. A. Hammerton (eds), The Great War (13 vols, London, 1914–19), vol. 1, p. 2.

8

Correspondence in Kitchener Papers, TNA, PRO 30/57/76; Asquith recorded in his diary: ‘August 5. I have taken an important decision to-day; to give up the War Office and install Kitchener there as an emergency man until the war comes to an end.’ Herbert Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols, London, 1928), vol. 2, p. 24; the full text of Lord Kitchener’s speeches is given in Sir Hedley Le Bas (ed.), The Lord Kitchener Memorial Book (London, 1916); on 25 August, he stated: ‘my position on this bench does not in any way imply that I belong to any political party, for, as a soldier, I have no politics’.

9

10

Corelli Barnett, Britain and Her Army (London, 1970 [2000]), p. 364.

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and maintain them for several years. In no other way could we discharge our duty to our allies or to the world.’11 The problem was that recruitment in the pre-war period had been declining. Haldane’s 1908 reforms had created the Territorial Force and grafted it to the existing county regiments of the 1881 Cardwell-Childers reforms. It was carefully calculated that 37,710 men per year would be needed to support the military edifice of Regulars and Territorials, all voluntary; of these, some 22,008 were for the infantry alone.12 Yet recruitment figures were not encouraging. From 1908, enlistments had been falling annually, by 5,000–6,000 per year, leading to a deficit of some 25,000 overall (more, given that the government had revised down its figures in 1914). Two weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the military correspondent of The Times was signalling the possibility that the current recruiting system was under pressure: ‘The Failure of Recruiting. A Serious Situation. The Need for Drastic Reform.’13 Shifting to a continental model of compulsion and national service was one option – but one that went against the grain.14 The question was how to tap into Britain’s manpower for the war. In Kitchener’s view, there would be no time for the mechanisms of the county Territorial Associations to raise sufficient men to fight. The role of the Associations was specific, with each ‘composed of influential men in each county whose business it is to receive and expend the money allotted by Government to the Territorial Forces in the county, and generally to encourage and assist in their raising and maintenance’.15 Though effective enough in building the Force, there was no evidence to suggest it would be equal to the rapid expansion of the army envisaged by Kitchener.16 Kitchener knew that, for all its value, the Territorial Force ‘had been devised as a Home Service army, and could not be transformed into a Foreign Service army by a mere stroke of the pen’ and that ‘a Territorial unit cannot train itself and expand simultaneously’.17 He steered away from the recruiting and organisational machinery of the Territorial Associations – referring to the Force as

11

Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918 (London, 1931), p. 140.

12

The Times, 13 July 1914, p. 6.

13

Ibid.

14

‘Only volunteers, willing or otherwise, could be sent abroad’: Barnett, Britain and Her Army, p. 10; W. G. Clifford, The British Army (London, 1915), pp. 17–18.

15

Paul Danby and Lt.-Col. Cyril Field, The British Army Book (London, 1915), p. 125.

Beckett et al., The British Army and the First World War, p. 91; this rejection of the Territorial Army has been discussed by Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army (Manchester, 1988), pp. 40–2.

16

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 44.

17

M y t h a nd R e a li t y in R a i sing the Ne w A rmy, 1914–15    61

an army of ‘town clerks’ – instead creating new battalions to be appended as new units of the ‘Regular army’.18

Recruitment of Kitchener’s Army Kitchener sought sanction to raise 500,000 men at his first Cabinet meeting, and the recruitment of the first 100,000 was announced in a front-page press advertisement – part of a significant ‘advertising campaign’ engineered professionally by Hedley Le Bas of the Caxton Advertising Agency.19 This was carried prominently in The Times – as well as all major regional papers – on Saturday 8 August 1914. It went straight to the heart of the situation: ‘A Call to Arms! Your King and Country Need You’.20 Kitchener’s ‘Call to Arms’ made a direct appeal to the men of Britain. In 1914, as the German armies swept through northern Europe, political cartoonists and leader writers fell upon ever-more extreme ‘horrors and atrocities’ to build up national indignation and bolster recruitment.21 For Victor Germains there were many factors in play: ‘patriotism, want of employment, ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, the sheer impulse of going with the crowd’.22 P. E. Dewey has presented the case that men were subject to not only ‘generalised factors such as Ian F. W. Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly, The British Army and the First World War (Cambridge, 2017), p. 90; Churchill had claimed, ‘It would have been far better to have formed the new volunteers upon the cadres of the Territorial army, each of which could have been duplicated or quadruplicated in successive stages. But the new Secretary of State had little knowledge of and no faith in the British territorial system.’ Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918, p. 140

18

Sir Hedley Le Bas (ed.), The Lord Kitchener Memorial Book (London, 1916), no page numbers. Le Bas entitled his own contribution ‘Advertising for an Army’.

19

The Times, 8 August 1914, p. 5; it was carried in other papers, for example, the Liverpool Echo, Saturday 8 August 1914, carried the advertisement as a column-width blocked-out advertisement – as would so many other regional papers. Sir Hedley Le Bas, an advertising expert, handled the campaign; his account was published in his edited volume, The Lord Kitchener Memorial Book; see also discussion in Ian Beckett, ‘The Nation in Arms, 1914–1918’, in Beckett and Simpson, A Nation in Arms: The British Army in the First World War. The fact that the call was about to be issued by the press was also announced. The Birmingham Daily Post for Friday 7 August carried a short article on its front page: ‘Call to Arms. An appeal for Recruits to the Regular Army’, with the text of the poster to be released the next day.

20

21

Viscount Bryce, Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (London, 1915); see Gerard DeGroot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London, 1996), p. 187.

Victor W. Germains, The Kitchener Armies: The Story of a National Achievement (London, 1930), p. 38.

22

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patriotism’ but also ‘economic, demographic, medical and institutional’ – affecting pay rates, age, condition and institutional protection. No one industry supplied the dominant number of men in 1914–15, with voluntary cohorts of this period arguably more heterogeneous than those that followed.23 For Jay Winter, the first men to join did so for a variety of reasons, with economic factors not necessarily being paramount.24 Winter went further: ‘there can be little doubt, then, that popular sentiment rather than pecuniary considerations lay behind enlistment in the first phase of the 1914–18 war’.25 On the day ‘the Call to Arms’ was announced, The Times reported a ‘steady stream of applicants’. It appeared that the ‘crowd of applicants was so large and so persistent that mounted police were necessary to hold them in check’.26 Statistical evidence indicates that while this may have been true in particular places, recruitment had nowhere near reached its peak.27 Recruitment varied from county to county; in Devon ‘initial results to Kitchener’s call were mediocre’ with ‘no immediate rush’.28 At best in the early part of the war recruitment was steady, if unspectacular.29 Late in August, recruitment posters and other materials were within the ambit of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC), a cross-party body whose sole aim was to direct men to the colours.30 The output of materials was prodigious, with ‘over 54,000,000 posters, leaflets and other publications’ issued, ‘12,000 meetings held’ and ‘over 20,000 speeches delivered’.31 Nevertheless, the PRC only came into existence at the end of August 1914, so there was a lot of ground to make up if See P. E. Dewey, ‘Military Recruiting and the British Labour Force during the First World War’, The Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 199–223. See also Clive Hughes, ‘The New Armies’, in A Nation in Arms: The British Army in the First World War, ed. Beckett and Simpson, p. 104; and David Silbey The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914– 1916 (London, 2005), p. 82 et seq.

23

Winter, ‘Army and Society: The Demographic Context’, p. 197.

24

Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (London, 1985), p. 33.

25

The Times, 8 August 1914, p. 4.

26

Peter Doyle and Chris Foster, Kitchener’s Mob (Stroud, 2016), p. 31; Hartigan, ‘Volunteering in the First World War: The Birmingham Experience’, p. 168, fig. 1.

27

Bonnie J. White, ‘Volunteerism and Early Recruitment Efforts in Devonshire, August 1914–December 1915’, The Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 644.

28

See recruiting statistics graphs in Doyle and Foster, Kitchener’s Mob, p. 31.

29

See Roy Douglas, ‘Voluntary Enlistment in the First World War and the Work of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee’, The Journal of Modern History, 42 (1970), 564–85; and Brendan Maartens, ‘The Great War, Military Recruitment and the Public Relations Work of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1914–1915’, Public Relations Inquiry, 2 (2016), 169–85

30

Captain Basil Williams, Raising and Training the New Armies (London, 1918), pp. 15–16.

31

M y t h a nd R e a li t y in R a i sing the Ne w A rmy, 1914–15    63

recruitment to the proposed New Armies was to be effective.32 Between Tuesday 4 August and Saturday 8 August, just prior to Kitchener’s ‘Call’, some 8,193 men joined the colours.33 At this rate it would take some time for Kitchener’s ambition to come to fruition. Writing in 1915, Edgar Wallace commented: The average young man of Britain was wont to cheer enthusiastically stories of British heroism. He himself was immensely patriotic and honestly desired to serve his country as best he could. That he did not enlist was not due to his lack of patriotism, not to his failure to appreciate the extraordinary demands which were being made on his country, but just from sheer failure to understand that he himself could be of any service in the ranks of the Army.34

Quite possibly this came down to misunderstanding. Rudyard Kipling’s late nineteenth-century portrayal of the British soldier as a ‘rough diamond’ was certainly at odds with the expectations of the ‘commercial classes’ who would later come to supply a significant proportion of the citizen army Kitchener was hoping to create.35 Though volunteer recruits to the late nineteenth-century army were commonly derived from the ‘underclass’ of the unemployed, Kipling’s view was nevertheless starting to be challenged: ‘Mr Rudyard Kipling’s pictures of the hard-drinking, rough-tongued Tommy Atkins are now out of date’.36 In his examination of recruitment patterns, Jay Winter argues that, taken as a percentage of the total, a greater proportion of ‘white collar’ men (i.e. those from finance, commerce and the professions) joined in the early months of the war than ‘blue collar’ manual workers.37 Though the proportion of men from middle-class professions was certainly high, manual workers still made up the majority. Compounding recruitment from early and late August in this way masks a more nuanced position, that while the demographic was decidedly mixed in the earliest recruitment period of early to mid-August 1914, it became more focused on the middle classes following the deliberate targeting of these men through the Pals concept later Douglas, ‘Voluntary Enlistment in the First World War and the Work of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee’, p. 566.

32

Approximate Number of Recruits Raised Day-by-Day, TNA, WO 162/32.

33

Edgar Wallace, Kitchener’s Army and the Territorial Forces (London, 1915), pp. 16–17.

34

Winter, The Great War and the British People, p. 33.

35

David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army and the British People c.1870–2000 (Oxford, 2008), p. 38; quote from Captain A. H. Atteridge, The British Army of Today (London, 1915), p. 39; see also Holmes, Tommy, pp. xv–xvi; cf. Hughes, ‘The New Armies’, p. 104.

36

Winter, The Great War and the British People, pp. 33–39; the recruitment patterns amongst the working class are also the subject of a study by Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War.

37

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that month.38 Certainly, for John Hartigan, who examined August recruitment figures for Birmingham, ‘the recruits, with one or two exceptions, have been composed entirely of the so-called working classes’.39 By Sunday 23 August, the day the British Expeditionary Force first met the German army in battle, some 104,510 men had enlisted.40 With the standing deficit of around 25,000 men for the regular army now filled, this left an additional 80,000 recruits to be housed, equipped, and trained. With an infantry division at this stage of the war consisting of four brigades, each of around 4,000 men, there were potentially only five more divisions – and not counting the manpower of the support services. It was fortunate, then, that recruitment took a sharp upwards turn in the wake of the retreat from Mons, particularly after this had been reported in the press on Sunday 29 August 1914.41 The effect was immediate; some 20,909 joined on Monday 31 August, 27,914 on the Tuesday, 31,947 on the Wednesday, and 33,204 on Thursday 3 September.42

The First Three Hundred Thousand, ‘K1’ to ‘K3’ Kitchener’s first call for 100,000 men on 8 August 1914 achieved its aim within two weeks. These men were quickly dispersed as new battalions of relevant county regiments.43 Termed ‘Service’ battalions, each one was added to the strength of existing regiments by Army Order 324 of 21 August 1914.44 Originally, it had been intended that the new battalions would simply be numbered consecutively, without special designation. It was Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Codringham, Kitchener’s military secretary, who identified the potential negative impact of this action: no association with an established regiment, no distinctive insignia and no military traditions to draw upon for fostering esprit de corps.45 Fortunately, it was not carried through, 38

Doyle and Foster, Kitchener’s Mob, p. 95.

39

Birmingham Daily Post, 29 August 1914, quoted in Hartigan ‘Volunteering in the First World War: The Birmingham Experience’, p. 169; see also Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, p. 47.

40

TNA, WO 162/32.

41

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, pp. 58–9; The Times, 29 August 1914, p. 3; Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, p. 23.

42

TNA, WO 162/32.

43

Captain A. H. Atteridge, The Army Shown to the Children (London, 1915), p. 73.

44

Army Order 324, quoted in Brigadier General E. A. James, British Regiments 1914–18 (London, 1976), p. 38. James, British Regiments, p. 128; Peter Doyle and Chris Foster, British Army Cap Badges of the First World War, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 2010), p. 24.

45

M y t h a nd R e a li t y in R a i sing the Ne w A rmy, 1914–15    65

though none of these early K1–K3 battalions would be identified by special or individual titles, setting them apart from the Pals battalions of later raising, who were distinguished by regional or city designations.46 Each of the component battalions of K1–K3 was built piecemeal. Men attesting at the recruiting offices were passed to the regimental depot and the Special Reserve, there to be processed and passed on to their battalion.47 The first of the new Service Battalions to reach full strength was the 11th (Service) Battalion of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment, on 25 August 1914.48 Each new battalion had a cadre of experienced men derived from regular units. The men of the first 100,000, K1, were often ‘of the same class as the average run of Regular recruit’ – predominantly working-class, many of them ex-soldiers.49 While it was common for some men to join in groups and serve together – such as George Tunstill’s men raised in Skipton and forming a company of the 10th (Service) Battalion, Duke of Wellington’s Regiment – the mix of the recruits in these early days of Kitchener’s Army was heterogeneous.50 Edgar Wallace’s account of recruitment in 1915 noted ‘a sprinkling’ of what he termed ‘a better type of man’. Though propagandic – given its publication in 1917 – Wallace’s account nevertheless suggests a shift in the demographic of recruitment: New faces appeared in the recruiting queue, a new type of recruit began to elbow its way to the front, first in a trickling stream and then in a whole volume … making for the new emergency recruiting stations which were being opened all over town. A new tone came to the tents, a new intonation, a suggestion of Public School and University.51

The recruitment of the second 100,000 tranche of Kitchener’s Army men was announced on 28 August 1914; this was timely, given the news from the front. As before, the press carried advertisements on their front pages to try and fill the vacant places.52 While the original intention was to raise 200,000 of the first 500,000 men to be recruited for the New Army, this half-million was almost achieved by 10 Doyle and Foster, Kitchener’s Mob, p. 40.

46

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 66.

47

Ibid., p. 57

48

Germains, The Kitchener Armies, p. 66.

49

Winter, The Great War and the British People, p. 35; Hughes, ‘The New Armies’, p. 104; see John T. Clayton (ed.), Craven’s Part in the Great War (Skipton, 1919), p. 49, for the story of Tunstill’s men.

50

Wallace, Kitchener’s Army, p. 22.

51

‘Your King And Country Need You. Another 100,000 Men Wanted’, Manchester Evening News, Friday 28 August 1914.

52

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September; sanction for the raising of a further 500,000 was sought the next day, with Army Order 388 marking the raising of the third new army – K3 – on 13 September.53 Recruitment for K3 was more challenging; with shortage of recruits in some areas, and some more sparsely populated regions, it was difficult to get recruits through the depots.54 A new concept would be required to recruit the last 200,000 men, the raising of Pals battalions.55

Pals Towards the end of August, prominent citizens took on the role of recruiting agents. Local committees were formed, led by Lord Mayors and people of influence, with the intention of filling the ranks of the growing New Army. Taking the lead from the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, politicians used to operating in wards and constituencies applied themselves to the task of gathering recruits. In Southampton, for example, an alliance of ‘Unionist and Liberal Leaders’ attempted to stimulate recruiting by ‘making a thorough canvass of the wards and clubs of the town’.56 As a whole the interventions of these citizens shaped the recruitment drive from late August 1914, and were, according to Peter Simkins, ‘to develop the unique character of the New Army’. He calculated that some 38 per cent of all Service Battalions raised were formed via this route.57 Ultimately, the Pals concept was inspired. Most battalions were born at the same time that Kitchener made his appeal for his second army, K2. By the time he had appealed for K3, the third army, the supply and training of the Pals battalions was well underway, local authorities taking on the mantle of recruiting, clothing and training Kitchener’s men before they were passed over to the War Office. The rivalry between cities was as much a part of the Pals story as was the desire of the men themselves to serve with those they felt most comfortable with. Most significantly, for the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, it provided a valuable means of filling his next tranche of 100,000 men, a whole six divisions (the Pals divisions 30th–35th), without the need for a wider call to arms.58

Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 69.

53

Hughes, ‘The New Armies’, p. 101.

54

Martin Middlebrook, Your Country Needs You (Barnsley, 2000), pp. 66–7.

55

Birmingham Daily Post, Thursday 27 August 1914.

56

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 79.

57

See Middlebrook, Your Country Needs You. The 26th–29th divisions were formed by assembling regular battalions returning from overseas service – their places on garrison duty were invariably taken by Territorials.

58

M y t h a nd R e a li t y in R a i sing the Ne w A rmy, 1914–15    67

Arguably the Pals concept was born following a request that the City of London should raise a whole battalion of ‘stockbrokers’, after a letter from Sir Henry Rawlinson, Director of Recruiting, on 12 August 1914 suggested that there were ‘many city employees who would be willing to enlist if they were assured that they would serve with their friends’.59 It was obvious that ‘friends’ was a euphemism, and Rawlinson meant ‘men of the same social class’, with a design directed at the ‘Commercial Classes’.60 Recruitment began on 21 August, and six days later 1,600 men had joined, ‘parading in all sorts of clothing from silk hats and morning coats to caps and Norfolk jackets’.61 If such men were to be persuaded to join the ranks of an infantry battalion, then they would need some assurance that they would not feel out of place when standing in the ranks next to navvies and dock-workers – a feature that set apart the Pals battalions from those who had joined in the initial recruiting boom. The proliferation of the Pals concept was in large part due to the action of Lord Derby, who, like Rawlinson, considered that the large number of working men serving in battalions might be off-putting to those whose workplace was the stock exchange or the drafting office. This is clear from the tone of the notices of recruitment that appeared in Liverpool and then in most major cities across England. Lord Derby was a hugely influential figure in Lancashire, and his intervention had a dramatic effect. He further developed the notion that men of the ‘commercial classes’ might wish to serve their country in a battalion of their comrades – their pals – in a significant letter to the Liverpool morning daily, the Daily Post (and repeated in the Liverpool Echo that evening), on 27 August 1914: It has been suggested to me that there are many men, such as clerks and others engaged in commercial business, who wish to serve their country and would be willing to enlist in the battalion of Kitchener’s new Army if they felt assured that they would be able to serve with their friends and not be put in a battalion with unknown men as their companions. Lord Kitchener has sanctioned my endeavouring to raise a battalion that would be composed entirely of the classes mentioned, and in which a man could be certain that he would be amongst friends.62

Once again, the implication was that middle-class men would not be forced to serve alongside men they would neither know nor understand. At a recruitment meeting in Burnley in early September, Lieutenant A. C. Robinson, a Territorial Officer with H. C. O’Neill, The Royal Fusiliers in the Great War (London, 1922), p. 10.

59

The concept of ‘friends’ has been used by some authors to define the Pals concept, e.g. Messenger, Call to Arms, p. 97.

60

O’Neill, The Royal Fusiliers, p. 10.

61

Liverpool Daily Post, Thursday 27 August 1914.

62

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the Lancashire Fusiliers, reflected that the Territorial Force was suffering for this very reason: He said that he recognised that a great number of young men would like to offer their services and yet did not want to separate. It had to be recognised that there were classes – cliques if they liked – and in Liverpool, Manchester, etc, there had been started ‘pals’ battalions of men of the same class and known to each other, and who were offering their services en bloc.63

In his history of the 89th Brigade, Lord Derby’s brother, F. C. Stanley, recounted the raising of the Pals, drawing upon reports under dramatic headlines that appeared in the Liverpool press on 31 August 1914. ‘PALS’ FIRST BATTALION COMPLETE Full Number Obtained in an Hour STIRRING SCENES Great Rally of Liverpool’s Young Business Men ‘No Undesirables’64

No undesirables. Lord Derby’s appeal had achieved its aim. The ‘undesirables’ were presumably men of a lower social standing from outside of Liverpool’s financial houses. With Derby’s call, middle-class men came forward to serve with those with whom they felt most comfortable, ‘composed of young men engaged in commercial and business offices in the city’.65 The response was overwhelming; by Tuesday 31 August, some 1,200 men had volunteered, and the city was well on its way to filling its second ‘City Battalion’. Lord Derby was thus the first to coin the phrase ‘Pals Battalion’ which has become so associated with Kitchener’s Army. Perhaps contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of original Pals raised across England were derived, in the main, from the middle classes, with a peak in middle-class recruits in September.66 There were some notable exceptions, however. In Accrington, a Lancashire mill town of 45,000, there was high unemployment. The town set about raising its own Pals by working with other local boroughs, such as Chorley.67 In addition, Glasgow raised a Burnley Express, Saturday 5 September 1914.

63

Brigadier General F. C. Stanley, The History of the 89th Brigade 1914–1918 (Liverpool, 1919), p. 8.

64

Ibid., p. 8.

65

Hartigan, ‘Volunteering in the First World War: The Birmingham Experience’, p. 171.

66

William Turner, Accrington Pals (Barnsley, 1987), p. 19; John H. Garwood, Chorley Pals (Manchester, 1989), p. 3.

67

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battalion of tramwaymen, reported in the press under the headline ‘Glasgow’s Own All Classes Flock To The Colours’.68 These examples were not the norm. As Winter has demonstrated, the proportion of men from commercial occupations joining the army in 1914–15 was ultimately higher than the proportion of those from manual roles – almost twice as much, though still much lower in totality.69 This statistic, for a much longer period, is not indicative of the K1 recruits who joined from 8 August. As Hartigan has pointed out, in Birmingham alone to 18 August 1914 some 78 per cent of new recruits were of working-class origin, even noting that with poorer housing, food resources and health, there was a greater likelihood they would be rejected as unfit to serve.70 Given the targeted recruitment associated with the Pals battalions, it is not surprising that middle-class recruits came to dominate them. The Liverpool Pals experiment was a success. Four battalions were raised, enough to form the 89th Brigade, a significant component of the 30th Division. All wore the crest of the Stanley Family, distributed in hallmarked silver to all original volunteers.71 Soon, there was an avalanche of Pals battalions, the majority aimed at the ‘Commercial Classes’. Kitchener was not in a position to refuse such positive assistance, and his sanction was avidly sought by ‘Energetic Members of Parliament armed with a scrap of Lord Kitchener’s handwriting’ who ‘rushed forth North, South, East and West of the Kingdom to take the responsibility of doing unheard-of things quite contrary to the regulations’.72 In Manchester, a suggestion had already been made on 24 August that the city might find recruits amongst the city’s warehouses and offices, and employers were asked to consider an incentive of paying a partial salary to those of their employees who might be persuaded to join.73 On Friday 28 August, a body of employers gathered in the Town Hall to see if they might be able to sponsor recruitment and make their scheme a reality. The influential Manchester Evening News carried a long piece on its front page the next day, announcing the success of the initiative under the

Daily Record, Sunday 6 September 1914.

68

Winter, The Great War and the British People, p. 25.

69

Hartigan, ‘Volunteering in the First World War: The Birmingham Experience’, p. 169; Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, p. 47.

70

Stanley, The History of the 89th Brigade, p. 53. The first three City Battalions certainly received one; the fourth, raised later in the year, may also have done; see Graham Maddocks, Liverpool Pals (Barnsley, 1991), p. 33.

71

Williams, Raising and Training the New Armies, p. 7.

72

Brigadier-General F. Kempster and Brigadier-General H. C. E. Westropp (eds), Manchester City Battalions Book of Honour (London and Manchester, 1916), p. xii.

73

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headline ‘The New Battalion. Welcomed by Lord Kitchener. An Auspicious Start’.74 Lord Kitchener had given his sanction to the raising of a Manchester battalion of middle-class merchants.75 In all, Manchester would supply eight City Battalions – eight battalions of Pals forming two brigades, the 90th and 91st. Together with the 89th Brigade, formed of the Liverpool Pals, they made up the three component parts of the 30th Division. As Peter Simkins has pointed out, the root of the Pals phenomenon is the development of intense civic pride in the major cities of Britain.76 While London could claim a population of over seven million people, the southern Lancashire cities of Manchester and Liverpool, and the towns that surrounded them, added a further three and a half million. Across the Pennines in West Yorkshire, and further south, in and around the ‘workshop of Empire’, Birmingham, each added over one and a half million people.77 The major conurbations of Britain had grown from the country’s industrial clout, most of them clustered in northern England. Nevertheless, it was Birmingham, at England’s industrial heart, that made one of the most important contributions in the drive for more men. The Royal Warwickshire Regiment, with its long history of association with the city, had already expanded with the addition of three Service Battalions, one in each of Kitchener’s New Armies, K1 to K3, assigned to the 13th (Western), 19th (Western) and 24th (later, tortuously, finding their way into the 37th) divisions.78 On 28 August 1914, the Birmingham Daily Post led with an editorial that was designed to ‘flush out’ those men who had been reluctant to ‘join the colours’. Once again, men from the ‘commercial classes’ who were holding back from joining alongside ‘manual workers’. With a sizeable city, it reasoned, there would be a sizeable number of potential recruits available, as many as 50,000.79 Seizing upon the initiative already put in place in Liverpool by Lord Derby, the Daily Post continued to make the inevitable conclusion. Apart from holding open positions for returning soldiers, there was also the opportunity to create ‘a battalion of non-manual workers’ for men to serve with those of their own class, and directly associated with the city of Birmingham.80 The response was almost immediate. After throwing down this gauntlet, the offices of the Birmingham Daily Post were 74

Manchester Evening News, Saturday 29 August 1914.

75

Ibid.

76

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 82.

77

1911 Census, General Reports with Appendices, Report Cd.8491, 1917–18; accessible through http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk.

78

Terry Carter, Birmingham Pals (Barnsley, 1997), pp. 27–8.

79

Birmingham Daily Post, Friday 28 August 1914.

80

Ibid.

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inundated with prospective recruits.81 By Monday 1 September, the newspaper had taken the names of 1,200 men who were willing to serve; by the end of the week there were 4,500 names of young men who worked in the white-collar professions, enough for three Birmingham City Battalions. Lord Derby’s efforts in Liverpool to try and raise a ‘Battalion of Pals’ had not gone unnoticed in West Yorkshire. The cities of Leeds and Bradford together eventually contributed three battalions to the West Yorkshire Regiment. If civic pride was the main driver for the development of the Pals concept, then this can be fairly identified in the fierce pride – and once again rivalry – of these two industrial cities. The city of Leeds had been active in seeking recruits for its local regiment, particularly in the wake of Kitchener’s first ‘Call to Arms’, published on 8 August 1914.82 Prominent citizens and clergymen made impassioned speeches in public meetings, at the pulpit, and even at the football grounds to attempt to get young men to take up Kitchener’s challenge. The Mayor was vigorous in his pursuit of fresh recruits. The Yorkshire Evening Post was quick to pick up on it, just four days later, under the headline ‘Why not a “friends battalion?” A lead wanted for the middle classes’; the Post identified ‘a vast recruiting ground’ consisting of ‘young men from the factories, the warehouses, and the offices of the city, who desire to go to the front, but hesitate about enlisting lest they should be sent to join a regiment in which they do not have kindred spirits’.83 The raising of the Leeds battalion was announced the next day, as ‘an opening for the City young men’.84 Lord Mayor Edward Brotherton made a personal pledge that the cost of raising of the Leeds Pals, their uniforms and equipment, would be paid for out of his own pocket – a significant commitment.85 The Pals would wear the city’s Coat of Arms as their badge. Nearby Bradford was a city of 300,000 that had built its industrial reputation on the production of worsted woollen products. Like its neighbour, the city aspired to raise its own Pals, and had gone so far as to form a Bradford Citizens Army League on 3 September in order to set plans in motion. Like all the other Pals Committees, it was supported by the great and the good of civic life – local politicians and businessmen. The Committee once again oversaw recruitment of ‘young businessmen’, and ensured that, in this city of wool, its men were suitably clothed, ‘paid for by the citizens of Bradford’.86 The first recruits were forthcoming on 8 September, the Carter, Birmingham Pals, p. 36.

81

Laurie Milner, Leeds Pals (Barnsley, 1991), p. 16.

82

Yorkshire Evening Post, Monday 31 August 1914.

83

Yorkshire Evening Post, Tuesday 1 September 1914.

84

Yorkshire Evening Post, Thursday 3 September 1914; Milner, Leeds Pals, p. 20.

85

David Raw, Bradford Pals (Barnsley, 2005), p. 30; Yorkshire Evening Post, Tuesday 8 September 1914.

86

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day that the Leeds Pals had declared themselves closed for further men. By the end of the week, the diverse commercial concerns of the city had relinquished some four hundred of their workers – men who, it was hoped, might serve together – and separately – in the eight companies, one for each trade or profession. Once again, segregation into commercial classes was proposed, down into the very fibres of the battalion, though it was never enacted. The battalion register was completed on 19 September.87 The Bradford Pals became almost like local celebrities – they were granted gifts of brass boxes filled with comforts by the owner of the Alhambra Theatre. Bradford would go on to raise another battalion, and both battalions (16th and 18th West Yorkshire Regiment) were brigaded together with the 1st Leeds Pals, sharing the 93rd Brigade (31st Division) with a Durham battalion (1st County) – raised as usual to ‘give an opening to clerks, draughtsmen, elementary schoolmasters, and others of kindred occupations’.88 The senior brigade in this division, the 92nd, consisted entirely of Pals battalions, but from Hull, a city of similar size to Bradford. The four battalions were once again segregated according to trade, profession or calling. Biographer of the 1st Hull Pals, David Bilton, has identified the snobbery that existed between them. The four main active service battalions came from different strata of society … This was reflected in the social composition of the ‘Hull Pals’, with the Commercials being composed of men from middle-class occupations, especially from the commercials, who, the other battalions felt, thought they were better than the others.89

The industrial cities of northern England held no monopoly on the raising of local battalions, however. The city of Bristol, with a population of around 400,000, had taken a direct interest in recruiting from relatively early on. Four days after Kitchener’s ‘Call to Arms’, a meeting chaired by the Lord Mayor of Bristol had led to the creation of the ‘Bristol Citizen’s Recruiting Committee’, chaired by Sir Herbert Ashman, a prominent Bristolian. The Committee set to work raising volunteers for the Gloucestershire Regiment, using the prominently placed Colston Hall as the recruiting centre.90 Recruitment for the new Bristol Battalion trod the same path as most other Pals – solely for the use of men of the ‘professional and mercantile

Raw, Bradford Pals, p. 40.

87

Newcastle Journal, Tuesday 8 September 1914.

88

David Bilton, The Trench: The Full Story of the 1st Hull Pals (Barnsley, 2002), p. 27. Nicknames for the Hull Pals were: ‘The Commercials’ (1st Hull); ‘The Tradesmen’ (2nd Hull); ‘The Sportsmen’ (3rd Hull), and ‘T’Others’ (4th Hull).

89

Dean Marks, ‘Bristol’s Own’ 12th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment (Bristol, 2011), p. 9.

90

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classes’. And the Committee acted as scrutineer to ensure that this was actually the case. Articles in the Bristol press were clear on the matter. The Western Daily Press for 5 September 1914 carried a front-page advertisement for the ‘New Bristol Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment’ and an editorial advising prospective recruits of the conditions of application, and defining their strict boundaries of class: ‘It is scarcely necessary to emphasise the fact that the scheme has in view the enlisting of young fellows connected with the business life of the city’.91 Applications were strictly vetted, with the battalion reserved ‘for mercantile and professional men only’, and with prospective recruits advised to ‘save the committee a lot of time if those not qualified will refrain from filling up the forms’.92 Arguably the greatest commitment to recruitment came from Tyneside. In addition to the seven battalions (and one reserve battalion) that were added to the roster of the Northumberland Fusiliers as part of the first three of Kitchener’s Armies, K1– K3, the Tynesiders added a further twelve Pals-type battalions and a further seven reserves – a truly prodigious achievement.93 The first inkling that Lord Derby’s Liverpool Pals had made an impact this far north came when a new ‘commercial’ battalion was mooted along the exact lines that had first been developed among the commercial houses of Liverpool and Manchester, with ‘young business men, clerks, and shop assistants’ eligible for the new unit.94 The Newcastle Commercial Battalion mirrored most other Pals battalions, and recruitment to it was complete by 16 September; but what was a real departure was the idea that there would be mileage in the raising of a battalion of ex-patriot Scots – a different recruiting strategy on ‘national’ lines that had less to do with social class.95 The final tranche of Kitchener’s 500,000 men was formed by other, slightly more unusual locally raised units – from Northern Ireland or Wales – together with reserve Kitchener battalions, making up the remainder of what would have been K5, the final 100,000, and the 36th–41st divisions These later battalions had a different flavour to them, though; Kitchener was now in the business of inviting prominent citizens to take on the mantle of recruiting. This was particularly the case in London. With the capital being an agglomeration of over six million people, individual boroughs could raise their very own battalions to rival those of other towns and cities. The London boroughs of Battersea, Bermondsey, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, The Western Daily Press, Saturday 5 September 1914.

91

Bristol Times and Mirror, Saturday 5 September 1915; Marks, ‘Bristol’s Own’, p. 10.

92

James, British Regiments, pp. 46–8. James lists thirty-seven battalions in total, plus three additional Garrison Battalions, as well as two late-war ‘Graduated’ and one ‘Young Soldier’ battalion.

93

Newcastle Journal, Wednesday 9 September 1914.

94

Graham Stewart and John Sheen, Tyneside Scottish (Barnsley, 1999), p. 9.

95

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Shoreditch, St Pancras, Wandsworth and West Ham all produced infantry battalions in the period from November 1914 to July 1915.96 With recruiting on the slide, ‘Lord Kitchener issued an appeal to the mayors of boroughs’: Bermondsey would be one of them. The Council was asked to consider their responsibilities in May 1915.97 Bermondsey is an inner-city borough of London, situated south of the River Thames. In 1914, it had a total population of around 124,000 people, and had a mortality rate that was much higher than the average outer London borough (and the nearby borough of Wandsworth).98 It was relatively poor. However, like Lord Derby’s ‘Liverpool Pals’, Bermondsey’s Pals would have to be trained, fed and paid by the borough until taken over by the War Office. Taken to the Council members, there were objections, particularly because a London Territorial Battalion raised from the borough was already in existence. Nevertheless, the motion was passed, and recruiting started on 24 May 1915.99 Eventually, a battalion was recruited with a somewhat different make-up from those Pals units raised in the first flush of enthusiasm, when ‘no undesirables’ were required, and where ‘scrutiny’ ensured that only men of the ‘Commercial Classes’ were permitted to join. Over 1,000 men joined, the bulk of the local recruits being dock and riverside workers with a good sprinkling from the tanneries. A great many ‘black-coated’ workers living or working locally also helped to swell the ranks. There was a fairly big proportion of youths under and men over military age, and some not properly fit physically for the rigours of active service.100 It was not quite what Lord Derby had originally in mind. Particularly as, in some cases, recruits would join, take their first day’s pay and clothing – and then abscond.101 Perhaps not surprising in a poor inner city borough.

‘Kitchener Blue’: Uniforming the New Army With the arrival of large numbers of men from the first recruitment efforts, pressure to supply them was building on the depots. Most K1 battalions experienced shortages of uniforms and equipment.102 This was a growing problem, as war reserves Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 120.

96

John Aston and L. M. Duggan, The History of the 12th (Bermondsey) Battalion, East Surrey Regiment (London, 1936), p. 3.

97

R. King Brown, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Bermondsey for the Year 1914 (Bermondsey, 1915).

98

Aston and Duggan, The History of the 12th (Bermondsey) Battalion, p. 3.

99

Ibid.

100

Ibid.

101

Asquith, Memories and Reflections, vol. 1, p. 31.

102

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had simply been put aside for the upkeep of the original Expeditionary Force of six infantry divisions and one cavalry, and there were relatively few firms equipped to supply them.103 They simply could not cope with the huge influx of new recruits. In terms of uniform supply, the men of the regular army and Territorial Force came first. Shortages in uniforms were common, with ‘Kitchener’s Mob’ drilling in their own clothes, and continued with the raising of the second and third of Kitchener’s Armies.104 With khaki serge cloth in such short supply, replacement ‘suits of blue serge uniform’ were obtained, which became known as ’Kitchener Blue’, and were supplied at a rate of 10,000 a day.105 The resulting uniform, created in haste for the mass army, was almost shapeless, and worn with a cap that defied attempts at smartness. Despite suggestions that the first brand of ‘blues’ was derived from unwanted Post Office or tramway department uniforms, there is no direct evidence of this. Instead, the uniform was a new development, produced from existing bolts of uniform blue serge, designed in the manner of a ‘sack coat’; simple, and capable of being produced rapidly.106 There is no doubt it was universally despised for being ‘unsoldierly’, with the early recruits to K1–K3 likening themselves to, at best, postmen, and at worst, convicts.107 Trade magazine The Tailor and Cutter was quick to comment on its ‘workhouse’-like cut: [The uniform] is made of blue serge with black buttons. The cap is finished with red braid and two brass buttons … this is not at all liked, the first men to wear it being mistaken for the inmates of an industrial home. We suppose some little latitude must be allowed for these emergency arrangements, the attempt evidently being to produce something extremely simple which could be made up at small cost. It is satisfactory to know that this outfit will only be used during the preliminary training, and as soon as the men go on active service they will be dressed in the regulation khaki uniforms.108

War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War 1914– 1920 (London, 1922), p. 868.

103

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 256, et seq. James Norman Hall, an American who joined the 9th (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers in 1914 – part of K1, the First New Army – experienced the supply problems first hand: Hall, Kitchener’s Mob, p. 20; Germains, The Kitchener Armies, p. 112.

104

War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort, p. 868; Williams, Raising and Training the New Armies, p. 51: ‘a cooperative society was discovered able to provide 400,000 emergency blue suits at short notice’.

105

War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort, p. 868: ‘Quantities of the former [blue material] were obtained from the Post Office from stocks which that department had in hand.’

106

Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 263.

107

The Tailor and Cutter, 5 November 1914, p. 877.

108

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Figure 1. ‘Kitchener’s Man’. A soldier from one of the three original tranches of Kitchener’s army wearing the blue ‘sackcoat’ uniform that would become known as ‘Kitchener Blue’. This emergency uniform was manufactured en masse to clothe the mass of early recruits.

Even the supply of ‘blues’ was variable. Pre-war red tunics were commonly issued, presenting a startling vision of a rag-tag army of Kitchener’s men. Novelist Neil Lyons described the phenomenon in an account of a fictional Lancashire battalion: In two or three weeks’ time the clogs had disappeared, having been superseded by leather boots and puttees … you kept on accumulating clothes. When you set out to perform those marches which you could not (in theory) accomplish, you looked like some kind of zebra – blue cap, brown jacket, blue trousers, brown

M y t h a nd R e a li t y in R a i sing the Ne w A rmy, 1914–15    77

puttees, or blue puttees, brown trousers, blue jacket, and brown ‘Brodrick’ cap. With a checkered overcoat, worn en banderole, across your shoulder.109

The shortages and variability of the uniforms of the early K1–K3 battalions were a matter of concern, with enthusiasm for volunteering being ‘considerably damped by being obliged to march and drill in public, attired in all sorts of garments, some in khaki, some in blue, some in civilian clothes of varying hues and cuts’.110 Concerns about martial appearance would not escape those who sought to raise their own battalions of Pals in later August. If the first men to join Kitchener’s Army faced being garbed indifferently, it was a different story altogether once local dignitaries and regional pride started to play their part in the raising of the Pals. With the supply of khaki serge cloth still an issue, blue serge remained the most viable option, though full-page advertisements in the trade journal Tailor and Cutter screamed KHAKI in two-inch block letters, suggesting the sought-after cloth was available.111 In order to avoid the detested blue uniform, some authorities ignored ‘Kitchener Blue’ altogether. Given the attempts to entice the middle classes to serve, it was surely important that care should be taken in clothing them in keeping with their social status. This was certainly the case with the first of the Pals battalions – the Liverpool City Battalions – under the patronage of Lord Derby. Derby’s sister-in-law was tasked with sourcing uniforms. Mrs Stanley was wired to in the early morning of the first day of recruiting, telling her that she was to arrange, by hook or by crook, to contract for the clothing of at least a thousand men. This appears a tall order, but within a very few hours she was able to wire back that the contract had been fixed up for clothing the men in khaki in a few weeks. This was much appreciated later by those serving in our City Battalions, because they were able to go about clothed in khaki, instead of having to go about in that terrible blue uniform, which was worn by most of the locally raised battalions, and which looked awful.112

Other battalions would take it to be their duty not to circumvent the procedures and bypass the supply line, thereby putting strain on the creaking system by seeking out their own sources and jumping the queue. Another option was to replace the original and awful ‘Kitchener Blue’ with something much more in line with the standard service dress worn by the regulars Lyons, Kitchener Chaps, p. 29.

109

Williams, Raising and Training the New Armies, p. 52.

110

The Tailor and Cutter, supplement, October 1914; an advertisement for the supplier Hunter and Nesbit, Newcastle upon Tyne. Clearly khaki cloth was there for those who wished to seek it out – no doubt at competitive prices.

111

Stanley, The History of the 89th Brigade, p. 27.

112

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and territorials, though still made up in blue serge. Known as ‘Jackets, Emergency Pattern’, the resulting uniforms had brass buttons, patch pockets, darts at the collar to improve fit, and all the other refinements of the standard pattern of uniform which had been worn, with some modifications, continuously since 1902.113 With civic pride at stake, the battalions of such cities as Manchester and Birmingham were clothed in this smart blue service dress and matching caps from at least early 1915, dispensing with the dreadful and impractical ‘Austrian-style’ cap. In woollen towns, like Bradford, it was a matter of pride that uniforms were to be made up to the sealed pattern in the best quality blue serge wool. Like their compatriots in Birmingham, when their Kitchener blue service dress uniforms arrived in November, they were of the finest quality.114 In Manchester, there would be no poverty of military bearing for their City Battalions. The Manchester Testing House ensured that ‘every article of clothing and equipment was checked by them and passed as correct before distribution to the men’.115 Once again the resulting uniform would not conform to the early ‘Kitchener Blue’ ‘sackcoat’, instead resembling standard service dress – though in blue serge. The original uniform was blue with the well-known dark grey overcoat, and very serviceable it looked; but still there was a feeling that these battalions would never consider themselves real soldiers until they donned the universal khaki. Needless to say they would have been promptly put into khaki had it not been forbidden by the War Office, who required at that time every yard they could obtain.116 Khaki was eventually sourced and a ‘second suit’ made. The costs of maintaining the Manchester Pals in these uniforms were met by the local citizenry. Some 165 donors – from individual citizens to textile and financial firms – would guarantee £26,701 9s 6d by 1916; while others would make donations: 4,000 pairs of puttees from Chorlton Bros Ltd; 4,000 ‘holdalls’ for soldiers’ ‘necessaries’ from Kay & Lee Ltd; and a ‘tug of war rope’ from Henry Cardwell & Co.117 In lieu of uniforms, the Birmingham Battalion Equipment Fund Committee originally sanctioned the wearing of a specially made and enamelled button-hole badge, distributed by the Deputy Lord Mayor, William Bowater, and his wife to all original members at Thorp Hall in September 1914.118 By the end of the year, all Birming A ‘sealed pattern’, i.e. standard for this uniform jacket, is on display in the Imperial War Museum, sealed on 8 February 1915; see John Bodsworth, British Uniforms and Equipment of the Great War, 1914–18 (Buxton, 2010), p. 43.

113

Raw, Bradford Pals, pp. 50–1.

114

Kempster and Westropp, Manchester City Battalions Book of Honour, p. xvi.

115

Ibid.

116

Ibid.

117

Carter, Birmingham Pals, p. 44.

118

Figure 2. ‘Birmingham Pal’. A soldier from one of the Birmingham City Battalions dressed in a ‘Kitchener Blue’ uniform manufactured to the highest standards, with matching peaked cap and distinctive insignia. Uniforms of this type set the Pals apart from the poorly-equipped volunteers of K1–K3.

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ham Battalion men were clothed, once again, in a species of Kitchener Blue that bore no relation to the uniform worn by the men of K1. Blue it might be, but poorly fitting it was not.119 As with Manchester, the direct sourcing of khaki cloth was forbidden. Nevertheless, the city’s Equipment Fund Committee spent £17,000 on the production of uniforms. Each one was cut to fit the soldier. The cloth was of the best quality. And in this city famed for its badge and button making, tunic buttons were specially made bearing the battalion titles, and there were special cap badges and shoulder titles to reflect the individuality of the units.120 Accordingly, each man was instructed to maintain a smart turn-out.121 The Bristol Citizens Recruiting Committee spurned the opportunity of equipping ‘Bristol’s Own’ in Kitchener Blue, in any shape or form. Instead, the battalion would wait until khaki service dress was available – in December – in the meantime wearing ‘buttons’ on the lapel – in cardboard at first, and then celluloid – bearing the arms of Bristol superimposed on the Union Flag. It was to be khaki or nothing.122

Conclusions Gradually, voluntary recruitment would grind to a halt. With his magnificent record of raising Pals battalions, Lord Derby was an obvious choice as the new Director of Recruiting, taking the post on 11 October 1915. Lord Derby drew up a scheme that would force the issue; it would either work or would signal conscription. The ‘Derby Scheme’ entailed the voluntary attestation of all men between eighteen and forty, with men of the same age and marital status being grouped together to be called to the colours in batches. Married men would be last to go. It was a tall order. On his appointment, Lord Derby made an ominous, direct plea to the public.123 Lord Derby invited all eligible men to attest by 15 December 1915; over two million of the three and a half million men available for military service failed to attest. If it was simply an experiment, it could be deemed a failure; but with it Lord Derby paved the way to compulsory service. With the introduction of the Military Service Act of January 1916, all fit single men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one would be compelled to join the colours, married men joining them in the second Military Service Act of May 1916. Unfit men were exempted for the time being; but three further Acts, in April 1917, January 1918 and April 1918, would find ways Doyle and Foster, Kitchener’s Mob, p. 112.

119

Carter, Birmingham Pals, p. 66.

120

Advice to NCO’s and Men of the 1st Birmingham Battalion, pamphlet, 1914 – illustrated in Carter, Birmingham Pals, p. 54.

121

Doyle and Foster, Kitchener’s Mob, pp. 130–1.

122

Kitchener Papers, TNA, PRO 30/57/73.

123

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of ‘combing-out’ more men for military service (the last reducing the recruitment age to seventeen, while, at the same time, increasing it to fifty-five). The ‘Kitchener Divisions’ would be filled with conscripts. Kitchener’s Army had been a bold experiment. The posters and recruiting campaigns had persuaded the earnest, and cajoled, even bullied, the timid, into joining. It had demanded of the average citizen that he did the right thing, that he serve his country and earn the right of citizenship. This chapter has highlighted the distinction between the volunteers of the first three of Kitchener’s volunteer armies, K1–K3, and those who formed the Pals battalions, raised from at least 27 August 1914. While the motivation to join as a volunteer has been much discussed, in the main it is accepted that this is a complex mixture of patriotism and moral pressure. What has not been fully explored is the social background of the men of these armies. For the most part, the men of the August recruitment drive have been grouped together, with previous scholars identifying a greater proportion of middle-class men (relative to occupation) compared to working-class in those armies. The men of the Pals battalions have been portrayed as ‘friends’ who ‘joined up to fight together’; but social class, as this chapter has shown, determined recruitment and organisation. Working-class volunteers joined largely independently and were assimilated into the army in consecutively numbered and undistinguished Service Battalions. These men of K1–K3 endured shortages of uniforms and equipment, and would eventually be garbed in a blue ‘sack-coat’ uniform of ‘Kitchener Blue’ that was universally despised, and more often than not seen as a hindrance to recruitment. This emergency uniform set the early battalions aside from the Pals. The Pals phenomenon, born of the City of London and promulgated through the commercial and shipping houses of Liverpool to the major cities of England, was specifically and demonstrably aimed at the more well-to-do ‘Commercial Classes’. It was so focused that men who did not meet this criterion were turned away, perhaps even deemed ‘undesirable’. These men, sponsored by dignitaries, pressed with gifts, and clothed in the best their cities could provide, no doubt joined for the same reasons as the earlier recruits, but did so, understandably, on the basis of an innate snobbery born of worlds apart reflecting what Jay Winter has described as ‘probably the most class-conscious nation in Europe’.124 Nevertheless, together, the battalions of the New Army as a whole would represent ‘the nation itself ’ and the sacrifice of the Pals would be no less than that of the men of K1–K3, and the impact on the communities that had created their mythology, all the stronger.

Winter, ‘Army and Society: The Demographic Context’, p. 194.

124

Part 2

Experiences in the Military

4 Sun, Sea and Starvation: The Logistics of the British Garrison on Minorca, 1746–56 R ob Til de sl ey

T

he island of Minorca was a unique British territory during the eighteenth century. It had a sizeable European population, with different cultural backgrounds and the traditional rights that entailed, who did not speak the same language as the rulers, predominantly practised a different faith, and who were previously subject to a still existent and powerful European state. Being seized from the Spanish during the War of Spanish Succession, Minorca was awarded to Britain in the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, alongside Gibraltar, and for most of its time in British hands remained a small outpost. It was a territory where troops were often left for long periods of time and officers sent to finish out their careers.1 One battalion remained on the island for sixteen years without relief, and the lieutenant governor at the time of the siege in 1756 was eighty-six. The island only really gained fame within the English-speaking world due to the events in 1756 and the resulting trial and execution of British Admiral Byng, which will be discussed in more detail later. During the mid-eighteenth century, Minorca was not properly represented by a form of civil government either; although, in theory, the appointed governor was tasked with administering the island for civil matters, there was constant absenteeism of the governors after Richard Kane (1733–36). This resulted in all those duties passing to the lieutenant governor, who during the 1750s was Lieutenant General Blakeney.2 The lieutenant governor was always a military officer who also held the role of supreme commander of the British forces on the island. Thus, civil government in Minorca was handled by ageing military officials. Like many of Britain’s overseas bases in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Minorca possessed one major and vital feature as an island, its anchorage. Mahon harbour was evocatively described by William Cunninghame in his journal For more studies on garrisons and outposts in this period, see Bruce Collins, War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain, 1790–1830 (Longman, 2010); and Roy and Leslie Adkins, Gibraltar: The Greatest Siege in British History (London, 2017).

1

During most of this period the active governor was Lord Trylawney.

2

86    R ob Til de sley

recounting his journey there, as having ‘the appearance of a river always smooth water generally good anchoring ground everywhere … It is the finest and safest harbour ever I saw’.3 This excellent anchorage was positioned just two days’ sailing from the French and Spanish coastlines, which included the main French naval base at Toulon, making it a vital point for control of the Western Mediterranean, and hence the continued British interest in it. Despite that, the island did also have some significant drawbacks. Sparsely populated, coupled with rocky terrain, it was not even self-sufficient in foodstuffs. It also suffered from its own strategic position, being two days’ sailing from hostile coastlines and as much as two weeks distant from ships leaving Portsmouth. It was one of the most isolated British positions within Europe. In 1756, Minorca became the focal point of French and British interests as the Seven Years War began. British control of the island threatened French naval operations and there was a hope amongst the French court that taking the island and offering it back to Spain could procure a critical ally in the coming conflict.4 French forces invaded and, despite a relief fleet, the garrison were unable to hold out and were forced to capitulate after a siege of seventy-six days,5 leaving the island in French control for the remainder of the war. This event caused a great deal of uproar in Britain, not only because it was a major defeat for both land and naval forces, but it also marked one of the first losses of British territory during the war. The public outcry was extensive and even the king became involved in looking for reasons behind the disaster. It is prudent at this juncture to address the elephant in the room for every study regarding Minorca, Admiral Byng. The Byng controversy has dominated much of naval and Mediterranean Seven Years War historiography and almost all attempts to look at the events that transpired on the island in 1756. Indeed, Cunninghame wrote in his explanation of factors leading to the end of the siege that ‘had there been any British fleet in those seas the French fleet never would have ventured out of Toulon’.6 However, despite the strong interrelationship between the island and the navy, the fleet and Byng will not be the focus of this study, nor will their actions in relation to the naval engagements and tactics that were involved in the battle. There are detailed studies available in both English and French that cover the naval

William Cunninghame, Journal of a Journey to Minorca, NAM 1968-07-225, National Army Museum (henceforth NAM).

3

Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years’ War 1754–1763 (London, 2011).

4

There were an additional three days to negotiate surrender terms.

5

William Cunninghame, Journal of the Siege of St Phillips Castle in the Island of Minorca, NAM 1968-07-227-1.

6

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    87

battle,7 but little work has been done on the garrison, especially the situation prior to the outbreak of fighting on the island itself. The conflict itself will not be the focus of this study, rather it will be the organisational aspects of the garrison and their methods of supply leading up to the key date of 1756. This will place the garrison’s position when the French arrived in context and allow readers to appreciate the complex and often seemingly ineffectual supply systems that forces had to deal with in such small and remote locations. Through an analysis of supply systems, we can observe how soldiers’ lives were structured during peacetime, and the kinds of difficulties and pressures that garrison life presented. This, therefore, leads on to questions of wider strategic policy. This is not an attempt to analyse and explain British foreign policy in general, or the British government’s prosecution of the war. This chapter focuses on administration of the British garrison in Minorca, providing a case study that explores how strategic imperatives and policy were implemented. This will involve looking at officials lower down the chain of command than Lord Newcastle or Admiral Anson (Prime Minister and First Lord of the Admiralty respectively), and the institutions which had a regular and direct influence on affairs in Minorca. This focus allows us to determine how systems were implemented and organised by studying the Treasury and Ordnance offices, and the agents of the Commissary General, who were the main institutions overseeing the garrison. The Treasury had a clear impact on how the island was run and how the garrison could operate. The allocation or withholding of funds directly impacted it; not only its ability to operate effectively, but also in shaping practices and strategies to align with Treasury budgetary requirements. The Ordnance Office dealt with the specifics relating to many of the affairs that were directly within the remit of the garrison. The supply of food and ammunition was handled by the Ordnance Office and the Commissary General, while the repayments for additional costs were managed by the Ordnance Office alone. In addition to this, the fortifications that formed one of the primary costs of the garrison were the joint responsibility of the Treasury and Ordnance Office. By looking at these three institutions and the papers they produced relating to Minorca, the level at which they understood events occurring there, and the extent to which their decisions impacted the ability of the garrison to act in situations, can be observed. It will also demonstrate the levels of agency government present on Minorca and how decisions from the centre filtered down to impact small garrisons on the remote fringes of Britain’s sphere of control and influence. In order to assess the British army on Minorca and how it operated, both in terms of administration and military organisation, it is necessary to explain some of the

N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), pp. 690–2.

7

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complexities of the governance of the island. First, the army’s activities need to be separated from those that were carried out as part of the civil governance of the island. Although this also fell into the remit of the lieutenant governor’s jurisdiction, due to the absence of the governor, it was a very different set of duties from that required as Commander-in-Chief of the garrison. This chapter focuses on issues that emerged from the military duties of the garrison. Although they cannot be entirely separated, and jurisdiction issues will certainly appear, by taking this approach the military duties of the garrison, their role, and organisation can be brought into sharper relief. Additionally, the garrison’s supply situation directly related to both combat and administrative effectiveness. Without adequate supplies, not only did the issues of hunger and disease appear within the bodies of troops, but it also added complexity to relations with local civilian populations, with whom soldiers would often clash when supply of food was inadequate. It is also important to highlight the supply issues that, other than food, impacted the garrison, such as ammunition and, crucially, information. These factors often more truly represent the strength of the garrison as an effective strategic force. Some words need to be said regarding relations between the British and the Spaniards8 to understand some of the civil-military issues which the garrison suffered and their resulting consequences. Protestant British rule brought with it many issues for the Catholic Minorcans who inhabited the island. They were now ruled by a different religious group who also opened up the island to groups that had been previously prohibited and controlled, such as Jewish merchants. Indeed, one of the first requests that Richelieu,9 Commander of the French forces, received after being presented with the keys of the old capital upon landing was that the French would drive out the heretics and ‘Jews’.10 Relations were constantly frayed, with many examples of British forces acting in a heavy-handed manner towards Minorcans with little attempt to understand their historical privileges. For example, there were often complaints against British forces intervening in the election of magistrates for the various parts of the island.11 At times, armed groups of Minorcans even threatened the garrison at St Phillips, the main fortress on the island.12 The garrison’s position on the island needs to be understood in this context. Faced with a hostile populace Hereafter referred to as Minorcans.

8

The great-nephew of Cardinal Richelieu.

9

William Cunninghame, Journal of the Siege of St Phillips Castle in the Island of Minorca (published), NAM 1968-07-226.

10

Privy Council Report on the Arrest of Magistrates, 1750, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), PC 1/60/8.

11

Privy Council Report requiring response from General Blakeney, August 1755, TNA, PC 1/6/41.

12

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    89

it had to make decisions regarding the defence of the island in the knowledge that they would be opposed whether covertly or overtly by the majority of Minorcans. Given Minorca’s position within the century’s events and especially its importance in the early stages of the Seven Years War, it has seen little attention even within wider works. One of the main reasons for this is the events that took place off the coast of Minorca during the siege. The Byng affair has dominated the work of many historians, and this has pulled almost all attention away from the garrison itself. Those studies that have used some of the sources from the garrison have focused on the way it relates to the statements made about Byng and the testimonies that came out over the course of his subsequent trial and execution. Brian Tunstall’s Admiral Byng focuses mostly upon Byng’s life and actions that led to the trial, but Tunstall also provides a summary of events on the island taken from some of the published sources that were available.13 Similarly, Janet Sloss’ study of the French occupation of the island discusses the garrison in its wider study of the invasion.14 Sloss starts at the French invasion of Minorca and thus discusses the forces arrayed against the French. However, because the main focus of the work is not on the British troops but rather the French, very few sources have been used to support her arguments of a weak and inefficient garrison. Her main sources for most of the discussion are the journals of William Cunninghame, the validity of which will be discussed later. Sloss’ other work on Minorca is a biography of one of the earlier governors, Richard Kane.15 Again, little attention is paid to the garrison and her focus is instead on the civil administration under Kane and his life before Minorca. Wider works such as those on the Seven Years War, due to their scope, only use the sources that have been used for some of the smaller studies, such as those of Sloss or Tunstall, and no attempt has been made to look at the other direct sources from the garrison. The most recent of these, Baugh’s history of the war, spends only a few pages discussing events on Minorca and that is in relation to what would later occur to Byng.16 Only one dedicated study has been published on the British in Minorca over the entire period: Desmond Gregory’s Minorca: The Illusory Prize.17 This work covers the entire period of the British occupation of the island and has used the most original sources of any work in order to achieve this. However, with regard to the garrison over the middle of the century, especially into the Seven Years War, there are some gaps in his work. Gregory’s main sources for the 1750s are the Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng (London, 1928).

13

Janet Sloss, A Small Affair: The French Occupation of Menorca during the Seven Years’ War (Tetbury, 2000).

14

Janet Sloss, Richard Kane, Governor of Minorca (Tetbury, 1995).

15

Baugh, The Global Seven Years’ War 1754–1763.

16

Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The Illusory Prize (Hackensack, 1990).

17

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Cunninghame journals and testimonies used by other historians. His other original sources are some diaries, but mostly letters between members of the government. These sources are mostly discussing wider events and Gregory has not examined all the sources from the garrison itself.18 In addition to this, Gregory only dedicates one chapter to the defence of Minorca for the entire period of 1708 to 1756 while the rest of the text focuses on civil administration and the rule of law on the island.19 This lack of historical attention to the military garrison and the strategic situation on the island is the reason why many of the attempts to understand the fall of the island have been lacking in detail. Yet a large number of sources are available for study on the garrison. The most commonly drawn upon sources directly relating to Minorca are the journals of William Cunninghame, Deputy/Chief Engineer at St Phillips.20 Cunninghame produced three journals during the 1750s. One, Journal of a Journey to Minorca, details his travels through France to the island to commence his duties as Deputy Engineer at St Phillips.21 Cunninghame also produced a second journal, which was most likely written at some point during the siege.22 The journal starts abruptly with Cunninghame in Nice where he is ordered to return to assist St Phillips. This section was clearly written after he arrived in Minorca and from that point the journal continues on a day-to-day basis up until just after the surrender. The final journal is an edited version of the siege journal clearly intended for publication.23 Another of the main untapped sets of records is the accounts kept by the garrison and other financial documents produced throughout the various stages of Minorca’s supply chain. The largest of these are the Ordnance Office Bill Books.24 Produced every six months for the entire period of study by both head storekeepers on the island, Robert Boyd and Edward Blakeney,25 they provide the most detailed picture of how the garrison operated on a daily basis. In addition to this, they can be used to illuminate larger trends within the supply system of the garrison by tracing the costs of these through the receipts and accounts. The Bill Books cover costs of two distinct parts of the garrison’s finances, fortifications and incidents. These are calculated separately then added together to provide a three-month total in each six-month Ibid., pp. 251–4.

18

Ibid., p. 5.

19

There is some dispute in the sources as to which title he formally held by the end of the siege.

20

Journal of a Journey, NAM 1968-07-225.

21

Journal of the Siege (unpublished), NAM 1968-07-227-1.

22

While a copy of the manuscript exists it is unclear if it was successfully published.

23

Ordnance Office Bill Books, 1746–56, TNA, WO 53/490–507.

24

Seemingly no relation to the Lieutenant Governor.

25

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    91

account. The fortifications budget is fairly self-explanatory, covering repairs to parts of the defences and also the increased construction costs of additional defences to the various forts present on Minorca. The incidents budget is a rather more ambiguous one, as there are examples of it being used to fill gaps in other parts of the finances. Its main purpose is for sudden costs such as collapsed walls, or paying for local aid such as unloading supply shipments. However, it was also the budget used to meet the costs of visiting dignitaries, ambassadors, and envoys from other countries. There is a reference, for example, to representatives from the Italian city states, particularly Genoa and Florence, visiting the island. Likewise representatives from Tunis are also mentioned within the books; though all these visits were only for short periods of time, they required attention from the budget.26 The Bill Books have been diligently kept and allow for close study of the garrison as an operative unit. There is also a large body of unused sources that come from a range of documents showing different parts of the complicated machinery around the handling of a garrison like Minorca. There are the papers from the Commissary General which relate to food supply and costs of supplying the island as well as the intricacies of creating a stable supply network in the Mediterranean.27 There are also War Office papers, which show the costs of paying the garrison by the government, and also the formal on-paper size of the garrison.28 Furthermore, they show the salaries and ranks of the various officers on the island. From this, it is possible not only to establish the organisation of the garrison’s ranks but also the understanding of the garrison from officials in London. Finally, there is also a large catalogue of various letters, reports, and files from spies, envoys, the Privy Council, and the Treasury which can serve to clarify elements of the operation of the garrison. When combined, they can improve our understanding of the connectivity between the various jurisdictions and responsibilities of the organisations which together ran Minorca. When used in conjunction with some of the more popular sources they can provide a rounder picture of the garrison on Minorca. By combining all the documents on the garrison, it is possible to understand multiple layers of the military on Minorca, how it operated, was supplied, and defended.

Suppling Minorca The island of Minorca was not self-sufficient; its main export was wine. The small population and its limited facilities resulted in there being very little in the way of military supplies and paraphernalia, such as gunpowder, shot, or uniforms, being Ordnance Office Bill Books, 1746–56, TNA, WO 53/499–502.

26

Papers Relating to Lord Irvin, Commissary General, West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS), Leeds, WYL 100/PO/5.

27

War Office Papers Relating to Minorca and Gibraltar, TNA, WO 24/235.

28

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produced on the island. As such, supplies had to be organised through contacts across the Mediterranean with provisions coming into Minorca from as far away as the Levant. The entire supply system for Minorca was organised by the Ordnance Office and Commissary General. The Ordnance Office handled all matters relating to military supplies and the upkeep of the garrison, whilst the Commissary General handled the food supplies, including the all-important bread contract. The bread contract was pivotal to the successful running of any military unit. Those tasked with its responsibility were required to ensure that a regular supply of grain was purchased, transported and stored for the troops to turn into bread. There was also a requirement that the grain be of a certain level of quality so as not to cause health issues amongst the troops. The Ordnance Office was managed by a representative on the island who was tasked with liaising with ships and private contractors to ensure that supplies reached the island, were correctly stored and maintained, and that other tasks, such as fortification upkeep, were paid and accounted for. The Ordnance agent of the island was assisted in this task by a number of clerks who processed the paperwork, but all the organisational and decision-making aspects rested on the agent alone. Though they often sought orders from England, especially when making major decisions, the length of communication often necessitated the taking of key decisions by the agent. The Ordnance Office budget was split into two distinct halves, as discussed earlier, and the agent paid for arrangements on the island and then claimed the money back from the Office, with their salary being in part from ensuring profit on those transactions. Being an important trading island with regular shipping there does not appear to have been an issue with capital on the island and the agent was always able to pay for most of the costs as they arose rather than on credit.29 The bread contract was held in England by the Commissary General, a wealthy individual who would be contracted by the Crown to finance the returns from the location while receiving a profit from the money claimed back from the government for that task over the course of a specific contract.30 The individual would expect to make a profit on this arrangement, usually split between themselves and the governor and lieutenant governor of the location in question. This system was administered by an agent in London, who would receive correspondence from the agent in the locality who in turn handled the purchasing of the supplies. These returns would then be passed on to the Commissary General who would claim the money each year from the Treasury. In the case of Minorca during this period, the Commissary General was Lord Irvin of Temple Newsam. Lord Irvin remained in Leeds for most of the period and received returns there from his agent in London, Ordnance Office Bill Book (hereafter OOBB), 1755, TNA, WO 53/506.

29

Contract of Lord Irvin, WYAS, WYL 100 PO/1.

30

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    93

Humphrey Portman. Portman, in turn, received the returns from his Minorca agent who was, for the 1740s, an Edward Blakeney and from the 1750s, Robert Boyd. Boyd was also the storekeeper at St Phillips and therefore amalgamated the tasks for both the Commissary General and the Ordnance Office. The supply situation for Minorca was based upon the premise of always having six months’ supply available at any time. This was mainly to avoid the ramifications of ships being sunk or the supply interrupted in some other manner, and provided a safety net of supplies for the garrison. The main source of grain for the garrison came through Greek and Jewish merchants who were based on the island, rather than Spanish or British, and the preferred source of supply, mostly because of cost, was from the Levant.31 Another of the crossover elements of the supply situation on Minorca was that while the grain was purchased through the Commissary General, the grinding of the grain into flour was carried out as part of the Ordnance Office’s budget when troops could not be employed on the task.32 One of the constant issues for the supply of Minorca was ensuring the consistent quality of the bread supply. An uproar was caused in 1754 when the quality of the bread came into question and seemed to have resulted in troops falling ill. The issue seems to have been caused by a government request to quickly purchase bread for the garrison from Tunis, rather than waiting for the usual supplies from the Levant.33 This was possibly due to the escalating tensions between Britain and France, or could have been seen as a quick resupply rather than waiting the time it would take for the ships to arrive. Following this incident and several other claims of mismanagement, mostly relating to health issues facing the troops from poor maintenance of grain facilities, Blakeney quit and travelled home, leaving Robert Boyd imploring the garrison’s commanders to write letters exonerating him from his part in the entire affair so as not to also be blamed by officials in London.34 Although the mismanagement itself was due to Blakeney, it is also clear that much of the blame lies with the government officials who both tasked the storekeeper to purchase supplies quickly, and then sought to blame whoever was in charge, rather than looking into the circumstances. While this does not appear to be an intentional fall in the quality of the bread supply, in this instance it does highlight one of the largest issues with the governmental approach to the supply of Minorca: that officials in London neither took an interest in affairs in Minorca nor did they attempt to understand the narrative of events. Indeed, there is no evidence in the official sources regarding the incident that officials in London understood that it was Letter to Lord Irvin, Mr Revell, Port Mahon, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/III/57.

31

OOBB, 1750, TNA, WO 53/499.

32

Letter to Lord Irvin from Humphrey Portman, London, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/IV/58.

33

Letter to Sir Willian Younge Bent, WYAS, WYL 100/PO5/V/2 and WYL 100/PO5/V/2; and Robert Boyd to Lord Irvin, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/III/73.

34

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their actions that had precipitated the problems. The desperation that can be seen in Boyd’s letters to the various colonels asking for their support is clear evidence of his faith in the official system, knowing that without their support he would be blamed for Blakeney’s failings. He was supported in the end by the officers’ letters, but the charge remained on him to the level that Cunninghame felt it necessary in his journal to exonerate him again for readers in London.35 Although Blakeney was certainly guilty of mismanagement, part of the issue with the drop in quality was the requirement that it be purchased quickly from Tunis. Government officials interfered with the working system of supply for the garrison without understanding how that system had developed and damaged the overall supply for Minorca. Another issue with the supplies in Minorca was poor government organisation. This can be seen clearly in a series of events that occurred over the 1750s. In April 1754, letters arrived for Lord Irvin from his agent informing him that the Ordnance Office had ordered the engineers on the island to no longer provide repairs to the bread magazines out of the Ordnance budgets.36 This forced the Commissary General to petition the Treasury to allocate funds to his budget for the maintenance of the bread magazines. The issue had arisen over the degradation of the iron bars on the windows of the magazine, which had opened the grain to contamination from vermin. The main goal of the petition to the Treasury was to secure funds to repair these bars and allow for future repairs should the need arise. It was not until April 1755 that the petition was heard before the Treasury, with Lord Irvin’s agent being present to make the case. It was also a further year before the Treasury agreed to allow the funds to be allocated for the repair of the bars.37 By the time of the siege, there is no evidence that the funds had arrived for the work to be successfully carried out.38 This meant that the contamination of the grain was still occurring before and during the siege with the obvious impact that would have on troop health as well as morale. The lack of funds allocated to support Minorca’s logistical framework, even when issues had been identified and those issues themselves had arisen because of the jurisdictional layout of Minorca’s supply institutions, shows the problems of distance from London. The distance and time that were required to properly inform decision-makers back home rendered much of Minorca’s ability to be flexible to changing circumstances inert and would have undermined the effectiveness of the Journal of the Siege (published), NAM 1968-07-226.

35

Letter to Lord Irvin from Humpfrey Portman, April 1754, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/ IV/59.

36

Letter to Lord Irvin from Humpfrey Portman, April 1755, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/ IV/67.

37

OOBB, 1755, TNA, WO 53/507.

38

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    95

troops on the island. The low quality of the bread, caused by government decisions without consulting with those who had established the system on the island and then failing to maintain the facilities, which further degraded the quality of the food available, had a detrimental impact on the troops on the island. If these actions had not been taken, then the garrison would have been in a much better position by 1756, with more troops available for duty and of a healthier disposition than was the actual case. The final aspects of the supply situation on Minorca were the ammunition and other materials of war which the garrison had in stock. Sieges of this period expended a vast amount of shot and powder, and many citadels were subjected to often constant bombardments.39 Supplies were organised through the Ordnance Office and stored mostly in St Phillips, although parts of the supplies were stored in Mahon and had to be evacuated before the siege.40 Most of the supplies were purchased through a network of contacts established and cultivated by the Ordnance Office agents on the island. As with the supplies of grain for the bread contract, this was handled mainly through the Greek and Jewish merchants who made regular stops on the island. It was this network of contacts that allowed for the purchase of supplies on credit, where necessary, with the Treasury providing the backing credit. It should be noted at this juncture that while the system was able to provide necessary supplies, by cutting out Minorcans and Spaniards from the process the garrison further alienated themselves from the island’s population. The major concern for the military supplies in Minorca was degradation. Much of the Ordnance budget was taken up with replacing supplies that had been damaged or placing supplies such as gunpowder into new barrels as the previous ones were falling into disrepair.41 This was largely because of issues with the quality of the supplies, in addition to the poor facilities that they were often stored in. At many points over the 1750s, large amounts of the garrison’s gunpowder supplies, which were almost entirely stored at St Phillips, had to be moved between storerooms due to water ingress and other building maintenance issues.42 This degradation of supply forced agents on the island to cut back on total stores, not having the budget available to continue the additional purchases required. As such the stores were lower than they should have been at the time of the siege. This can be seen in the desperate attempts by the garrison to purchase additional powder and shot from any source available in the days leading up to the French landings. They were Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London, 1983).

39

Journal of the Siege (published), NAM 1968-07-226.

40

OOBB, 1755, TNA, WO 53/506.

41

OOBB, 1753, TNA, WO 53/503.

42

96    R ob Til de sley

unable to pay for these supplies and the government received numerous requests after the siege to reimburse those that had been affected. Most of these took some deliberation, as they checked the validity of the claims, although it does appear that the majority were eventually remunerated. For example, Constantin Calamata was tasked with bringing in powder barrels to augment supply.43 These supplies were either requisitioned from ships in the harbour or, as in the case of Calamata, agents secured the delivery of the supplies which were sent into St Phillips via the jetty at St Phillips Cove. Over the course of the siege 353,639 lbs of powder was expended by the garrison, propelling 61,000 shell and shot.44 This clearly shows the levels of supply that were available to the garrison, and none of the journals show any indication that there were concerns regarding supplies of ammunition throughout the siege. While there were clearly some supply issues and concerns, the requisitioning moves made by the garrison mitigated some of these; however, had better storage solutions been available at St Phillips and had the necessary upkeep costs been covered, the supply situation would have been much more in keeping with the strategic significance of the position. Despite this, Minorca was a reasonably well supplied location overall, and was able to keep the garrison fed to adequate levels even with limited funding and resources. It was these limited resources, however, coupled with its isolation, that had an overall detrimental effect on the military strength and efficiency of the garrison.

Defending Minorca There were three fortified locations on Minorca: the small outpost at Fornelles on the northern coast, which required a garrison of fifty men; the inherited Spanish fort at the old capital of Ciutadella, which usually had around 200 men; and finally there were the main fortifications centred on St Phillips Castle on the cliffs above Mahon. By the 1750s, St Phillips had been greatly expanded from its original size and there had been changes in the defences from the original plans drawn up by General Stanhope in the 1710s. The biggest single change that affected the defences of Minorca prior to the siege was the abandonment of Queen Anne’s Fort. This fort, which was intended to cover the other part of the mouth of Mahon harbour, was situated on a promontory known as Cape Mola. The reasons for constructing a fort there had been evident to earlier engineers, and Cunninghame notes that because of the lay of the land, Cape

Petition on Gunpowder Landing, TNA, T 1/386/77.

43

Account of ammunition spent during the siege of St Phillips Castle 1756, TNA, PRO 30/26/97.

44

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    97

Mola could only be attacked along a single thin stretch of rocky ground.45 In addition to this, Cape Mola actually reached a higher elevation than St Phillips’ Point, with better views for covering the harbour. The construction of Queen Anne’s Fort had begun as early as the 1720s, but it was no more than a watchtower and some groundwork by the 1750s.46 Furthermore, even the garrison had stopped accounting for Queen Anne’s Fort as a separate fort with its own troops by 1747.47 Given the small size of the garrison, there were clear strategic arguments against adding to the size of the defences required to be manned. The halting of construction of Queen Anne’s Fort was also blamed on the added cost of construction because of the solid rock of Minorca. Any attempt at fortifications, especially those containing subterranean sections, would have been extremely difficult to construct. Indeed, Cunninghame argued as much in his journal when discussing Cape Mola. He identified its strategic importance but also the issues and costs that would be incurred in constructing such a fort.48 In the end, the decision not to build Queen Anne’s Fort was one which rested with the government. The lack of additional funds directed towards its construction meant that it had to be built and maintained within existing budgets, alongside the continued work on St Phillips. This is clearly the main reason that the project was abandoned. As a result, there were only a few ruins on Cape Mola when the French arrived. This decision had consequences. The additional elevation of Cape Mola and its position, where it faced the narrowest part of the defences at St Phillips, made it a prime candidate for an artillery battery. During the siege, the French positioned a battery there which was able to fire directly at the citadel and prevent or damage any ships entering Mahon harbour. This lack of attention paid by the government to the needs of the defensive situation in Minorca, and its failure to provide the resources to the garrison which ensured that Queen Anne’s Fort was never completed, became a major liability in the defence of Minorca. The main defence of Minorca was St Phillips itself. The fort had been manned and expanded since the British move of the capital to Mahon following the occupation of the island.49 By the 1750s, the fort was extensive, and was best described by Cunninghame in his journal: The castle of St Phillips is a small square of 4 bastions. The line of defence 140ft. The capital wall is above 90ft high. The ditches cut out of the rock proportionately

Journal of a Journey, NAM 1968-07-225.

45

Ibid.

46

War Office Returns, Minorca and Gibraltar, 1747, TNA, WO 24/262.

47

Journal of a Journey, NAM 1968-07-225.

48

Gregory, Minorca, p. 158.

49

98    R ob Til de sley

large and deep and the outworks and ditches are also. The whole works consist of the above square, 4 Gunner Ravelins 4 Counterguards 4 Puller Ravelins 1 Capeniere with a palisaded covered way and glacis. To cover these are: 4 lunettes 2 redoubts 2 standing cavaliers at the side. Charles Fort which is a small sided square with short flanks and fort Marlbourogh are insignificant redoubt on the high ground on the south side of St Stephens Cove over which it has a pontoon communication covered from in salt. All these are full of subterranean of all sorts.50

The main approach to St Phillips was the old road, which ran all the way to Ciutadella on the other side of the island, and it was by this road that the French forces approached during the siege. It was this route that represented one of the critical weaknesses in the defences of St Phillips, though, in this case, it was the fault of the garrison and commanders, instead of the government. Rather than increase the contact between the garrison and the local population, which was a frayed relationship and often resulted in other problems arising, the decision was made to allow the construction of a town right at the base of the fort. This meant a new town was constructed which in many ways would cause issues for the overall defence of the castle. This town contained comfortable houses for the officers, such as the Chief Engineer,51 as well as taverns and brothels for the garrison at St Phillips. This cluster of buildings, known as St Phillips’ Town, represented a significant defect in the defences of the fortress. Straddling the approach road, St Phillips’ Town provided cover to advancing enemies and prevented effective fire from parts of the walls. This flaw had been identified by the garrison, and part of the town was demolished in the 1740s, but only that part which joined directly onto the curtain wall and the outworks, leaving a narrow channel between them and the rest of the town. However, it still proved to be an obstacle for the successful defence of the fortress. There had been discussion between the officers about demolishing the whole of St Phillips’ Town in the event of an invasion. However, French maps of the siege show much of the town was still standing, and indeed parts of it appear to have been used to cover the construction of gun Journal of a Journey, NAM 1968-07-225.

50

OOBB, 1748, TNA, WO 53/492.

51

L o g i st ics of the Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    99

emplacements. By not demolishing the town, the garrison greatly assisted the French by undermining their own fortifications, simply to allow for the continued convenience of St Phillips’ Town to provide services that otherwise would require travel to Mahon, about 5 km distant. One of the most critical and important parts of the defences at St Phillips was its subterraneans. Built on the rocky cliffs above Mahon harbour, the fortress had, as part of its construction, large tunnels dug into the rock below the fort, which were extended throughout the period. These tunnels were extensive, reaching from the top of the cliffs all the way to St Phillips’ Cove below the fort, where a jetty had been constructed. This allowed for the ingress and egress of supplies and men directly from the sea without having to use Mahon harbour itself. Indeed, some of these tunnels also served as excellent and safe storage facilities for men and material. One tunnel contained sixteen carriages with room to walk beside.52 This was of absolute importance in the event of the fortress coming under siege. Not only did the tunnels allow for the safe storage of supplies if the enemy was able to direct some fire over the walls, but they also allowed for the passage of troops to different parts of the outworks without having to risk them being placed under fire from the enemy. Therefore, these passages were one of the most vital parts of the fortresses’ defences; they were not however, a guarded secret. Given their role as part of the storage solution for the garrison, they were often frequented by labourers performing tasks such as powder storage and decanting, as well as moving materials to different parts of the fortress.53 As a result, any force that attacked St Phillips would understand that gaining a foothold in the subterraneans would be one of the pivotal factors in bringing about the successful capitulation of the garrison. The nature of the subterraneans themselves, dug out of the rock, meant that they required little maintenance. Only a few references were located within the budget for the garrison regarding repairs to one of the tunnels.54 These tunnels were the linchpin of the defences at St Phillips; whilst being well known to all those with even a cursory interest in Minorca, they were also recognised and rightly maintained and defended by the garrison, acting as a key strategic position within the fortress. The last major part of the defences of St Phillips which needs to be addressed is their scale. As already shown, the number of component parts of the fortress was extensive, with additional redoubts and forts that were designed to cover key locations around St Phillips but were not connected to the fortress directly, such as Phillipet and Fort Marlborough. Such an extensive fortress would require a large garrison in order to effectively defend all parts of the works. Although Minorca was Journal of a Journey, NAM 1968-07-225.

52

OOBB, 1755, TNA, WO 53/507.

53

OOBB, 1753, TNA, WO 53/502.

54

100    R ob Tilde sley

only a small island and did not require a large military force to control the population, its strategic location and importance rendered it a prime target for any force attempting to reduce British holdings in the Mediterranean. The fort, therefore, was fit for purpose in that regard but the garrison was not increased to the level required to defend it. For example, Cunninghame in one of his many defence plans drew up the number of men he felt would be required in order to mount an effective night perimeter guard of the outer walls. Once he had included all the outer forts his total came to 2,700 men.55 However, in 1754 the total number of men taking rations was 2,102. These troops had been present on the island for several years by this point, and although the officers knew the ground well, many were perpetually absent attempting to escape duties on this little island, further reducing the ability of the remaining effectives to efficiently organise. This number was for the troops in Mahon and St Phillips and does not include the troops at Ciutadella and Fornelles, but it is still the greatest proportion of the garrison, with possibly only a few hundred in the outlying posts.56 According to Cunninghame’s calculations, in order to maintain an effective night patrol, more than the entire garrison would need to be employed in this task. This highlights another significant flaw in the defences of St Phillips and therefore Minorca: the garrison was too small for the task. There was no local militia that could be called on, but even if there had been it would have been unlikely to have been of any use given the ill feeling that existed between the garrison and the local population. Indeed, once French troops landed on the island there are accounts of locals doing their utmost to attack British patrols and knock down their own farm walls to allow for the passage of cannon.57 The garrison had been increased by one battalion during the War of Austrian Succession but that was withdrawn as soon as the peace treaty came into effect.58 Even had this additional battalion been retained, it would only have placed the full strength of the garrison just below 3,000 men. The large lines of St Phillips were therefore impossible to defend effectively with the men available, and yet no attempt was made by the government to increase the size of the garrison, even as the conflict with France scaled up in the 1750s. One of main factors for this appears to be lack of interest, rather than an active attempt to keep the garrison small. There are no letters concerned with the size of the garrison on the island; indeed one of the few papers from government archives simply states that each of the battalions present on Minorca was exactly 815 men

Journal of the Siege, NAM 1968-07-227-1.

55

Bread Ration 1754, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/II/20.

56

Journal of the Siege, NAM 1968-07-227-1.

57

Bread Ration 1748, WYAS, WYL 100/PO/5/II/13.

58

L o g i st ics of t he Br i ti sh G a r r i son on Minorca , 1746–56    101

strong regardless of the actual situation on the island.59 Even when troops were allocated to the garrison, after the French had landed, this still amounted to only 500 men who were due to be picked up by Byng on his way to Minorca. Had the garrison been of an adequate size, given the fortifications it was expected to defend, then Minorca could have been the significant strategic location its fortifications would indicate. Minorca had a precarious but functional supply system; the organisation of both the ingress of grain, for the production of bread, and the egress of capital to pay for all the aspects of the logistics network on the island were handled effectively by a small number of officials. What is clear from a study of the network is that Minorca existed in a pocket far away from government supervision or understanding. Ambitious projects to improve defences had to be shelved; the financial situation for the garrison was purely one of subsistence. The entire network survived on the skills and perseverance of the men who maintained the relations with contractors and managed what financial resources were available, without whom the island would have collapsed logistically. Minorca’s logistics did operate with a degree of efficiency, but not enough to protect the island from the oncoming storm that would arrive in 1756; the contractor networks could maintain the island’s supply in peacetime but not supply the amounts of material required to mount a successful defence against another determined European power. From a study of Minorca we can observe several important aspects, not only of the garrison but of wider military organisation of the period and trends in later periods: how suppliers were organised in this period, the networks of contractors who supplied them, and the individuals who were responsible for their management; how too funds were allocated or in many cases neglected for garrisons that were deemed fringes to the national interest, and how soldiers were expected to maintain themselves and carry out their duties with often very few chances of returning home. The garrison on Minorca was never able to overcome its relations with the local population and therefore never fully safe from social upheaval. The weak strength of the garrison forced them to pull into themselves, unable to fully secure the island or provide the necessary security. The biggest issue however, and the insurmountable one from the garrison’s side of things, was distance: the lack of communication, funds and attention from London while still being expected to function in its primary roles. The result was an under-manned and under-supplied, isolated garrison. It was this lack of attention to any real attempt to remedy the situation from Britain that led to irreparable damage to British positions on the island and would lead to their loss of the territory after only sixty years. The public outcry from this event was substantial (though less so than their outcry Estimate Charges of His Majesty’s Forces in the Plantations, 1756, TNA, T 1/368/82.

59

102    R ob Tilde sley

over Byng), but in many ways little changed as a result of the events on Minorca. British military history is filled with small island positions which despite their significance in our maritime history have often been neglected by the army and become prime targets in many of the wars that Britain has engaged in. Minorca sits as a prime example amongst Britain’s history of its military relationship with outlying islands.

5 British Soldiers, Sieges, and the Laws of War: The 1807 Siege of Montevideo Gavin Da ly

W

hilst the British sieges of the Peninsular War (1808–14) have long been studied from an operational point of view, it is only in very recent years that historians have turned their attention to examining what occurred to garrisons and civilians in the aftermath of the British storms of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian.1 This traditional neglect of the infamous British sacks of the Peninsular War is part of a broader neglect of the history of sieges in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, and of the laws of war in which they were conducted.2 Yet sieges played a crucial role in shaping the development of customary laws of war in early modern Europe.3 Moreover, whilst battles had well and truly supplanted sieges as the principal form of operational warfare by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, sieges nevertheless remained important to military and civilian experiences of war, not only within European theatres of war, but within the European colonial sphere.

Gavin Daly, ‘“The Sacking of a Town is an Abomination”: Siege, Sack and Violence to Civilians in British Officers’ Writings on the Peninsular War – the Case of Badajoz’, Historical Research, 92:255 (2019), 160–82; Gavin Daly, ‘Anglo-French Sieges, the Laws of War, and the Limits of Enmity in the Peninsular War’, English Historical Review CXXXV: 574 ( June 2020), 572–604; Bruce Collins, Wellington and the Siege of San Sebastian (Barnsley, 2017), ch. 12; Alice Parker, ‘“Incorrigible Rogues”: The Brutalisation of British Soldiers in the Peninsular War, 1808–1814’, The British Journal of Military History, 1:3 (2015), 42–59; Edward J. Coss, All for the King’s Shilling: The British Soldier under Wellington, 1808–1814 (Norman, OK, 2010), ch. 7.

1

On the neglect of siege warfare in the Napoleonic era, see Collins, Wellington and the Siege of San Sebastian, pp. 2–7. On French siege sacks in the Revolutionary Wars, see F. Robson, ‘Siege Warfare in Comparative Early Modern Contexts: Norms, Nuances, Myth and Massacre during the Revolutionary Wars’, in Civilians under Siege from Saravejo to Troy, ed. Alex Dowdall and John Horne (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 83–105.

2

John A. Lynn, ‘Introduction: Honourable Surrender in Early Modern European History, 1500–1789’, in How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender, ed. Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan (Oxford, 2012), p. 102.

3

104    G avin Da ly

This chapter explores the often forgotten 1807 British siege and capture of Montevideo during the ill-fated River Plate campaign of 1806–07. Whilst the siege operation has been covered in detail in a number of recent campaign histories, this chapter examines the siege through the prism of laws of war, with a particular focus on the British storming of the town and the subsequent fate of the garrison and civilians.4 The siege did not constitute a large-scale operation relative to many other contemporary sieges, but it is nevertheless of particular interest in terms of the evolution of customary laws of war, and of how soldiers interpreted and enforced those laws, especially when compared with the more famous British sieges of the Peninsular War. In Spain, after storming the towns of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian, British troops spared the French garrisons but notoriously sacked the towns and committed atrocities against the Spanish inhabitants. Yet at Montevideo the opposite was true: a rare example of a besieged city taken by storm, where the enemy was initially given no quarter, but the inhabitants were spared the fate of sack.

The Siege and Its Context The siege of Montevideo took place within the extraordinary context of the British invasion of the River Plate in 1806–07. Here, unlike what would soon unfold in the Peninsular War, British forces faced Spain as a traditional imperial rival and enemy. The British campaign began rather unexpectedly when Sir Hope Popham took it upon himself without any official authorisation to sail across the Atlantic from the Cape to the River Plate, with only a small force of 1,500 men, the core being the 71st Regiment of Foot, under the command of William Beresford. In June 1806, Beresford captured Buenos Aires, a largely open and unprotected city of around 50,000 inhabitants, only for the city to be retaken by Spanish forces and armed civilians in August, with Beresford and his men taken prisoners of war in controversial circumstances. It all ended nearly a year later, in greater controversy and humiliation, when General Whitelocke surrendered whilst trying to recapture Buenos Aires in July 1807. Under the surrender terms, the British evacuated all their troops from the River Plate, with Whitelocke himself court-martialled upon his return to England.5 On the siege, see Ben Hughes, The British Invasion of the River Plate: How the Redcoats Were Humbled and a Nation Was Born (Barnsley, 2015), ch. 11; John D. Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic 1805–1807: Operations in the Cape and the River Plate and Their Consequences (Barnsley, 2015), ch. 10.

4

For general histories of the River Plate campaign, see Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic; John D. Grainger (ed.), The Royal Navy in the River Plate, 1806–1807 (Aldershot, 1996); Ian Fletcher, The Waters of Oblivion: The British Invasion of the Rio de la Plata (Staplehurst, 1991); Carlos Roberts, Las Invasions Inglesas del Rio de la Plata 1806–1807 (Buenos Aires, 1938).

5

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    105

In the interim, between the initial British capture of Buenos Aires and their final ignominious surrender, the only success story for the British in the River Plate was the siege and capture of Montevideo under Brigadier-General Samuel Auchmuty in February 1807. Auchmuty had set sail from England with 3,000 men the previous October, arriving in the River Plate on 5 January. With earlier reinforcements having arrived from the Cape, his total force came to over 5,000 men: comprising the 38th, 40th, 47th and 87th Regiments of Foot, three companies of the 95th, one company of the 71st, light dragoons, and a detachment of Royal Artillery.6 Rather than attempt to recapture the prize of Buenos Aires, Auchmuty turned his attention to the other strategically important city, Montevideo. The British operation began on 16 January when Auchmuty’s forces disembarked in a small bay a few miles from the city. By 19 January the British were camped before Montevideo, having seen off enemy skirmishes and a Spanish force on the march there. After repulsing a large sortie from the garrison on 20 January, the British settled in for a siege.7 Sitting on the northern bank of the River Plate, Montevideo was a much smaller and less populous city than Buenos Aires, with a population of about 10,000 inhabitants.8 But it was a fortified town boasting reasonably good defences. Situated on a small rocky peninsula, it was surrounded on three sides by the sea, and fully protected by walls and gun batteries. On its eastern landward side were fifteen foot high curtain walls and bastions, with the central defence being a citadel, designed along regular lines with bastions, ditch and glacis. The garrison, estimated at about 3,000 strong before the sortie and reinforced to roughly this number again by the end of the siege,9 was commanded by Pascal Ruiz Huidobro, a fifty-six-year-old Spaniard who originally hailed from Galicia.10 What the British were about to commence – a formal siege – was the most structured and rule-bound form of eighteenth-century European warfare. Both Auchmuty and Huidobro were consciously operating within long-established customary laws of war and summoning and surrender siege rituals.11 On the morning Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, p. 141; Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 86, 226.

6

On the landing, march and preliminary fighting, see Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 109–17; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, pp. 141–9.

7

Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, p. 113.

8

Ibid., p. 122.

9

Ibid., p. 62.

10

On sieges and the laws of war in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, see John W. Wright, ‘Sieges and Customs of War at the Opening of the Eighteenth Century’, The American Historical Review, 39:4 (1934), 629–44; Randall Lesaffer, ‘Siege Warfare in the Early Modern Age: A Study on the Customary Laws of War’, in The Nature of Customary

11

106    G avin Da ly

of 21 January, before the siege commenced, Auchmuty, abiding by time-honoured etiquette, offered to discuss capitulation terms with the governor. Approaching the walls under a white flag, Captain Philip Roche was blindfolded and taken to Huidobro. The governor’s response was unequivocal: the garrison ‘would defend their town and fortress with the last of their blood’.12 Auchmuty had no choice but to besiege the city, despite having few heavy guns and limited entrenching tools. The siege operations began on 22 January, centred on the landward eastern defences. Auchmuty’s forces were supported throughout by Rear-Admiral Sterling’s fleet, which provided additional heavy guns, sea bombardment, and marines, sailors, and supplies. Entrenchments were dug and batteries established, the citadel and defences then fired upon, and parts of the city bombarded. On 1 February, the operation entered its final phase, when a breaching battery was set up about 600 yards from the walls, near the southern gate, and the following day a practicable breach opened up.13 The siege had now reached a critical juncture. The opening up of a practicable breach was the conventional end game of a siege, where the growing tension of the siege operation was either diffused through the defenders finally agreeing to capitulate or escalated by the garrison deciding to defend the breach. Adhering again to long-established etiquette, Auchmuty offered to treat with the governor one final time, sending in an officer on the afternoon of 1 February. Huidobro, though, refused to receive the British representative, and with good cause – he knew that a Spanish relief column from Buenos Aires was only days away; and besides, he was not convinced the breach was practicable. The surrender offer was snubbed.14 Both parties were only too aware of the implications. Under age-old customary laws of war, if the garrison sought to defend a practicable breach, and mount an ‘obstinate defence’, then they ran the risk, if overwhelmed by the attacking forces, of forfeiting their protective rights and those of the town as a whole. The garrison could be put to the sword and the town sacked, with civilian inhabitants subjected not only to plunder but the likelihood of murder and rape. This violence was traditionally justified as both retributive justice and exemplary punishment for the loss of life that the attacking forces incurred in having to take the town by storm, and plunder was a motivation for having to brave the hazards of storming in the first place.

Law, ed. Amanda Perreau-Saussine and James Bernard Murphy (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 176–202; Lynn, ‘Introduction: Honourable Surrender’, pp. 102–7. Quoted in Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, p. 117.

12

On the siege operations, see ibid., pp. 118–22.

13

Ibid., pp. 121–2.

14

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    107

Storm and the Fate of the Garrison In the face of Spanish obstinacy, the British had no option but to storm. At 3 am on 3 February, British regiments stormed a narrow breach by the South Gate.15 The initial scenes were chaotic, with the lead assault grenadiers and light troops unable to find the breach, which unbeknownst to them had been barricaded with bales of hide under the cover of darkness. For fifteen long minutes at the base of the wall they were exposed to musketry and a deadly cross-fire of grapeshot from flanking batteries, before they finally located the breach. Intense fighting and further casualties then ensued as the British scaled the barriers and forced their way through the breach into the streets. For the British, at least, the first hour of the assault was the bloodiest, where they sustained the majority of their casualties, amounting overall to 397 dead and wounded.16 Having survived the carnage of the breaches, the British troops initially gave no quarter to the enemy garrison. Sergeant William Lawrence of the 40th recalled: ‘We drove the enemy from the batteries and massacred with sword and bayonet all whom we found carrying arms.’17 Moreover, evidence indicates this was not spontaneous but rather premeditated, with soldiers adhering to orders. Just before the storm, Lieutenant-Colonel Vassall, who was mortally wounded in the assault, instructed his troops: ‘You will respect old men, women, and children; but every man with arms in his hands you must bayonet!’18 The redcoats duly obliged, whether the enemy was armed, running away, or trying to surrender. One Spanish survivor claimed: ‘There were men who had been shot twice that [tried to] surrender’, but they ended up being ‘bayonetted twenty times’.19 The fighting and killing lasted until about On the storm, see Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 124–6; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, pp. 152–4; Fletcher, The Waters of Oblivion, p. 69. Auchmuty’s account of the storm in his dispatch of 6 February 1807 is reproduced in John Tucker, A Narrative of the Operations of a Small British Force, under the Command of Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Auchmuty, employed in the Reduction of Monte Video, on the River Plate, A. D. 1807. By a Field Officer on the Staff (London, 1807), appendix, p. 31.

15

This figure is based on the returns reproduced in Tucker, Narrative of the Operations, appendix, p. 34.

16

William Lawrence, A Dorset Soldier: The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence, 1790–1869, ed. E. Hathaway (Staplehurst, 1995), p. 24.

17

Memoir of the life of Lieutenant-Colonel Vassall (Bristol, 1819), p. 27. In his post-war re­ collections, Captain Fletcher Wilkie, a veteran of the 38th Regiment, put the following words in Vassall’s mouth – ‘Spare the women and children; for the rest, you know what to do with them’ – Wilkie adding that the meaning was ‘perfectly understood’ by the troops; F. Wilkie, ‘Recollections of the British Army in the Early Campaigns of the Revolutionary War’, The United Service Magazine, Part 2 (1836), p. 494.

18

Quoted in Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, p. 124.

19

108    G avin Da ly

5 am, two hours after the storm had begun.20 British actions then switched from killing combatants to rounding them up, Lawrence claiming ‘we were ordered to take prisoner everyone we could lay our hands on’.21 The prize prisoner was Huidobro, who, upon being escorted to Auchmuty, boldly asked for surrender terms with military honours for the garrison – the request, naturally enough, was denied, with the governor surrendering at discretion.22 Daylight revealed the scale of the killing of enemy soldiers within the walls, where ‘heaps upon heaps of dead were found of the Spaniards’.23 All up, Auchmuty reported 800 enemy killed, 500 wounded, and 2,000 prisoners.24 At one level, the British withdrawal of quarter to the garrison during the storm was consistent with the fate of obstinate garrisons in numerous other contemporary sieges, although the scale and severity of killing, and the degree to which it was planned, premeditated or ‘hot-blooded’, could vary across sieges. Only a few years earlier, in the British colonial context in India, British regiments had shown no quarter to Mysorean and Marathan garrisons when they stormed Seringapatam (1799) and Gawilghur (1803).25 When it came to other obstinate Spanish garrisons, the French would later show little mercy when they stormed Tarragona in 1811 during the Peninsular War.26 Yet at another level, British behaviour towards the Spanish garrison at Montevideo was completely at odds with the consistent restraint that British stormers later demonstrated towards French garrisons in the sieges of the Peninsular War, despite suffering horrendous losses in the breaches. At Ciudad Ibid., p. 126.

20

Lawrence, Dorset Soldier, p. 24. John Grainger speculates that Auchmuty may have wished to offer these prisoners in exchange for the 71st Regiment; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, p. 155. Auchmuty certainly used the prisoners afterwards as leverage to try and release the 71st; Auchmuty to the High Court of Audienza, Montevideo, 6 February 1807, in John Whitelocke, Trial at Large of Lieut. Gen. Whitelocke, Late Commander in Chief of the Forces in South America, by a General Court Martial, Held at Chelsea Hospital on Thursday, January 28, 1808, and Continued by Adjournment to Tuesday March 15, Taken by Blanchard and Ramsay (London, 1808), appendix II, pp. 53–4.

21

Tucker, Narrative of the Operations, p. 19.

22

Samuel Walters, Samuel Walters, Lieutenant RN: The Memoirs of an Officer in Nelson’s Navy, ed. C. Northcote Parkinson (Liverpool, 1949), p. 59.

23

24

Auchmuty’s dispatch, 6 February 1807, Montevideo, in Tucker, Narrative of the Operations, appendix, p. 32.

25

H. M. Vibart, The Military History of the Madras Engineers and Pioneers (2 vols, London, 1881), I, 318–19; Randolf G. S. Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaign and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South East Asian Military Economy (Cambridge, 2003), p. 136.

26

John T. Jones, Account of the War in Spain, Portugal and in the South of France from 1808 to 1814 (London, 1818), pp. 200–5.

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    109

Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian, French garrisons obstinately defended practicable breaches, yet on all occasions they were overwhelmingly spared by British troops.27 Moreover, a number of battalions involved in the storming of Montevideo later participated in storms during the Peninsular War, with William Lawrence of the 40th, for example, a stormer at both Montevideo and Badajoz.28 The same laws of war applied in all these instances, but the fate of obstinate garrisons was markedly different between Anglo-French sieges in the Peninsular War and British sieges in the colonial context in Spanish America and India. Of course, circumstances and campaign contexts differed across these sieges, but a consistent pattern of restraint towards French garrisons is clearly evident. In the Peninsular War, British soldiers perceived their French enemy as civilised and honourable, whereas they commonly characterised their Spanish allies as cowardly, treacherous and barbaric.29 The fate of the Spanish garrison at Montevideo, when viewed through the wider comparative lens of the Peninsular War, highlights that the interpretation of laws of war was never fixed or universally applied, but contingent upon the interaction of military and cultural factors. British behaviour towards the garrison at Montevideo needs to be viewed not only within the specific framework of customary laws of war, but within the broader context of Anglo-Spanish cultural estrangement, enmity, and the general erosion of wartime restraints during the British invasion of the River Plate, which reached its zenith in the ferocious urban street fighting of Whitelocke’s attempt to retake Buenos Aires on 5 July 1807.30 Throughout the campaign there was a growing conviction amongst the British forces that they were in a backward, barbaric and isolated land, a view formed by both enlightened conceptions of ‘civilisation’ and the anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic traditions of the Black Legend.31 To be sure, the British drew birth, class and racial distinctions in their assessments. ‘If the character of the lower orders is savage and fierce’, concluded one officer, ‘it is strongly contrasted by that of the higher classes, whose conduct towards the British who fell into their hands, Daly, ‘Anglo-French Sieges’.

27

These were the 1/38th, 1/40th, and 2/95th Rifles; J. H. Lawrence-Archer, The British Army: Its Regimental Records, Badges, Devices, etc (London, 1888), pp. 316–18, 331–4, 571–8.

28

Gavin Daly, ‘“Barbarity More Suited to Savages”: British Soldiers’ Views of Spanish and Portuguese Violence during the Peninsular War, 1808–1814’, War & Society, 35 (2016), 242–58.

29

On the British assault on Buenos Aires, see Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, ch. 17; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, ch. 12.

30

On British soldiers’ perceptions of contemporary Spain through these lenses, see Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal (Basingstoke, 2013), esp. ch. 5.

31

110    G avin Da ly

exhibited the highest civilization and humanity’.32 But overall assessments of local life were often highly critical. Captain Wilkie wrote in his recollections: ‘If the European Spaniards are supposed to be two centuries behind the rest of Europe, half a century more may be added to the distant colonies.’33 Notwithstanding the high proportion of Catholic soldiers amongst particular British regiments sent to the River Plate, religious differences only heightened for British Protestant soldiers their sense of estrangement from local culture.34 In his memoir, the Scottish soldier, ‘Thomas’ Todd, described the lower orders in Montevideo as ‘ignorant in the extreme and very superstitious’.35 British officers and soldiers became increasingly convinced that the laws of war of ‘civilised’ nations had only a fragile hold at best in the River Plate. In many ways, the whole tone of the conflict was shaped early on, by the bitter controversy that arose after Beresford’s capitulation at Buenos Aires on 12 August 1806 and the subsequent captivity of the officers and men of the 71st Regiment for over a year. The British were adamant that the Spanish had violated the original capitulation terms, which had been to embark the troops on transports for Britain or the Cape. Beresford’s captivity proved a watershed moment, bringing questions of honour, civility and the laws of war explicitly to the fore, with the release of Beresford’s men becoming a cause célèbre amongst British army and naval commanders, including Auchmuty.36 The British invasion unleashed popular mobilisation and armed resistance in urban centres and the countryside, so that British forces, who were generally outnumbered, found themselves fighting not only regular soldiers, but hastily formed city militias, urban inhabitants, slaves, and light and irregular cavalry drawn from Creole and indigenous communities in the countryside.37 British troops had scant Anon., An Authentic Narrative of the Proceedings of the Expedition against Buenors Ayres, under the Command of Lieut. Gen. Whitelocke. By an Irish Officer (Dublin, 1808), pp. 88–9.

32

Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 3, p. 507.

33

On the Irish Catholic dimension, especially within the 88th, 87th and 71st Regiments, see Peter Pyne, The Invasions of Buenos Aires, 1806–1807: The Irish Dimension (Liverpool, 1996).

34

Anon., Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, ed. John Howell, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1819), p. 34.

35

On the capitulation and ensuing controversy, see Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, pp. 100–22; Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 78–9, 88–94, 128–33. Popham and Huidobro exchanged many letters on the matter: see the correspondence between the two in British Library, Add MS 32607, ‘Papers relating to invasions by the English of Spanish provinces in South America …’. See also the correspondence between various Spanish authorities and British admirals and generals in Whitelocke, Trial at Large, appendix II, pp. 53–8.

36

See Alejandro Martin Rabinovich, ‘The Making of Warriors: The Militarization of the Rio de la Plata, 1806–07’, in War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830, ed. Richard Bessel,

37

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    111

respect for Spanish-European regulars, let alone militia and volunteers drawn from a broad social and racial cross-section from the River Plate. In the words of one officer, the British were fighting an ‘ill-disciplined and heterogenous army’.38 At the siege of Montevideo, the city’s defenders were mainly regulars and militia, from Spanish and Creole backgrounds, but also included irregulars from the countryside, slaves, and some European privateers and sailors.39 ‘I shall never forget the strange mixture I saw within its walls’, recalled Wilkie upon entering the citadel after the storm. ‘There were not above a dozen who bore any appearance of regular soldiers, although the militia made some approach to it. There were Gauchos, Peons, Indians, sailors of various nations, among which were the crews of French privateers.’40 Moreover, Spanish atrocity stories abounded throughout the war.41 This was true at the siege of Montevideo, where one incident in particular – relatively minor at one level – is very revealing of British attitudes towards the enemy and of a desire to exact vengeance. This occurred during the early stages of the Spanish sortie on 20 January, when the British were forced to leave behind two wounded grenadiers, ‘who, to our horror, the Spaniards deliberately cut to pieces’.42 This fundamental violation of European ideals of honourable conduct on the battlefield left a deep and lasting impression. Indeed, Auchmuty raised the very matter with Huidobro. According to Admiral Sterling’s diary: the governor ‘acknowledges the barbarity in mutilating our men that were wounded: he said it was by Indians and mulattos not by the Spanish troops’. Tellingly, Sterling went on, ‘I believe one is just as bad as the other’.43 William Lawrence later claimed that one of the reasons why the British troops considered Auchmuty to be an ‘excellent commander’ was that ‘When told about the barbarity of the Spaniards to our two wounded comrades, he had said that we were to repay them in their own coin.’44

Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 81–100. Anon., Authentic Narrative, pp. 92–3.

38

On the composition of the garrison, see Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 110, 115, 123; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, p. 155.

39

Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 2, p. 495.

40

See, for example, Popham to Huidobro, 20 September 1806, in Grainger, Royal Navy in the River Plate, p. 80.

41

42

Lawrence, Dorset Soldier, p. 23.

43

Quoted in Grainger, Royal Navy in the River Plate, p. 148.

44

Lawrence, Dorset Soldier, p. 25.

112    G avin Da ly

The Absence of Sack Yet there was also something quite remarkable about the storm and its aftermath at Montevideo: where British stormers initially showed no mercy to enemy combatants, there was restraint towards the civilian inhabitants and their property. Of the siege storms of this era, Montevideo is unique, the one town taken by storm that was not subjected to sack. The earlier British storms in India ended in sack and violence to civilians; so too those in the Peninsular War, with the notorious sacks of Badajoz and San Sebastian lasting for up to three days each, including the murder and rape of Spanish civilians whom the British were meant to be liberating.45 In defending the measures he took to try and minimise the 1813 sack of San Sebastian, Wellington pointed out: ‘I am concerned to add that I never saw or heard of one so taken [towns by storm], by any troops, that it was not plundered.’46 Yet there was one noted exception: the storm of Montevideo, where the inhabitants were ostensibly enemies rather than allies as they were in the Peninsular War. This important feature of the storm has been only briefly mentioned in operational histories of the siege, and has not been subject to broader comparative analysis within the history of sieges and laws of war.47 Yet it was a feature of the siege that contemporaries noted and highlighted – from British soldiers themselves, to the British Parliament, and even to the City Council of Montevideo itself. In his official dispatch of 6 February, Auchmuty made mention of the peaceful aftermath of the storm, specifically singling out women walking in public as a key signifier of a safe post-storm environment: ‘At day-light everything was in our possession except the citadel, which made a shew of resistance, but soon surrendered, and early in the morning the town was quiet, and the women were peaceably walking the streets.’48 Captain Peter Jennings of the 40th Regiment, too, recorded in his diary: Great credit was due to the Conquerors for their orderly and good conduct after the assault, the moment the town was in our possession all further hostilities ceased on both sides, and in the course of that same day everything appeared as quiet within the walls as in time of profound peace: few instances of Pillage or of

On the sack of Badajoz, see Daly, ‘“The Sacking of a Town is an Abomination”’; on San Sebastian, see Collins, Wellington and the Siege of San Sebastian, ch. 12.

45

The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, ed. J. Gurwood, 2nd edn (8 vols, London, 1844–47), VII, Wellington to his brother, Henry, 9 October 1813, p. 47.

46

47

Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, p. 156; Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 126, 134; Fletcher, The Waters of Oblivion, p. 70.

48

Auchmuty’s dispatch, 6 February 1807, Montevideo, in Tucker, Narrative of the Operation, p. 31.

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    113

disorder occurred and where any such was discovered the authors were punished on the spot.49

Jennings’ diary account rings true relative to other eyewitness accounts and memoirs,50 not least being an extraordinary address that the Calvido of Montevideo (‘Council of the City’) wrote to Colonel Gore Browne on 27 August 1807, seven months after the city had fallen.51 The Calvido comprised six magistrates, who together with two other office holders formed the municipal government. Colonel Browne of the 40th Regiment had been in overall command of the storming operation, and then became commander of the city. The occasion for the letter was the impending departure of Browne and the British garrison, as part of the evacuation of all British forces in the River Plate under the treaty terms Whitelocke signed on 7 July 1807 following his surrender at Buenos Aires.52 It was therefore a time of liberation and celebration for Montevideans, yet the Calvido nevertheless felt it important to ‘acknowledge our gratitude and to tender our warmest thanks to you, Sir, and to his Excellency Sir Samuel Auchmuty, the late Commander in Chief for your generosity, forebearance and levity’. In particular, the Calvido highlighted the actions of Browne in saving Montevideo from sack. Indeed, this was presented as both a deeply personal as well as civic debt, as they claimed they owed their own lives to the intervention of British officers. As described in the letter, on the morning Montevideo fell, the Calvido was assembled in the town hall in the Plaza Mayor, which was only a block away from the citadel and fierce fighting during the assault. As British troops gained the breaches and entered the city, the Calvido expected nothing but ‘death from an enraged and victorious soldiery, who had burst open the doors, and were rushing in with all the fury inspired by success’. But their lives were spared by the intervention of a ‘gallant and amiable officer’ (Captain Harry Powell). Browne then received the magistrates and gave his word they would be safe, placing guards at the doors to the town hall. The Calvido’s gratitude extended to Browne’s actions more generally, in preventing atrocities against the local inhabitants: ‘What deeds of violence may have been committed, but for your rectitude and firmness! Journal of Capt. Peter Jennings, National Army Museum, 1983–01–102.

49

See Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 3, p. 211.

50

‘From the Illustrious the Calvido, to Colonel Gore Browne, Commandant of the City of Monte Video, Hall of the Capitol, 27 August 1807’, in Anon., Notes on the viceroyalty of La Plata, in South America: with a sketch of the manners and character of the inhabitants, collected during a residence in the city of Monte Video, by a gentleman recently returned from it… (London, 1809), appendix, pp. 278–80. See also Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 3, p. 211.

51

Under Article VI, British troops were to be evacuated from Montevideo within two months. The Treaty is reproduced in Anon., Authentic Narrative, pp. 71–3.

52

114    G avin Da ly

What but your resolution and virtue could have restrained the fury of incensed soldiers.’ In keeping with Jennings’ account, they acknowledged that a ‘trifling’ degree of plunder initially occurred, but later that day ‘in the great square of the city, the perpetrators of this excess were publicly chastised with the utmost severity’, with the Calvido claiming their own intervention brought mercy to the culprits: ‘at the earnest entreaties of some of the Calvido, were you induced to pardon the lives of two offendors who were condemned to die’. Plundered items found in the possession of British soldiers and sailors were handed over to the Calvido so that they might be restored to their rightful owners.53 In the end: ‘The pride of victorious troops, who had just conquered a city, and entered through blood and fire, was in a moment suppressed, and their exultation reduced to quiet and tranquility.’54 The absence of sack at Montevideo is therefore clear. This makes it very unusual, not only across other contemporary and historical siege storms, but also within the immediate context of British violence, plunder and disciplinary problems during the campaign itself.55 This was true of British behaviour before and after the siege, involving some of the same regiments. In his recollections of the River Plate campaign, the German Hussar officer Landsheit thought that the Spanish inhabitants ‘had no love for the English. They despised them as unbelievers, and hated them as robbers and plunderers.’56 Before the operations against Montevideo, the small coastal town of Maldonado was plundered after it was captured by British forces on 29 October 1806. The assault was led by none other than the 38th Regiment under Vassall. British troops ransacked the town for at least a day, with some accounts claiming that Vassall gave the soldiers licence for three hours of plunder. Order was restored the following day under provosts.57 Then, when British forces under Whitelocke, including regiments that had stormed Montevideo, tried to recapture Buenos Aires in July 1807, some troops, including the 38th, found time to plunder, with troops still in possession of their loot when they surrendered.58

No doubt reflecting his own army prejudices, Fletcher Wilkie singled out British sailors, who had arrived on transports, as the culprits; Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 3, p. 211.

53

For the above quoted extracts from the letter, see ‘From the Illustrious the Calvido, to Colonel Gore Browne’, in Notes on the viceroyalty, pp. 279–80.

54

On the problem of troop desertion during the River Plate campaign, see Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, pp. 205–6, 213.

55

C. Landsheit, The Hussar, ed. G. Gleig (2 vols, London, 1837), vol. 1, p. 218.

56

Ibid., pp. 169, 171, 176; on the capture and aftermath, see Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 96–108.

57

Anon., An Authentic Narrative, pp. 42–3.

58

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    115

Yet after the storm of Montevideo, where laws of war licensed plunder and violence against the inhabitants, British redcoats did not live up to their reputation. It is almost impossible to determine with any degree of certainty, however, precisely why this was the case. Certainly, there was a mix of contributing factors, but no one single factor alone adequately explains the absence of sack, as some factors were present at other stormed towns where sack occurred. First, there is the leadership role of officers, with a number of memoirs mentioning that instructions were given on the eve of the storm not to plunder or harm the inhabitants. Lawrence claimed that Auchmuty’s ‘orders’ were ‘not to plunder or enter any house, or injure any woman, child, or man not carrying arms’.59 Captain Wilkie, too, claimed that Vassall conveyed words to that effect to the men of the 38th: ‘Spare the women and children.’60 But as Wellington’s experiences during the 1803 sieges of the Maratha War and at the 1813 siege of San Sebastian clearly demonstrated, pre-storm orders and instruction alone could not prevent plunder or atrocities.61 As contemporaries noted at the time, any British commander seeking to restrain the troops from sacking a stormed town was constrained by the fact that there was nothing specifically under British articles of war and within the British military justice system that criminalised sack itself, which came under older customary laws of war.62 Secondly, from a practical point of view, the small number of both Montevideans and British soldiers on the ground was a contributing factor. Although Montevideo had a population of over 10,000 inhabitants, multiple sources indicate that many of the inhabitants were simply not there in the aftermath of the storm, although it is impossible to determine with any accuracy the exact number. Certainly, British bombardments in the earlier stages of the siege had led to civilian casualties, the destruction of homes, and inhabitants relocating to safer parts of the town.63 On 27 January, Admiral Stirling recorded: ‘The inhabitants seem to have evacuated the south part and to have retired towards the north.’64 Moreover, during the storm itself, as British troops advanced further into the town, some of the garrison, sailors, and inhabitants in the western sector of the town closest to the water, escaped on boats across the bay.65 The Calvido noted of that morning: ‘the inhabitants had fled

Lawrence, Dorset Soldier, p. 24.

59

Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 2, p. 494.

60

Collins, Wellington and the Siege of San Sebastian, pp. 184–5, 228–9.

61

See Daly, ‘“The Sacking of a Town is an Abomination”’, p. 168.

62

Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, pp. 121–3.

63

Admiral Stirling’s diary, in Grainger, Royal Navy in the River Plate, p. 213.

64

Walters, Samuel Walters, p. 58.

65

116    G avin Da ly

and abandoned their possessions’.66 This seems truer of the wealthy, ‘Thomas’ Todd of the 71st claiming ‘the better sort of Spanish settlers’ had ‘all left the place before we took it’.67 But whilst civilians may have been thin on the ground, especially in streets nearest the fighting and British advance, the abandoned homes and shops still presented the opportunity for prolonged and systematic plunder. Here, the relatively small number of British soldiers involved in the operation meant that military discipline could be more effectively administered in the aftermath of the storm. The control and surveillance of the troops was also rendered easier by the nature of the urban environment – a grid street pattern – and the fact that daylight was dawning when the troops gained possession of the town; although other stormed towns with those particular street patterns and daylight contexts were not spared sack, whether San Sebastian or sieges in India. Thirdly, other strategic considerations may have also been at play in Auchmuty’s desire to spare the town, although the connections cannot be established with certainty. Only three days after the fall of Montevideo, Auchmuty used the fact that the inhabitants had not been harmed as part of a strategy to persuade the High Court of Audienza, which had assumed authority in Buenos Aires, to release from captivity Beresford and the 71st Regiment. In the opening sentence of his letter to the Court, Auchmuty appealed to the ‘very extraordinary lenity shown to the inhabitants, even at the moment of assault’, going on to describe the good treatment of the prisoners taken at Montevideo: ‘acts of lenity like these sooth the horrors of war among civilized nations’. In the same letter, however, this appeal to moderation, civility, and honour, was undercut by a threat to send the Montevidean prisoners of war to Britain, and to march upon Buenos Aires, if the 71st Regiment was not released – the Spanish authorities remained unmoved.68 It may also be the case that winning over the inhabitants, and not wanting a repeat of the popular armed mobilisation that Beresford had earlier encountered in Buenos Aires, may have factored into Auchmuty’s thinking on preventing plunder after the storm. Buenos Aires and Montevideo were always considered by the British as the two axes on which the whole success of the campaign depended.69 So, too, were British commanders concerned with reading and reporting on the public mood, as to its

‘From the Illustrious the Calvido, to Colonel Gore Browne’, in Notes on the viceroyalty, p. 280.

66

Anon., An Authentic Narrative, p. 33.

67

Auchmuty to the High Court of Audienza, Montevideo, 6 February 1807, and High Court of Audienza to Sterling and Auchmuty, Buenos Aires, 2 March 1807, in Whitelocke, Trial at Large, appendix II, pp. 53–6.

68

Grainger, Royal Navy in the River Plate, p. 6.

69

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    117

disposition towards the British, the Spanish Crown, and independence.70 Once in possession of Montevideo, the British produced a bilingual propaganda newspaper, The Southern Star, which ran for seven issues in May and July 1807 – extolling the virtues of British constitutionalism, religious tolerance, and free trade.71 Suffice to say, Auchmuty was never convinced they made any inroads amongst the Montevideans, writing to Wyndham in early March: ‘My present acquisition is too important to be left slightly defended; and I am sensible that every inhabitant within the walls is an enemy, and ready to commit any desperate act, if the least encouragement is given.’72 In the end, however, the sparing of Montevideo was above all understood by the British themselves as an exemplar of British values – of ‘honour’, ‘humanity’, ‘character’ and ‘orderly behaviour’. Lieutenant Samuel Walters of the Royal Navy who was present at the siege was among those who praised Auchmuty’s conduct: The conduct of Sir Samuel Auchmuty was such that, agreeable to the rule of war any place taken by assault everything in it taken is prize property, but notwithstanding, his conduct, lenient as it was, merits the esteem of even those who might lose by it. He gave up all private property …73

Auchmuty himself praised the troops: The gallantry displayed by the troops during the assault, and their forbearance and orderly behaviour in the town, speak so fully in their praise, that it is unnecessary for me to say how highly I am pleased with their conduct.74

In his post-war recollections, Wilkie was in no doubt about the significance of what had transpired at Montevideo, seeing it as a source of pride: One of the most singular things, and, I may say, that adds a feather to the cap of the troops employed in the attack, is, that it remains perhaps the solitary instance of a town taken by storm in the night, in which no instance of plunder or outrage took place.75

See, for example, Auchmuty to William Wyndham, Montevideo, 6 March 1807, in Whitelocke, Trial at Large, appendix II, pp. 50–3.

70

This was established after Whitelocke’s arrival in Montevideo, with its editor the adjutant-general, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Bradford. The Southern Star was Montevideo’s first ever newspaper; Hughes, British Invasion of the River Plate, p. 150; Grainger, British Campaigns in the South Atlantic, p. 175.

71

Auchmuty to Wyndham, Montevideo, 6 March 1807, in Whitelocke, Trial at Large, appendix II, p. 53.

72

Walters, Samuel Walters, p. 59.

73

Auchmuty, General Order 4 February, in Tucker, Narrative of the Operation, p. 31.

74

Wilkie, ‘Recollections’ (1836), Part 2, p. 495.

75

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This was a sentiment expressed in the British Parliament itself at the time, on 16 April 1807, with Lord Hawkesbury in the House of Lords and Lord Castlereagh in the Commons. Castlereagh brought to the House’s attention remarks made by fellow member, General Phipps, which spoke ‘highly to the honour of humanity and to the character of the British army’.76 For Hawkesbury, this furnished an example of moderation and forebearance, which, I trust, will always be observed by British troops, as well as be imitated by the world in general. Such a conduct is likely to have the most beneficial effects, and deserves the highest degree of commendation.77

Conclusion In the aftermath of the siege, whilst British commentary focused on the heroism, courage and sacrifice of the British stormers, there was nevertheless an important acknowledgement and celebration of the humane treatment of the civilian inhabitants; there was to be no dwelling on the withdrawal of quarter to enemy soldiers. Montevideo was hailed as an aspirational model – about moral virtue, humanity, and restraint, prevailing over laws of war that sanctioned plunder and pillage in the very circumstances in which the town fell. Here was a rare case indeed of a siege storm without a sack. Yet the example was not to be realised in other towns taken by British storm during the Napoleonic Wars – at least as far as Spanish civilians and their property were concerned in the Peninsular War. When Wellington claimed in 1813 that he had never heard of a town taken by storm that was not subsequently plundered, he had conveniently forgotten Montevideo. Yet there was certainly one senior British officer in Spain who did not forget. Lieutenant-Colonel George Bingham was not present at the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo but was disgusted when news reached him of its sack and a rumour that General Craufurd himself had used this to incentivise the men. In a letter to his mother, he mentioned Montevideo in this very context: It is said, however that General Craufurd promised it to our men, to encourage them, but certainly this need not have been done. Sir Samuel Auchmuty carried Castlereagh’s address to the House of Commons, 16 April 1807, in Tucker, Narrative of the Operation, p. 55.

76

Hawkesbury’s address to the House of Lords, 16 April 1807, in Tucker, Narrative of the Operation, p. 47. There were often variations in the reportage of parliamentary speeches and debates in this era, although Hansard and other contemporary newspaper reports capture the same broad sentiment of Hawkesbury and Castlereagh on Montevideo as reported in Tucker; see PD, 16 April 1807, vol. 9, col. 476; PD, 16 April 1807, vol. 9, cols 478, 480; The Morning Post, 17 April 1807, p. 2.

77

The 1 8 0 7 Sie g e of Montevideo    119

Monte Video without it, and it must be surely most disgraceful to plunder our allies.78

The complex issues around the British sacks of the Peninsular War lie outside the scope of this chapter.79 Bingham, though, was far from alone within Wellington’s army in expressing a deep sense of shame and moral outrage at the behaviour of British troops in the aftermath of the storms of the Peninsular War. Sentimental soldiers were casting an increasingly critical gaze on the age-old custom of sack, equally celebrating its absence at Montevideo and condemning its persistence in the Peninsula.

Gareth Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler: The Peninsula and St Helena Diaries and Letters of Sir George Ridout Bingham 1809–21 (Barnsley, 2004), p. 97.

78

See Daly, ‘“The Sacking of a Town is an Abomination”’.

79

6 ‘Something-to-smoke, at the right time, is a godsend’: Voluntary Action and the Provision of Cigarettes to Soldiers during the First World War1 Mich a el R ee ve

T

he First World War enabled a boom in the use of tobacco products in Britain, particularly the cheap, mass-produced cigarette. The economies of scale made possible by machine automation of cigarette production – beginning in the late nineteenth century – led to the rise of a mass market for cigarettes in particular.2 Wartime conditions enabled a continuation and entrenchment of smoking habits among broader swathes of the British population than had been possible before. Not only was war good for business, cigarettes were widely seen as an essential part of the combatants’ kit, alongside food and clothing. Existing national and international organisations, from the charitable humanitarian Red Cross Society to patriotic groups such as the Over-Seas League, introduced ‘comforts funds’ to provide soldiers and sailors with better quality food, warm clothing, sports equipment, gramophone records and games. Cigarettes and tobacco were also a central component of these efforts, with specialist ‘tobacco funds’ springing up all over Britain, organised by similarly established organisations, as well as under the auspices of national and provincial newspapers, factories, public houses, social clubs, trade unions, Chambers of Commerce, churches and women’s voluntary societies. With the tacit involvement of the state through relaxed import and export rules, tobacco firms also provided products direct to soldiers fighting abroad, in many cases cutting out small retailers who relied on an ever-shrinking, loyal customer base, which was badly affected by military recruitment.

I acknowledge the kind and generous support of the Society for the Study of Labour History, who provided a research grant to visit the National Archives, Kew, in summer 2019. The materials consulted form the bedrock of this chapter.

1

Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800–2000 (Manchester, 2000), p. 83.

2

Volunta ry A ct ion a n d t he Provi sion of Cig a r et te s    121

For some, the importance of tobacco dwarfed the basic necessities of life – food, warmth and shelter – getting to the heart of what it meant to be part of a modern ‘total’ conflict. Contemporary debates about the potential negative effects of smoking were elided by the foremost British medical journal The Lancet in October 1914, to underline its special status: We may surely brush aside much prejudice against the use of tobacco when we consider what a source of comfort it is to the sailor and soldier engaged in the nerve-wracking campaign … tobacco must be a real solace and joy when he can find time for this well-earned indulgence.3

Indeed, as Fiona Reid notes, early twentieth-century doctors were already aware of the addictive properties of nicotine, with excessive consumption also linked to the development of heart defects. However, the popularity of smoking, coupled with its assumed soothing properties when in stressful situations – a view shared by a considerable constituency of medical practitioners – meant ‘smoking was the one area of self-medication which neither the military nor the medical authorities attempted to police’.4 In October 1916, for a correspondent to the editor of The Times, using the nom de plume ‘M.D.’, any negative effects tobacco could have on the body were far outweighed by its positive effect on morale. Tobacco was a panacea for the damaging excesses of modern war: Tobacco at the front has a moral value which simply cannot be ignored, and it may be asked whether any ill-effects it possesses are equal to or even comparable with the ill-effects of shock and strain and stress which cannot be eliminated and which tobacco does so much to mitigate.5

Tobacco was a panacea because its application was perceived as necessary in almost all the imaginable social settings embodied by wartime experience, on and off the battlefield. It was essential during the long periods of attrition on the battlefront, as a means of recreation when waiting for action. It was similarly prized as a salve for frayed nerves when an intense battle had passed. It was essential to soldiers convalescing in hospitals away from the front, again possessing a similar social-psychological, quasi-medical quality: ‘To be without a smoke in the casualty clearing stations and in the hospitals is a tragedy. Something-to-smoke, at the right

The Lancet, 3 October 1914, p. 857.

3

Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists (London, 2017), p. 136.

4

The Times, 4 October 1916.

5

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time, is a godsend.’6 The cigarette was perfectly suited to wartime conditions. The spatio-­temporal conditions of modern war can be explained through the cigarette. As Richard Klein notes, the act of smoking allowed the smoker to master a moment in time, to momentarily escape from the horrific and dehumanising conditions of the trenches, of a situation seemingly out of one’s control. It provided a space for individual contemplation or focus, as well as for distraction.7 Furthermore, the cigarette was eminently suited to conditions enabled by trench warfare, as the small tube of paper – whether manually rolled or received from a manufactured pack – was easier to consume and preserve in the ever-changing conditions of trench life.8 According to official estimates, over 96 per cent of British servicemen were smokers by the end of 1914, and domestic consumption steadily rose year-on-year during the war.9 This habit was facilitated by the provision of tobacco and cigarettes in soldiers’ ration packs, in a move that surprised the tobacco industry early on in the conflict, as such a ‘luxury’ item had not been provided on this scale before. As the Tobacco Trade Review commented in September 1914: Hitherto the Government has not shown evidence of providing anything in the nature of luxuries for Mr. Thomas [Tommy] Atkins when he has been on active service, but apparently the authorities have now formed the opinion that the soldier requires something more than fighting machinery and food.10

The daily ration, at this time, consisted of two ounces of Capstan tobacco, direct from the manufacturer W.D. & H.O. Wills. This dwarfed the French ration of twenty grams (0.8 ounces) and the German provision of two cigars and two cigarettes per day, though this latter offer was more varied, including the additional choice of either loose tobacco or snuff. Among the troops of all belligerents, the choice of tobacco product provided in rations and donations reflected the broader smoking culture prevalent in each nation.11 Given the centrality of images of smoking and cigarette advertising in twentieth-­ century visual culture, there are surprisingly few scholarly works in history focused

Liddle Collection, Leeds University Library, LIDDLE/WW2/NAVY/033, Over-seas League Tobacco Fund donor card (1940s example). See Imperial War Museum (IWM), LBY K. 12/882, for a 1917 example.

6

Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (London, 1995), pp. 144–5.

7

Dorothee Brantz, ‘Environments of Death: Trench Warfare on the Western Front, 1914– 18’, in War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age, ed. Charles E. Closmann (College Station, TX, 2009), p. 70.

8

Klein, Cigarettes, pp. 144–5.

9

Tobacco Trade Review (hereafter TTR), 1 September 1914.

10

Reid, Medicine, p. 136.

11

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on the relation of smoking and particularly cigarette consumption to modern war.12 Similarly, though historians of charity and philanthropy have explored wartime comforts funds and other fundraising efforts, the importance of tobacco within the wider movement has been, at best, understated and generally overlooked as a central facet of wartime voluntary action.13 Similarly, historians of smoking – as well as social and cultural historians of the First World War – have explored the role of comforts funds in cementing the ubiquity of cigarettes in the war context, but have not connected this with the processes and machinations of the central state in facilitating the habit at home and in theatres of war.14 Furthermore, while there is a rich literature on the role of the First World War in drawing the state into welfare provision – a result of the accelerated centralising pressures of the conflict – the provision of tobacco has not been viewed as a welfare issue, despite its status in the period as a ‘necessity which must be supplied’.15 The wartime discourse on the social, psychological and medicinal qualities of tobacco in many ways allowed smoking to be presented as an act akin to eating, drinking or sleeping: the tireless energies of volunteers, military authorities and the state combined to cement it as an ingredient in soldierly welfare.16 Modern war and smoking are intimately intertwined, bound up with both the lived experience and cultural representation of conflict: a phenomenon exemplified by the First World War. In the context of a now firmly established mass market, the use of tobacco to signify independence, individuality and taste – a Matthew Hilton, ‘Leisure, Politics, and the Consumption of Tobacco in Britain since the Nineteenth Century’, in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford, 2002), p. 320; Peter Gurney, The Making of Consumer Culture in Modern Britain (London, 2017), pp. 67, 78.

12

Peter Grant, Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War: Mobilizing Charity (London, 2014), pp. 19–21; Peter Grant, ‘“An Infinity of Personal Sacrifice”: The Scale and Nature of Charitable Work in Britain during the First World War’, War & Society, 27:2 (2008), 67–88; Frank Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London, 1988), pp. 74–9; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 227–33.

13

Hilton, Smoking, pp. 96–7; Michael Reeve, ‘Special Needs, Cheerful Habits: Smoking and the Great War in Britain, 1914–18’, Cultural and Social History, 13:4 (2016), 483–501.

14

St. Andrew’s Citizen, 20 April 1918; Patrick Joyce and Chandra Mukerji, ‘The State of Things: State History and Theory Reconfigured’, Theory and Society, 46:1 (2017), 1–19, pp. 5, 11–15; Pierre Purseigle, ‘The First World War and the Transformations of the State’, International Affairs, 90:2 (2014), 249–64; Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York, 2010), p. 78; Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘Total War’, in Total War and Historical Change: Europe 1914–1955, ed. Arthur Marwick, Wendy Simpson and Clive Emsley (Maidenhead, 2008), p. 35; David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 5.

15

Reid, Medicine, pp. 136–7.

16

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Victorian liberal identity – was transformed into a device for the cultivation of collective identities, which could aid in the patriotic mobilisation of civilian volunteers and military volunteers.17 As Matthew Hilton has explored, from the late nineteenth century, consuming a changeable array of tobacco products – from snuff to the ‘bourgeois-liberal cigar’ –­ acted as a cipher for the expression of differing conceptions of modernity and liberal values in Europe.18 In addition, war has been seen by historians and cultural critics as central to the dizzying proliferation and spread of modern forms of smoking culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.19 This includes the Crimean War (1853–56) and, in the late twentieth century, the first Gulf War (1990–91), with emphasis placed on rising smoking levels among naval and military personnel.20 In more recent public health studies related to twenty-first-century conflicts, despite generally falling rates among military constituencies – in line with the general population – younger, working-class male recruits still presented higher daily rates of cigarette consumption.21 Popular books on smoking, published early in the twentieth century, even noted the propensity of military leaders, including Otto von Bismarck and Napoleon III, for tobacco products when suffering from frayed ‘nerves’ on the battlefield.22 Indeed, the latter was said to have been quieted by an ‘enormous consumption of cigarettes’ during the Battle of Sedan (1–2 September 1870).23 The centrality of smoking to the soldier’s well-being when on active service was reiterated in a panoply of local newspaper-sponsored tobacco funds situated the length and breadth of Britain, not least one based in the East Yorkshire city of Hull: Hilton, ‘Leisure’, p. 325.

17

Matthew Hilton, ‘Advertising, the Modernist Aesthetic of the Marketplace? The Cultural Relationship between the Tobacco Manufacturer and the “Mass” of Consumers in Britain, 1870–1940’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (Oxford, 2001), p. 45.

18

Mary C. Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY, 2013), pp. 70–5; Michael Reeve, ‘Tobacco and Smoking Culture’ (2018), International Encyclopedia of the First World War, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.11265 (accessed 6 August 2019); Klein, Cigarettes, ch. 5 (‘The Soldier’s Friend’).

19

James Walton (ed.), The Faber Book of Smoking (London, 2000), p. 76; Elizabeth A. Smith and Ruth E. Malone, ‘“Everywhere the Soldier Will Be”: Wartime Tobacco Production in the US Military’, American Journal of Public Health, 99:9 (2009), 1595–602.

20

N. T. Fear et al., ‘Smoking among Males in the UK Armed Forces: Changes over a Seven Year Period’, Preventive Medicine, 50 (2010), 282–4.

21

G. L. Apperson, The Social History of Smoking (London, 1914), p. 319; Egon Corti, A History of Smoking (London, 1931), p. 256.

22

Corti, Smoking, p. 256.

23

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A pipe of tobacco or a cigarette in times like these indeed seems to be the solvent of all the British soldier’s cares, and to deprive him of a smoke, for even a few days, would be unthinkable, if we only realised the debt we owed him.24

This sentiment also clearly connected the provision of tobacco with ideas of sacrifice. Civilians owed a debt of gratitude to those serving overseas and sending the gift of cigarettes was a way of signalling this, since literal repayment was not possible.25 Commenting on a forthcoming ‘Fag Day’ fundraising event in May 1918, the Hampshire Advertiser similarly underlined the social function of tobacco-giving for civilians: ‘It is to be hoped that the [tobacco] fund will very considerably benefit from Saturday’s appeal, for it is the only way that many citizens can show their appreciation for all that our fighters achieve for us.’26 While providing a source of ‘useful’, patriotic work for non-combatants, the provision of tobacco also broke down any perceived boundaries between the fronts, maintaining a point of continuity with the pre-war civilian lives of the soldiers: The first thing we do for a friend is to offer our fag-case, and every fighting man who has been to the front, wounded or not, is the greatest friend we could possibly have, and the least we can do is to empty our fag-cases into his hand, and then empty our pockets to buy him more.27

The requirement to make oneself ‘useful’ by providing comforts was foregrounded in one of the most high-profile comforts funds, run by the Emergency Committee of the Empress Club (an exclusive ladies’ club established in 1897) in partnership with the Red Cross Society.28 Civilians at home were advised in an appeal of September 1914 on ‘How to be Useful in Wartime’, by providing items for use in ‘Soldier’s Packets’, which would be dispatched to fighting men. These would contain, in addition to socks, chocolate, ointment and writing materials, ‘a packet of tobacco (packed in thick tinfoil), cigarette papers or a pipe’.29 The ‘emergency’ status of this scheme, and its connection with the foremost humanitarian aid organisation in Britain, suggests that tobacco and its accoutrements were seen, even by these auspicious organisations, as vitally important components of military welfare. Indeed, women’s voluntary action was, from the outset, coordinated by already extant medical support agencies, including Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs). Established The Hull Daily News and Sports Express Tobacco Fund for Hull & District Heroes advertisement, Hull Daily News, 25 May 1915.

24

Gregory, Last Great War, p. 112.

25

Hampshire Advertiser, 25 May 1918.

26

Ibid.

27

Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture (Oxford, 2006), p. 20.

28

The Times, 5 September 1914.

29

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in 1909, VADs were jointly administered by the British Red Cross and Order of St John.30 There may also be a connection between the likely social composition of the club’s middle- and upper-class membership and their affinity for tobacco. As Penny Tinkler notes, smoking at this early point in the war was associated more readily with women of a higher social status, though this would change as the conflict wore on, as war-related occupations and uniformed service for women became more common across the social spectrum.31 As a counterpoint, there is evidence of specific concerns about tobacco provision in the generally working-class social space of the public house (explored in detail below).32 Pubs in the early twentieth century were, after all, important hubs for working-class sociability and communality, facilitating the consumption of tobacco products – including their sale – alongside that of beer and cheap food.33 Tobacco-related messages in the arts and popular media could be useful in communicating the need for community resilience and mobilisation, to spur on the voluntary action of civilians and, in turn, push eligible men towards the recruiting centre. Often, cigarettes and tobacco were the conduit between the ‘fighting’ and ‘home’ fronts, underlining the continuity of pre-war civilian quotidian practices within the unpredictable and changeable mire of the trenches.34 Such messages could also convey expressions of local identity and solidarity with erstwhile townsmen and family members. Local tobacco funds – provided with regular column inches and advertising space in the local press – were the means for legitimate, patriotic action in aid of the war effort.35 Though there were prominent national organisations with tobacco funds – including some with official government endorsement, such as the Smokes Soldiers and Sailors Fund – the majority were community-based and stated firmly that they were for the service of local men and local men only. Others, though making a similar local link, were more general in outlook.36 Peter Grant, ‘Voluntarism and the Impact of the First World War’, in The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society, ed. Matthew Hilton and James McKay (Oxford, 2011), p. 35.

30

Tinkler, Smoke Signals, pp. 24–6.

31

Diane Kirkby, ‘“Beer, Women and Grub”: Pubs, Food and the Industrial Working Class’, in Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History, ed. Diane Kirkby and Tanja Luckins (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 139.

32

Kirkby, ‘Pubs’, p. 139; Hilton, ‘Leisure’, p. 323.

33

Martin Brown, ‘A Pulverised Landscape? Landscape-Scale Destruction and the Western Front during the Great War 1914–18’, in The Archaeology of Destruction, ed. Lila Rakoczy (Newcastle, 2008), p. 196.

34

Prochaska, Voluntary Impulse, p. 76.

35

Peter Grant, Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War: Mobilizing Charity (London, 2014), p. 20.

36

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With reference to government records, newspaper advertising and the tobacco trade press, the first portion of this chapter provides an analysis of the infrastructure and supply chains required to make the smooth running of tobacco funds possible, including the numerical data related to the amount of tobacco-focused funds, against generic ‘comforts funds’.37 The latter were often more concerned with providing luxury foodstuffs – improving on the dire quality of rations – woollen clothing and socks, and entertainments in the form of gramophone records and sports equipment.38 However, some commentators suggested that, among British servicemen, cigarettes were more prized than food, as the stresses and privations of war made tobacco ‘“essentially an essential”’. In this view, the government was duty-bound to ‘take no steps which would endanger Tommy’s tobacco supply’.39 As will be demonstrated, the provision of many millions of cigarettes and many tonnes of tobacco to troops involved the close partnership of the central state with voluntary organisations, in addition to the philanthropy of tobacco companies and other private enterprises. Secondly, this chapter also assesses the social and cultural work involved in the establishment and promotion of tobacco and other comforts funds, focusing particularly on the efforts of newspapers and advertisers. It argues that, given the importance placed on the social-psychological and cultural functions of smoking as a practice, in the context of the inhumane and often horrific conditions of combat life – most infamously in the trenches of the Western Front – the already prevalent value placed on tobacco products was raised almost exponentially. Indeed, the war could be said to have cemented the popularity of cigarette smoking across the belligerent countries, warranting gargantuan efforts by voluntary groups, civil society organisations, concerned individuals and families to supply the ‘special need of the fighting man’.40 With regard to the period in focus here, qualitative and empirical economic data related to trade and consumption of tobacco suggest that consumption was vastly accelerated by the onset of war in 1914.41 Building upon work related to First World War military consumption, logistics and twentieth-century smoking Ibid.

37

Rachel Duffett, ‘A Taste of Army Life: Food, Identity and the Rankers of the First World War’, Cultural and Social History, 9:2 (2012), 251–2.

38

TTR, 1 March 1917.

39

Reeve, ‘Special Needs’, p. 494.

40

Rosemary Elliot, ‘From Tobacco in the War to the War on Tobacco: Smoking in Britain and Germany from c. 1900 to 1945’, in Health and Citizenship: Political Cultures of Health in Modern Europe, ed. Frank Huisman and Harry Oosterhuis (London, 2014), p. 145; Hilton, Smoking, p. 126.

41

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culture, this chapter combines a close reading of visual and textual culture with analysis of the economics and governance of wartime charitable tobacco provision. In so doing, it attempts to contribute to historical perspectives on wartime relations between military service personnel and civilians, while deepening our understanding of the prominent place reserved for tobacco in charitable and voluntary action during the war.

‘Comforts for His Majesty’s Forces’: The Wartime Context of Charitable Tobacco Provision While much of the activity related to the provision of tobacco and other comforts remained voluntary in nature throughout the war, just as elsewhere in British society, the central state increasingly intervened in the processes of manufacturing and distribution. November 1915 saw the creation of the position of Director General of Voluntary Organisations (DGVO), held by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Edward Ward and situated at the War Office.42 Ward’s appointment would have been no surprise to colleagues and those familiar with his career, given an earlier involvement in military provisioning and welfare. He had been Chief Supply Officer (Assistant Adjutant-General) in Natal during the Boer War (1899–1902) and Permanent Secretary at the War Office from 1901. Through this work he developed a number of post-war welfare schemes for soldiers, including the Union Jack Club for soldiers passing through London, founded in 1902.43 He was also Chairman of the Committee on Civil Employment of Ex-Soldiers and Sailors from 1906. The role of the DGVO scheme was to coordinate charitable activity, particularly the supply of comforts and medical supplies, reducing waste in manpower and materials.44 Business management principles were to be applied in an area which had suffered from the reproduction of effort, inconsistent distribution processes and, in some cases, corrupt practices. However, in the case of misuse of funds or extravagant organisational overheads, Ward’s powers were too limited to achieve more than the rational organisation of voluntary action, which worked well when applied to ‘well-organised, altruistic groups’, but was less effective in curtailing abuses of philanthropic or charitable principles.45

Grant, ‘Voluntarism’, p. 37.

42

C. Harris and J. Lunt, ‘Ward, Sir Edward Willis Duncan, first baronet (1853–1928), army officer’ (3 January 2008), ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36727 (accessed 17 September 2019).

43

Grant, Philanthropy, p. 73.

44

Grant, ‘Voluntarism’, p. 40.

45

Volunta ry A ct ion a n d t he Provi sion of Cig a r et te s    129

Long before the introduction of the DGVO scheme, there were significant discussions at Customs and Excise on the delivery of tobacco, duty-free, to troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) stationed at home and abroad. Partly prompted as it was by correspondence from civilian retailers, this demonstrated significant state involvement in tobacco provision – aiding civilians wishing to provide gifts of tobacco – aside from the standard rations servicemen received. Despite steady rises in excise duty on the staple British imports of tobacco, tea and alcohol during the war, consumption of tobacco products at home and in the field did not markedly diminish. Indeed, in the context of wider economic contraction and stagnation in areas such as coal production and agriculture, tobacco provided a steady stream of government revenue, despite wide-ranging schemes that provided tobacco duty-free to various wartime constituencies.46 The continuing buoyancy of the trade during the conflict even surprised industry commentators. Given that tobacco leaf was imported from neutral countries, reductions in imports of manufactured cigarettes from continental Europe did not significantly affect sales statistics, even with the disruption caused by the onset of the conflict: In these days of impending new taxation, unemployment and distress some curtailment in such an article of consumption as tobacco, falling within the category of luxuries, might be expected. But so far the actual fact is directly the opposite. The normal quantity of tobacco retained for home use ranges round 8,200,000 lbs. – the average monthly clearance for last year – but for September this year [1914] the figure reached was 8,364,056 lbs. […] The smoker is evidently just ‘carrying on’ as usual …47

The supply of duty-free tobacco was an established custom for servicemen in the Royal Navy, and was supposedly reserved for those at sea but, over time, had become increasingly freely enjoyed as more naval men became housed in barracks or ‘hulks ashore’.48 By October 1918, this custom was seen as increasingly untenable owing to cost and the level of appeals from disgruntled non-smoking men, leading to calls for a clearer set of rules: ‘The Navy man would then know where he stood in regard to tobacco’.49 Correspondence from the Merchandise Manager of London department store Selfridge & Co. to the enquiries department of the General Post Office Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett, ‘The United Kingdom during World War I: Business as Usual?’, in The Economics of World War I, ed. Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 214, 217.

46

TTR, 1 November 1914.

47

TNA, ADM 116/1860, ‘Service Tobacco for ratings of the “Vernon” moved ashore to the Gun Wharf, Portsmouth’, 5 October 1915.

48

TNA, ADM 116/1860, F. S. Parry (Chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise) to Admiral Sir H. Tothill, 5 October 1918.

49

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(GPO) on 21 August 1914 suggests there was a degree of pressure from below for free-flowing tobacco exports to servicemen, even early in the war: ‘We have received many requests from customers who have relatives with the Expeditionary Forces as to whether we can forward them tobacco from Bond […]’.50 Through the bonded warehouse system, tobacco could be held free from the payment of duty and, within the accepted warehousing period, exported duty-free. As such, special provision was made for BEF servicemen, where tobacco products sent to France through the Army Post Office, acting as intermediary, would not be subject to export duties.51 On entry, the products, if they were clearly marked as intended for a member of the BEF, were not subject to import duty. As the Morning Post reported in late August 1914: The French Government have agreed to admit free of import duty any postal or other parcels containing tobacco, cigars, and cigarettes sent for the use of British troops at the front. No public declaration need therefore be made in this country before despatch, and the public may rest assured that their friends at the front will not be called upon to pay any duty on receipt of parcels.52

A green label was to be affixed to packages with this status, ensuring they were properly handled by the Army Post Office; they were to be treated in the same way as products posted directly from the warehouse.53 Later in the war, following the establishment of the Tobacco and Matches Control Board, advertisements in the trade and popular press reframed the green band as a gimmick. In the case of Carreras’ Black Cat brand, the band was used to signify their product’s exceptional value for money: they were extra large packets containing higher levels of tobacco.54 The band, therefore, conferred a special status in a similar way to its use by Customs and Excise. As well as a source of good value in the context of declining tobacco supplies during 1917 and 1918, they were also a symbol of continuity with pre-war non-combatant identities, as well as the probable post-war identities based on the experience of combat: The soldier of to-day was the pre-war civilian. After the war he will return to civil life carrying with him all sorts of likes and dislikes, acquired during the war.

TNA, CUST 49/320, Frank Chitham to Enquiries Dept., GPO, 21 August 1914.

50

Ibid., ‘Tobacco: Duty free delivery from Bond for British Expeditionary Force’, Secretary of GPO to the Secretary of Customs and Excise, 17 August 1914; TNA, CUST 143/102, ‘The Drawback System’.

51

Morning Post, 31 August 1914.

52

TNA, CUST 49/320, Customs and Excise, Circular to Parcel Post Ports, 29 August 1914.

53

Evening Despatch, 27 September 1917; TTR, 1 April 1917.

54

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The average Tommy hasn’t very much spare cash, and consequently he knows to the last fraction how to get the uttermost value for what little he has.55

Implicit in official measures was the intrinsic value placed on tobacco in the war context, acknowledging that ration packs would not be sufficient to the needs of soldiers and sailors even at this early stage in the conflict. They also represent significant inroads into further direct intervention in the wartime economy, a process already underway before 1914 but accelerated by the conflict: a perspective well established in the historiography.56 There were a number of significant points during the war at which state intervention in tobacco supply was extended and deepened. In addition to the introduction of the DGVO scheme, the War Charities Act 1916 aimed at the registration of all charitable organisations established during the war, in order take account of the war charities in operation and prevent fraudulent activities.57 This affected comforts funds as much as the panoply of other forms of charitable organisation. Measures in early 1916 to restrict the import of cigars and tobacco to allow the freer movement of food raised the spectre of nationalisation and the introduction of a state monopoly on tobacco production and trade. As reported in the tobacco trade press, Sir Leo Chiozza Money, Liberal Member of Parliament for East Northamptonshire, spoke in favour of such a move in February 1916.58 For Money, the profitability of the industry, coupled with the success of the trade despite relatively high tax receipts, suggested that full government control was an eminently logical step: ‘What we ought to do is take over the whole trade and turn it into a great national business, yielding enormous profits to the State, and yet giving the smoker the best article in the world at a reasonable price.’59 While this never came to pass – direct state intervention was thoroughgoing but seen to be limited to the exigencies of the war – the fact that such a radical policy was mooted speaks to the extent of intervention already in place by this point. As Broadberry and Howlett have noted, direct intervention in the economy was ad hoc and particularly reactive in the realm of food production and import, where direct intervention was not introduced until TTR, 1 February 1918.

55

Patrick Joyce and Chandra Mukerji, ‘The State of Things: State History and Theory Reconfigured’, Theory and Society, 46:1 (2017), p. 15; Barry Supple, ‘War Economies’, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. II: The State, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 295–324; Pierre Purseigle, ‘The First World War and the Transformations of the State’, International Affairs, 90:2 (2014), 249–64; David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 296.

56

Grant, Philanthropy, p. 90.

57

TTR, 1 March 1916.

58

Chester Chronicle, 19 February 1916.

59

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late 1916, following severe shortages and a spate of domestic unrest. However, by 1917, some two-fifths of national income was comprised of government spending on goods and services.60 A more concerted effort to control tobacco supplies, affecting both businesses and voluntary groups in some measure, was the advent of the Tobacco Control Board in May 1917 (Tobacco and Matches Control Board from September). Under the chairmanship of stockbroker and former soldier Lancelot Smith, this was a response to significantly diminished supplies of tobacco in British warehouses because of shipping losses. Even with state control of merchant shipbuilding from 1916, pre-war levels were not attained during the span of the conflict due to Admiralty demands for warships.61 The intent of this organisation – a subsidiary of the Board of Trade – was clear from the outset: ‘The Board immediately on its appointment took control of all the tobacco in the country’, controlling directly the release of stocks from bond and closely regulating the export of tobacco to other countries, in order to safeguard domestic levels.62 From 1 June 1917, there was also direct control of prices to prevent war profiteering, within the framework of the central emergency legislation that had been in place since the start of hostilities, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and its incumbent regulations.63 Significant rises in consumer demand throughout the war also affected stock levels, leading to the distribution of apologetic circulars to wholesale customers by prominent tobacco firms, including W.D. & H.O. Wills, John Player & Sons (both Imperial Tobacco Company subsidiaries) and Carreras.64 Fundamentally, the aim of the Board was to ensure all actors within the tobacco production and distribution process received stocks, ensuring both the domestic trade and servicemen overseas were supplied. For the latter purpose, the Board arranged for the import of 10,000 tonnes of supplementary tobacco from the British American Tobacco Company, directing it to the armed forces, hospitals and for export.65 The Tobacco Broadberry and Howlett, ‘Business as Usual?’, pp. 14, 224.

60

TTR, 1 May 1917; Broadberry and Howlett, ‘Business as Usual?’, pp. 211, 214; Lancelot Hugh Smith was a stockbroker, during 1914 a lieutenant in the Westminster Dragoons and in 1915 a principal delegate in the British diplomatic mission to Sweden. See Judy Slinn, ‘Smith, Lancelot Grey Hugh’ (23 September 2004). ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/50270 (accessed 19 September 2019).

61

TNA, BT 72/1/TandMCB14, ‘Tobacco & Matches Control Board’, 5 March 1919.

62

Sydney W. Clarke, ‘The Rule of DORA’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 1:1 (1919), 36–41; Broadberry and Howlett, ‘Business as Usual?’, p. 224.

63

TNA, T 172/250, W.D. & H.O. Wills circular, 26 March 1917; TNA, T 172/250, John Player & Sons circular, 12 March 1917; Carreras Black Cat Extra Large (Green Band) advertisement, TTR, 1 February 1918.

64

TNA, BT 72/1/TandMCB14, ‘Tobacco & Matches Control Board’, 5 March 1919.

65

Volunta ry A ct ion a n d t he Provi sion of Cig a r et te s    133

and Matches Control Board had originally arranged for 15,000 tonnes, transported aboard two chartered ships, but one was sunk in early 1918.66 A series of Tobacco Restriction Orders and Matches Orders were enacted throughout 1917, the latter being first introduced on 8 September 1917 (amended 31 December) along similar lines to the Tobacco Orders. Prices were to be fixed and imports and wholesale stocks regulated, with manufacturers effectively pooling supplies for the duration of the war.67 The army and navy were to take precedence in supply, with the remaining stock then being ‘apportioned to each district on the basis of the present population, and will be circulated through the normal trade channels’. Consumers were encouraged to exercise economy in their use of matches to enable sufficient levels of stock to be maintained, while retailers were to ensure fair distribution among their customers. This would ensure equitable management of shipping space and the allocation of stocks from local factories would reduce strain on railway transport.68 By the close of 1917, the Restriction of Imports Committee of the Ministry of Shipping recommended that ‘in 1918 tobacco should be imported for the troops alone and … civilians should be restricted to the consumption of the existing stocks’.69 Regular rises in tobacco duty had not significantly affected consumption, owing to a number of factors directly related to war conditions. First, increased duty in 1914–15 was, according to Customs and Excise, ‘generally accepted as a necessary contribution to the expense of the war’. Further increases in 1917–18 did not have a marked impact on consumption, owing to rising real wages for working-class civilians, including women, and the popularity of smoking amongst servicemen. The yield gained from tobacco duties demonstrated during the period is testament to its economic as well as significant social-cultural value: from £18 million in 1913–14 to £61 million in 1919–20, after three increases in rates during the war.70 A number of tobacco funds and manufacturers boasted of their status as state-endorsed and free from the imposition of duties and, in some cases, postage. In an advertisement in The Times in October 1914, for John Player & Sons, part of the Imperial Tobacco Company conglomerate, Navy Cut tobacco for troops at the front could be supplied duty-free, clearly subject to the duty warehousing system. On the

TNA, T 172/250, Lancelot Smith to the Chancellor of the Exchequer [A. Bonar Law], 7 February 1918.

66

Alexander Pulling (ed.), The Defence of the Realm Manual, 5th edn (London, 1918), pp. 254–63; The Times, 10 September 1917.

67

The Times, 10 September 1917.

68

TNA, T 172/250, Ministry of Shipping to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 3 December 1917.

69

TNA, CUST 143/102, Customs and Excise memorandum, 30 January 1922.

70

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other hand, tobacco sold for supply to troops at home was subject to duties, as it was derived from the ‘usual trade sources’: It would be well if those wishing to send Tobacco to our Soldiers would remember those still in Great Britain. There are thousands of Regulars and Territorials awaiting orders, and in sending a present now you are assured of reaching your man.

What is especially notable here is the grouping of a number of advertisements, including some smaller independent manufacturers and retailers, under the heading ‘Smoking Comforts for our Troops’.71 This suggests that commercial entities engaged with the wider culture of voluntary effort and charitable giving from an early point in the war, demonstrating a propensity to bypass the traditional retailer to provide tobacco to servicemen. Indeed, this fact was a source of consternation for many small tobacconists, who saw the major tobacco firms to be undermining their conventional role as distributer to consumers. This also, of course, complicated retailers’ involvement in the processes of voluntary giving, potentially preventing any commercial benefits from promoting comforts provision. This was the subject of frequent articles in the Tobacco Trade Review, expressing concern regarding the encroachment of both the central state and Big Tobacco into retailing. This was despite trade remaining consistently healthy during the early months of the war, growing year on year as more people took up the habit, in addition to civilians purchasing more than usual in order to send it abroad.72 In May 1915, the tobacco trade in Leeds was said to be buoyant despite a significantly reduced customer base: ‘[S]peaking broadly, the loss of custom thus experienced has been amply made up by the liberal purchases by wives and sisters and sweethearts of parcels to be sent through the post’.73 Even the destructiveness of war could be turned to the advantage of the trade. In February 1915, a Portsmouth tobacconist was reported to be displaying ‘war relics’ in his shop window, items brought home from the front by his son: ‘These include bandoliers, belts, regimental accessories of various kinds taken from German prisoners and dead at various times.’74 Reports in early 1915 stated that October and November 1914 had seen record levels of home tobacco consumption, rising from 9 million lbs to 9.5 million; a trend explained by tobacco being both an ‘article of luxury and need’. In July 1914, the figure for home consumption had stood at a still-healthy 8.6 million lbs.75 Indeed, tobacco was seen The Times, 30 October 1914.

71

TTR, 1 January 1915; TTR, 1 January 1916.

72

TTR, 1 May 1915.

73

TTR, 1 February 1915.

74

TTR, 1 September 1914.

75

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to buck broader trends towards economic downturn as a result of rising living costs and restricted home and foreign markets, owing to its many perceived intrinsic medicinal, social and cultural properties, including the ‘sedative influence of tobacco on the nerves’ and the propensity of the ‘press and other agencies [to popularise] the weed as a solace and comfort to the men at the front’.76 Still, there were legitimate concerns among retailers that the larger firms and conglomerates – foremost being the Imperial Tobacco Company and British American Tobacco – were undermining high street trade. The energetic efforts of voluntary bodies to provide tobacco were seen to contribute to this situation, as export laws meant that only licensed manufacturers could send on their stocks duty-free: ‘Many tobacconists have felt somewhat slighted in being passed over by local bodies, newspaper folk and philanthropists in giving orders direct to the manufacturers for tobacco, cigars, cigarettes and pipes.’ In order for a tobacconist to extend a similar service to the consumer, they would have to attain a ‘manufacturer’s license and enter into bond – formalities which to most tobacconists sound formidable and expensive’.77 In any case, by August 1915, tobacconists were taking a more active role as an intermediary in the supply of tobacco to troops, with many more civilians buying cigarettes from shops themselves before sending them on to France. This was possible because of a reduction in postage costs for packets of tobacco sent abroad.78 High-profile tobacco funds organised by newspapers, including The People, were seen by some to threaten the continued existence of small tobacconists. The People scheme – accompanied by a perversely idyllic-looking image of a Tommy, with bandaged head, smoking in a rural setting – encouraged readers to order differing amounts of Woodbine cigarettes and Players’ Navy Cut tobacco, the sending of which would be facilitated by the newspaper upon receipt of correspondence and payment, including details of the ‘“Tommy” to whom you desire the parcel to be sent’, their regiment and location; 2s 6d (£7.37 today)79 could purchase a package of 150 Woodbines and 4 oz of tobacco, while 5s (£14.75) would provide 500 Woodbines. Interestingly, and worrying for tobacconists, the typical retail price was included in the scheme’s advertisement as an inducement to get involved: 250 Woodbines purchased through the tobacco fund would cost 2s 6d, almost 2s cheaper than in ‘retail shops at home’.80 Many other similar schemes were devised along the same lines by national and provincial titles. This included the tobacco fund TTR, 1 January 1916.

76

TTR, 1 November 1914.

77

TTR, 1 August 1915.

78

National Archives Currency Converter, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter.

79

The People, 27 September 1914.

80

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of the Birmingham Daily Gazette, whose offer included 1s, 2s 6d, and 3s options. Where this scheme differed was in its insistence on sending packages to ‘Midland regiments’, in addition to individual soldiers, implicitly stating a commitment to local patriotism, underlining the mass nature of the conflict and the continuity of civilian place identities in the war context.81 Local shops were keen to introduce their own tobacco funds in order to recoup some of the losses entailed by a diminished customer base, the many men who had been called to the colours.82 One possible solution was the introduction of a ‘common fund for the supply of tobacco and cigarettes to our troops on active service abroad’, to which customers would contribute by buying an additional packet of cigarettes on top of their usual purchases, for dispatch to France.83 The Tobacco Trade Review produced its own display cards for tobacconists’ shops, emulating the form already employed by tobacco manufacturers. In an example from March 1915 – coloured in red, white and blue – customers were encouraged to purchase ‘Cigars for Heroes’, which could be sent, free of duty, to ‘OUR BRAVE DEFENDERS Abroad or Afloat’. This was printed in colour on thick paper within the back pages of the magazine itself.84 Once the customer had ‘enquire[d] within for particulars’, they would be directed to manufacturers such as R.I. Dexter & Sons, whose packing charges of 6d included customs examination and were, as stated in the window card, duty-free.85 In a promotion to retailers in October 1914, Carreras’ popular Black Cat brand included miniature British and Allied flags in its packets, akin to those distributed as tokens at ‘Flag Day’ fundraising events.86 Tobacconists were encouraged to display the advertisement in a ‘conspicuous place’, its content drawing parallels between the patriotic action of soldiers and that of civilians at home: We may not be able to wear the Victoria Cross or the Star of the Garter, but we can all show our loyalty, our enthusiasm, our patriotism by wearing on our breast the flag for which our soldiers and sailors are fighting.87

Birmingham Daily Gazette, 15 March 1916; Helen McCartney, Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), p. 58; Brad Beaven, ‘The Provincial Press, Civic Ceremony and the Citizen-Soldier during the Boer War, 1899–1902: A Study of Local Patriotism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:2 (2009), 207–28.

81

82

TTR, 1 October 1914.

83

Ibid.

84

TTR, 1 March 1915.

85

Ibid.

86

Grant, Philanthropy, p. 172.

87

TTR, 1 October 1914.

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Again, as elsewhere, the purchasing and gifting of tobacco was encouraged as a patriotic act in itself, as a way to ‘repay’ the sacrifice of fighting men. Using sources from the Charity Commission and contemporary pamphlets accounting for charitable activities, Peter Grant has reached a figure of approximately 23,000 war-related charities, including pre-war organisations that shifted to a war footing from 1914. If only war charities newly created after the outbreak of war are included, the figure stands at 17,899;88 3,056 of all war charities registered under the Act were comforts funds. Assuming that funds to collate and distribute ‘Comforts for His Majesty’s Forces’ were only formed after the outbreak of war, 17 per cent of all new war charities were comforts funds of various descriptions, including those both general and specific in scope.89 If we focus only on war charities registered between 1916 and 1920 – following the advent of the War Charities Act – the figure is closer to 28 per cent.90 As Grant has demonstrated, funds focused on comforts for troops and medical supplies predominated in the national effort, at 28 and 25 per cent respectively. This was followed by charities supporting disabled servicemen (13 per cent), relieving distress at home (11 per cent), post-war remembrance/celebration (9 per cent), aid for refugees and overseas (8 per cent), and assistance to prisoners of war (7 per cent).91 The amounts of tobacco and cigarettes distributed through voluntary activity were immense. If we take the total figures of materials distributed by the DGVO scheme – introduced in 1915 to facilitate direct state control of charities owing to reproduction of labour and overlapping distribution – 256,487 lbs of tobacco (roughly 114 tonnes) and over 232,000,000 cigarettes were collected and distributed during the war.92 This is without taking into account the uncoordinated gifts sent in packages to the front by families, in addition to the routine sale and barter of cigarettes among soldiers themselves. Disregarding medical items, such as bandages and dressings, and warm clothing like socks, mufflers and mittens, these official figures suggest that zones of military action were awash with tobacco, and that other ‘non-essential’ items – books and games, for example – were of secondary importance. Within the national total of comforts funds, 5 per cent (154) were expressly tobacco-related, with ‘tobacco’, ‘cigarettes’ or ‘smokes’ mentioned either in the fund’s name or in its stated objective. However, it should be borne in mind that many of the other more general comforts funds are likely to have also taken part Grant, ‘“An Infinity”’, p. 69.

88

TNA, CHAR 4/24, War Charities Act 1916: Index of Charities Registered under the Act to March 1919.

89

Grant, Philanthropy, p. 47.

90

Ibid., pp. 46–7.

91

Ibid., pp. 2, 78–9.

92

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in tobacco-related fundraising, gifting and distribution. Some funds did not state their objectives clearly in the War Charities Register. For example, in New Quay, Cardiganshire (Wales), the Cross Inn Local Soldiers and Sailors Fund stated that it intended to provide ‘Comforts of every kind’.93 Others were similarly unclear due to the use of ambiguous language. The Graziers Inn Soldiers and Sailors Fund Charity, based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, wished to ‘find Tommy and Jack with dainty bits on active service only’.94 While this seems most likely to have been related to foodstuffs, it could easily have also referred to other kinds of consumable item seen to provide a degree of luxury or comfort to service personnel, such as tobacco.

Local Tobacco Funds and Advertising When geographical location is considered, the tobacco funds acquire an additional significance beyond the merely practical, providing insight into the degree of importance placed on tobacco locally, as well as the local class composition of voluntary workers. In the latter case, these details contribute to recent efforts to problematise commonly-held conceptions of wartime charitable giving as the preserve of the middle and upper classes.95 It could be said that many comforts funds, given their basis in local communities – a point often stated explicitly in mission statements and fund names – were forms of ‘mutual aid’, rather than philanthropy. The mass basis of the war combined with the communality of working-class life fostered a kind of supportive, ‘local patriotism’, where the welfare of ‘Our Boys’ was central.96 Furthermore, just as smoking could act as a means for sociability, even between enemies, the provision of tobacco products to troops by civilians could bridge any perceived divide between the fighting and home fronts.97 After all, smoking was a central plank of popular culture in both the civilian and military spheres, a point of continuity made possible by the largely civilian character of the volunteer army. This created a ‘concrescent community’, where exposure to enemy action – be it through combat TNA, CHAR 4/24, War Charities Act Index (hereafter, Index), p. 115.

93

Ibid., p. 319.

94

Nicholas Deakin and Justin David Smith, ‘Labour, Charity and Voluntary Action: The Myth of Hostility’, in Hilton and McKay, pp. 69–93; Justin Davis Smith and Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘The Labour Movement and Voluntary Action in the UK and Australia: A Comparative Perspective’, Labour History, 88 (2005), 105–20; Grant, Philanthropy, p. 7; Grant, ‘“An Infinity”’, p. 72.

95

TNA, CHAR 4/24, Index, pp. 119, 213, 219; Martin Gorsky, ‘Mutual Aid and Civil Society: Friendly Societies in Nineteenth-Century Bristol’, Urban History, 25:3 (1998), 302–22, p. 303.

96

Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1999), p. 154.

97

Volunta ry A ct ion a n d t he Provi sion of Cig a r et te s    139

for soldiers or air raids for civilians – and the continuation of pre-war social and cultural practices enabled the soldier to maintain a semblance of his civilian character. As David Monger defines it, this was a ‘community growing together through shared wartime exertions – linking families and workplaces to their localities, localities to the wider region and nation, the nation to Britain’s “civilized” allies, and civilians with servicemen’.98 As well as through the hundreds of tobacco funds registered in Britain during the First World War, this process was demonstrated through advertising and other forms of popular visual culture, such as postcards and cartoons. Not only was there a panoply of images depicting the smoking ‘Tommy’, positioned to promote smoking among both military and civilian populations, in addition to charitable advertising specifically, the act of smoking could be useful as a social-psychological tool in fraught situations on the battlefield and on the home front.99 For example, during air raids on British cities and in the field of battle, smoking provided an opportunity to boost morale and strengthen fraternal bonds through sharing cigarettes within and between military and social ranks, as well as a ‘chance to escape from hostilities, in one’s mind if not in reality’.100 As already foregrounded, it was also prized as a mild narcotic capable of steadying nerves, enabling the user to ‘regain self-composure, relieve boredom, escape depression and loss, [and] to prepare both mind and body for battle’.101 This narrative was presented clearly in an advertisement for Abdulla cigarettes in November 1917. Referring to conditions during an air raid, the copy read: It was a night of discoveries, both as regards the midnight toilettes of others and our own amazing heroism under gun-fire, but our greatest discovery of all was made in connection with Abdulla’s soothing and enchanting Cigarettes. We found Abdullas to be the one and only Cellar Cigarette.102

While cigarettes could be directly marketed to civilians at home with messages related to their specific wartime exertions, efforts to mobilise volunteers and consumers to purchase and organise the provision of tobacco to fighting men took precedence over the civilian need to smoke.

David Monger, ‘Soldiers, Propaganda and Ideas of Home and Community in First World War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 8:3 (2011), 331–54, p. 334. On the ‘citizen soldier’, see McCartney, Citizen Soldiers.

98

Daniel O’Neill, ‘“People Love Player’s”: Cigarette Advertising and the Teenage Consumer in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 28:3 (2017), 414–39, p. 418.

99

Elliot, ‘From Tobacco’, p. 145.

100

Hilton, Smoking, p. 126.

101

The Sporting Times, 10 November 1917. I am grateful to Lucie Whitmore for drawing this to my attention.

102

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Close analysis of the index of the 1916 War Charities Act register suggests geographical divergences in terms of the relative importance placed on tobacco and, though conclusions are tentative, the class character of some of the tobacco funds. Taking England, Scotland and Wales together, out of the 154 tobacco-specific comforts funds registered under the War Charities Act 1916, fifty-three were pubs and inns (34 per cent), with these forming the majority in Warwickshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The starkest numbers relate to Warwickshire, where out of a total of ninety-two comforts funds, some 38 per cent were expressly tobacco related (thirty-five in total).103 Within this region, Birmingham stands out in terms of its propensity for pub-based tobacco funds, the majority being run for the benefit of erstwhile regular customers.104 For example, ‘The Fountain, Heneage Street, Soldiers and Sailors Fund’ wished to provide ‘cigarettes for old customers’, while the Golden Eagle on Hodge Road was home to the ‘Cheery Chums’ fund, which sought to provide ‘cigarettes for customers with the Colours’.105 Elsewhere, the Reindeer Hotel in Sheffield focused on ‘cigarettes for friends and relations of subscribers serving abroad’.106 Many funds were concerned with the welfare of local men more generally, such as the Hairdressers Saloon Cigarette Fund for Lads at the Front, based in Boston, Lincolnshire, and the Pencoed Tobacco Fund in Glamorganshire. The aim of the latter was to ‘[p]rovide men from Pencoed who have joined the Colours with Tobacco and other Comforts’.107 Others focused on mutual relations and interests, be they friendly, religious or work-related. This included Sheffield’s Banner Cross Young Men’s Cigarette Fund, which directed tobacco to members of its bible class; the Baptist Church Working Party for Soldiers in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, was concerned with providing ‘[c]lothing, tobacco, food and comforts for Soldiers and Sailors associated with Baptist Denomination’.108 The Woodville Working Men’s Club in Burton-on-Trent served its members fighting abroad, as did the Bristol Sports Club.109 The Bryant and May (Brymay) safety match factory in Bow, East London, through its ‘Our Boys Cigarette and Toffee Fund’, provided tobacco and other comforts to office staff on active service.110 Tobacco manufacturers also played a role beyond providing products, engaging their employees in voluntary TNA, CHAR 4/24, Index, pp. 256–62.

103

Ibid., pp. 110–332.

104

Ibid., p. 258.

105

Ibid., p. 312.

106

Ibid., p. 153.

107

Ibid., pp. 213, 266.

108

Ibid., pp. 133, 159, 310.

109

Ibid., p. 219.

110

Volunta ry A ct ion a n d t he Provi sion of Cig a r et te s    141

schemes. The C.W.S. [Co-operative Wholesale Society] Tobacco Factory Employees War Fund in Manchester provided comforts to members of staff in the armed forces, as did the B.A.T. [British American Tobacco] Bulletin Cigarette Fund in Millbank, central London.111 The prevalence of tobacco-specific comforts funds in some areas points to varying degrees of importance placed on tobacco provision by some volunteers, though it should not be forgotten that many of the generalist funds are likely to have been involved in similar work without stating it overtly. In this regard, Warwickshire stands out in particular, with 38 per cent of the total stating tobacco provision as a central aim, followed by London with 11 per cent.112 This small sample of tobacco funds alone is evidence of the much broader social milieu involved in tobacco-related voluntary action during the war, with tobacco-specific funds exhibiting a concomitant concern to serve the local (town or city) or hyperlocal (pub, club or church), or both. Indeed, given the proclivity of some areas for pub-based tobacco funds, it can be said that, at least in the realm of charitable tobacco provision – which some volunteers more likely viewed as locality-specific mutual aid – working-class civilians led the way. However, the role of local newspapers as a means of representing local civic culture provided an overarching framework for broader tobacco funds which served the fighting men of the locality.113 Such funds operated in almost every area of England, Scotland and Wales covered by the 1916 War Charities Act register and, arguably, provided a conduit between the fighting and home fronts, in addition to directly working with tobacco firms to develop schemes. They also utilised eye-catching advertising and the (mediated) personal testimony of soldiers and sailors to induce civilians to action. In addition, tobacco companies utilised the concept of civilian service in their advertisements, encouraging civilians to purchase products to send to loved ones fighting abroad. The Manchester Courier Tobacco Fund was promoted through large advertisements, including bold illustrations of smoking soldiers in trench conditions, with a subscription form appended. In one example, a cartoon soldier is pictured writing a letter home, thanking donors for ‘the smokes’, referencing a common practice during the war which tangibly connected the front with loved ones in Britain.114 As with other comparable funds, variable amounts of tobacco and cigarettes could be sent for differing rates of subscription. This was promoted as an economical way for civilians Ibid., pp. 195, 219.

111

Ibid., pp. 256–62.

112

Andy Croll, Civilizing the Urban: Popular Culture and Public Space in Merthyr, c. 1870– 1914 (Cardiff, 2000), p. 20.

113

Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009), pp. 9–10.

114

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to send tobacco to their ‘local heroes’, as it was provided duty- and postage-free. One subscription advert, published in October 1915, featured subscription rates ranging from six shillings (providing thirty cigarettes and one ounce of tobacco) to £25 (serving every man in a battalion or naval vessel).115 Another included a cartoon of a smoking soldier, with a body and kit constructed entirely from packets of cigarettes and tobacco alongside its sales pitch to readers.116 It is difficult to imagine a clearer evocation of the ‘necessity’ of smoking to military welfare, with the soldier figuratively embodying tobacco from head to toe. In November 1915, the Birmingham-based Evening Despatch encouraged readers to assemble a ‘Christmas Parcel’ of various comforts, foremost among them Player’s cigarettes and rolling tobacco – the most popular brand at this time and into the interwar period – in addition to water sterilisers, throat lozenges and ‘vermin powder’.117 Indeed, as part of the Imperial Tobacco Company, Player’s was one of the main contributors to service personnel supplies, providing over 3.6 million lbs of tobacco during the period 1916–18, following closely behind British American Tobacco, who supplied 5.8 million lbs.118 As with the Manchester Courier fund, in the Despatch the visual was foregrounded, again featuring an illustration of cheerful soldiers smoking, in this case pipes and cigarettes. In the copy accompanying the image, local men were again put forward as local heroes: the fighting men of the Midlands were the ‘soldiers the Kaiser fears above all others … They have defeated his crack regiments’.119 The gift of tobacco and other comforts here, as in a range of other examples, was a token of gratitude directed only to local men, providing a tangible connection with home. This was especially important at Christmas time, given the holiday’s high emotional timbre and association with family and, crucially for soldiers, pre-war normality.120 Later in November 1915, the Sheffield Independent replicated this appeal in its own name, while more closely reflecting recent developments on the battlefield and underlining the scheme’s value for money. Consumers could send ‘11/9 Worth For 5/-’.121 Manchester Courier, 15 October 1915. In the latter case, this amounts to more than £1,400 in today’s money. See National Archives Currency Converter, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter.

115

Manchester Courier, 23 October 1915.

116

Evening Despatch, 8 November 1915.

117

TNA, BT 72/1/TandMCB2, ‘Tobacco, Cigar, Cigarette and Snuff Manufacturers’, ‘Statistics & Miscellaneous Papers relating to consumption of Tobacco by H.M. Forces, 1916–18’ file.

118

Evening Despatch, 8 November 1915.

119

Martin Johnes, Christmas and the British: A Modern History (London, 2016), pp. 73–4.

120

Sheffield Independent, 12 November 1915.

121

Volunta ry A ct ion a n d t he Provi sion of Cig a r et te s    143

The Hull Daily News Tobacco Fund for Hull & District Heroes, in addition to similarly focusing on local men stationed abroad, underlined its official approval by the War Office and Admiralty and its close connection with a London tobacco firm.122 The leading tobacco appeal, the Smokes Soldiers and Sailors Fund, made a similar boast on its posters and advertisements, lending a degree of kudos and legitimacy which was cemented by the approval of ‘Fag Day’ fundraising appeals by Queen Alexandra, the queen mother and former queen consort of Edward VII.123 The Hull appeal encouraged civilians to send, for 6d, a package of thirty cigarettes, two ounces of cake tobacco and some matches. Where this scheme differed from other comparable examples was in its provision of cigarettes with a novelty, war-specific branding; in this case, ‘Kitchener Cigarettes’, replete with an image of the Field Marshal on the packet.124 However, though this practice was not repeated in many tobacco appeals, such branding was not uncommon during the war. Large and small firms introduced new brands throughout the conflict, with names directly referencing the war on the home and fighting fronts. New trademarks in the Tobacco Trade Review during 1915–16 referenced both military culture and the weapons used against civilians on the home front, all too familiar by this point in the war:125 Air Ship, Anzac, ‘Arf a Mo’, Armlet, Billet, Blighty, ‘Fall In’, Pals, Periscope, Scrap of Paper (referencing Germany’s disregard of the Treaty of London, 1839), Shrapnel.126 These brands represented further attempts by tobacco companies to situate their products firmly within the prevalent ‘war culture’; the ‘mental furniture’ adopted by society at large to make sense of the conflict, to define the enemy and provide reasons for people to continue working for the war effort.127 When taken with the voluntary activities of civilians engaged in the organisation of tobacco funds, facilitated by the actions of the state by waiving tax duties and directly controlling stocks, we see a concerted effort at all levels of wartime British society to provide the ‘solvent of all the British soldier’s cares’.128 Hull Daily News, 25 May 1915.

122

Grant, Philanthropy, p. 20; Pall Mall Gazette, 30 May 1916; IWM, ‘Fag Day’ Poster (29 May 1917), Art.IWM PST 10798, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/26181.

123

Hull Daily News, 25 May 1915.

124

Susan Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012), ch. 2.

125

TTR, 1 April 1915; 1 May 1915; 1 June 1915; 1 January 1916; 1 March 1916; 1 April 1916; 1 September 1916.

126

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005), p. 164.

127

Hull Daily News, 25 May 1915.

128

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Conclusion The long nineteenth century saw the rise of the cigarette, made possible by technological innovations in production. Leading to unprecedented economies of scale, there was now a mass market for tobacco products, with the cheap, mass-produced cigarette predominating in Britain by the onset of the First World War in 1914. The war itself presented ideal conditions for the promotion of the ‘cheerful’ smoking habit, which many saw – including medical practitioners – as vital to military morale and soldierly well-being under fire. War was instrumental in cementing and furthering trends in civilian and military tobacco consumption that had been underway since the late nineteenth century. Though soldiers received tobacco and cigarettes in their ration packs, and some naval men received duty-free tobacco when aboard ship, the efforts of the War Office and Admiralty could not possibly keep pace with demand. From the first weeks and months of the conflict, the voluntary action of civilians was vital to the provision of tobacco to fighting men. The social and geographical basis of tobacco-specific comforts funds was diverse, with many being run from sites of working-class recreation in towns and cities the length and breadth of Great Britain. As evidence from central government departments – including Customs and Excise and the Board of Trade – demonstrates, the state was instrumental in the smooth running of voluntary operations, ostensibly through tax duty waivers and, from 1917, direct control of tobacco and match supplies. Where direct provision of tobacco, from bonded warehouses or from large manufacturers, was not possible, small retailers attempted to recoup the losses resulting from a shrunken customer base by encouraging customers to buy tobacco from them to give to servicemen. By and large, these efforts were immensely successful. Even in the face of constrained supply chains and steadily rising import duties, home consumption rose annually throughout the war; a combination of an increase in civilian smokers and the popularity of charitable tobacco giving. Such a situation was, of course, helped by a relaxation of duties in the case of some comforts schemes and the imposition of price controls from 1917. The stresses, strains, anxieties and privations of war were cited by commentators to account for the booming popularity of tobacco consumption. Taking into account these broad trends, this chapter has demonstrated that tobacco and cigarettes were a vital facet of the culture of wartime charitable giving and voluntary action. In some ways, the cigarette and its beneficial functions for the soldier loomed larger in popular visual culture than the names and stated aims of comforts funds suggested. Indeed, though comforts funds explicitly related to tobacco did not predominate in the 1916 War Charities Act register, the sheer amounts of tobacco and cigarettes provided to servicemen attest to their prioritisation by voluntary workers. Indeed, it could be argued that demands for tobacco remained constant throughout the conflict in a similar way to foodstuffs, while calls

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for mainstays of wartime charitable provision, such as warm knitted clothing, saw significant peaks and troughs owing to reproduction of effort (rectified to a large extent by the advent of the DGVO scheme). Not only has this chapter provided insights into the organisation of tobacco funds, through the intersection of voluntary groups, the state and commercial entities, it has offered a perspective on the ever-centralising modern state. Though the First World War has been seen by many historians as a turning point in deepening the state’s role in the provision of services and intervention in the economy, the provisioning of tobacco itself offers a way into this debate. Fundamentally, the analysis of the culture, economics and mechanics of charitable tobacco giving offers another way to understand the phenomenon of total war in twentieth-century Britain.

Part 3

The Soldier in Politics and Society

7 ‘Our Brother Officers in India’: The Military Lobby in Imperial Politics of the 1780s C hr istina Wel sch

I cannot conceive of anything more preposterous than that the East India Company should be holding in their hands a large European Army, exclusive of the Crown, to be recruited from the subjects of this Country.1

H

enry Dundas’ candid sentiments, written to Lord Sydney in 1784, anticipated one of the priorities of William Pitt the Younger’s first administration. For nearly two centuries, the British East India Company had operated in India largely independent of the British state, trading, negotiating treaties, establishing settlements, and even conducting war. Since the mid-eighteenth century, its activities had taken on new prominence as the Company acquired sweeping new political authority in India. To support its expanding territories and operations, by 1784, it had amassed an army of more than one hundred thousand combatants, operating independently from the British army proper. Most of the Company’s soldiers were Indian or ‘native’ troops – called sepoys – but they included about ten thousand ‘European’ soldiers and officers.2 Dundas was not the only minister uncomfortable with the autonomy of those recruits. ‘[C]onsolidation’, Pitt himself proclaimed in a speech to Parliament, referring to a plan to incorporate the Company’s forces into the British army, ‘was, undoubtedly, to be wished for’.3 Yet no such consol Henry Dundas to Lord Sydney, 2 November 1784, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Chatham Papers, PRO 30/8/361, fol. 155v.

1

‘A Comparative View of the Military Establishment of Bengal and Fort St. George in 1774 and 1783’, The British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection (hereafter BL APAC), Military Papers, IOR/H/84, 466–7; Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 (New York, 2011), p. 77. ‘European’ was something of a catchall term in the Company’s records, but the corps was becoming increasingly British and disproportionately Irish and Scottish. See Jeremy Black, Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688–1815 (Bloomington, IN, 2018), p. 56.

2

T. C. Hansard (ed)., The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 27 (London, 1813), p. 93 (hereafter, PH).

3

150    C hr i st ina Wel sch

idation would occur. Quite the opposite, Pitt’s government would help to elevate the standing of the Company’s European officers in the empire’s formal military hierarchies and in its political landscape. That shift in status was the result of the officers’ concerted efforts to renegotiate their perceived role in the empire – from a ‘preposterous’ absurdity to a source of national honour that could alleviate Britons’ anxieties about colonial expansion. The confrontation between the British state and the Company’s officers over their autonomy belongs to a broader moment of uncertainty across Britain’s empire. Vincent Harlow famously described the British reaction to the crisis of the American Revolution as ‘a swing to the East’.4 In fact, British metropolitan interest in India had been building since the Seven Years War, prompted both by the state’s growing interest in centralised control and by a visible transformation in the Company’s power in India. In 1765, the Company acquired formal control over Bengal, a population and territory many times larger than Britain itself.5 The extent of the Company’s reach, its independence from governmental oversight, and reports of the conduct of Company officials in India stoked alarm in Britain. As a handful of such officials – including a number of the Company’s military officers – arrived back in Britain flush with fortunes claimed in India, many fretted that ‘[w]ith the wealth of the East, we have too imported the worst of its vices’.6 Both in Parliament and out-of-doors, the Company faced growing charges of corruption, tyranny, and overreach, fuelling a sustained effort by governments in the 1770s and 1780s to check and to take control of the corporation’s growing empire. Scholars examining these would-be reforms have tended to focus on their impact on civil institutions – especially the Company’s internal governance, its judicial structures, and its finances – where the effects of the campaigns to rein in the Company were decidedly mixed. The most dramatic contest, Edmund Burke’s attempted prosecution of Warren Hastings as Governor-General, offered a highly visible challenge to the Company’s expansion, but ultimately did not result in a conviction.7 Legislative efforts, including the Regulating Act of 1773 and Pitt’s India Act of 1784, Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793, vol. 2 (New York, 1964), p. 8.

4

P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c.1750– 1783 (New York, 2005), pp. 2–4.

5

Samuel Foote, The Nabob: A Comedy in Three Acts, ed. George Colman (London, 1778), p. 13.

6

See P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London, 1965); Mithi Mukherjee, ‘Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke’s Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings’, Law and History Review, 23:3 (2005), 589–630, pp. 614–17; Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

7

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similarly stopped far short of the hopes of the Company’s opponents, but nevertheless gave the British government increasing authority over the corporation.8 Yet, despite Dundas’ urgent condemnation of the Company’s military independence, attempted reforms of its armies have attracted relatively little scholarly attention.9 That omission in part reflects the government’s failure: the Company’s military survived the push for reform even more completely than did its civil institutions. Indeed, its armies would be among the most enduring aspects of the Company’s colonial rule, outlasting even its trade monopoly, which was rescinded in 1813.10 This chapter argues that this persistent autonomy was shaped and anticipated by the debates of the 1780s, in which the issue of military ‘consolidation’ first arose. Anxious to prevent loss of status and seniority as a result of such a shift, men in the Company’s service protested the depiction of their corps as ‘preposterous’, insisting instead that they shared royal officers’ commitment to national honour. Paradoxically, to assert this common cause, Company officers engaged in a spate of political manoeuvres that diverged radically from accepted norms of the British army proper. Ultimately, their activities produced a political lobby that operated independently of and at times against the Company as a whole. Where royal officers tended to avoid or at least downplay moments of collective political engagement, those in the Company’s service enthusiastically asserted their interests jointly as ‘brother Officers’.11 Together, they convened mass meetings in India and Britain, established a trans-imperial network of correspondence, and even formed representative committees to assert their interests in public debates. Their collective identity was explicitly disconnected from the Company as a whole, distancing the officers from the corporation’s controversial civil administration. As an alternative to that beleaguered body, the officer corps offered Britons a potential resolution to contemporary anxieties, allowing future military victories in India to be celebrated without attendant fears of imperial vice. In preventing ‘consolidation’, the officers transformed their corps into a dominant source of colonial ideology that would persist until the final dissolution of the Company.

L. S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952); H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756– 1833 (Cambridge, 2006).

8

But see Raymond Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798 (Cambridge, 1972).

9

Bowen, The Business of Empire, pp. 53–8.

10

For ‘brother Officers’, see Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, by a General Meeting of the East India Company’s Military Officers Now in England (London, 1788), pp. 2–3 (hereafter, Proceedings of the Committee).

11

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From Nobodies to Nabobs In December 1787, Captain Andrew Wilson Hearsey of the Company’s Bengal army gathered his fellow officers then in London to discuss news that Pitt’s administration intended to send four new royal regiments to India. The proposal was widely seen as a prelude to consolidation and certainly represented a drastic shift in British military involvement in India, in which royal troops had only been sporadically deployed. Hearsey opened the meeting with a dramatic speech celebrating the Company’s service as one composed of ‘officers who glory in the name of Britons’.12 The phrase was lifted from George III’s coronation in 1761, meant to assuage anxieties about the loyalties of the Hanoverian monarch.13 Hearsey borrowed the declaration of patriotic commitment to refute similar scepticism about the Company’s officers, who were regularly imagined less as a source of ‘glory’ than of disrepute. The alternative view is perhaps best captured in an anonymous print from 1791, The Unhappy Contrast. In it, a royal officer – emaciated, crippled, and impoverished with nothing to show for his sacrifice but a scant ‘half-pay’ subsistence – stood juxtaposed with an officer in the Company’s service, rotund and encumbered with a massive pile of exotic goods and cash. As the cartoonist punned, the royal officer served the king and the Company officer a more liquid kind of ‘Crown’.14 Officers’ hopes of challenging the push for consolidation required first and foremost dispensing with this image, an effort that would in turn change the role that officers played in Britons’ imperial imagination. Both this print and Hearsey’s challenge reflected a dramatic shift in the status of the Company’s European officer corps, one that had granted its members unprecedented visibility in British society. The Company had first gained the right to commission its own military officers under the late Stuarts, who looked to such chartered corporations as low-cost means to extend England’s global reach beyond what the cash-strapped state could manage.15 Far from a source of fame and fortune, though, positions in the early Company were oubliettes: traveller Edward Terry in 1655, for instance, wrote that wealthy families sent their ‘unruly’ sons to India ‘so they might make their own Graves in the Sea, in their passage thither, or els [sic] have Ibid., p. 2.

12

Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760–1820’, Past & Present, 102 (1984), 94–129, pp. 94–5, 102.

13

Christina Smylitopoulos, ‘Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture, and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century’, RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne, 37:1 (2012), 10–25, pp. 17–18.

14

Elizabeth Mancke, ‘Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World’, in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore, 2015), 236–62, pp. 238–48.

15

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Figure 3. Anonymous, ‘The Unhappy Contrast’, Print, 1791.

Graves made for them on the Indian shore, when they come there’.16 The emerging officer corps was indeed a motley group, composed not just of miscreant sons, but of political exiles, foreign mercenaries, and adventurers looking to navigate England’s early modern trade networks.17 In 1649/50, officials at Madras were sufficiently desperate for a captain to act as local commander that they reluctantly appointed James Martin, who had ‘bin in armes on the late Kings [Charles I’s] side’ and who was dogged by accusations that he was a practising Catholic.18 Few officers commissioned in this context thus had the patronage or capital needed to access elite political networks in Britain. Within the Company’s settlements, the status of these early officers was quite different. In 1678, officials in Madras determined that captains (including Martin)

Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India, Wherein Some Things Are Taken Notice of in Our Passage Thither, but Many More in Our Abode There, within That Rich and Most Spacious Empire of the Great Mogol (London, 1655), p. 176.

16

Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560– 1660 (New York, 2008), pp. 3–6, 95–104.

17

Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800, vol. 1 (London, 1913), pp. 109–12.

18

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were socially equivalent to senior merchants.19 Though Company administrators frequently claimed that they were a body of ‘mere merchants’, military operations and martial spectacle were central to the Company’s political negotiations with Indian powers and European rivals alike.20 In the eighteenth century, significant changes in India’s political landscape multiplied the opportunities Company actors found to assert that military power.21 As the Mughal empire’s centralising authority contracted, Company officials made use of force – or at least the threat thereof – to jostle for and to expand privileges in their interactions with a host of emerging, regional states. Those conflicts, rivalries, and alliances in turn became increasingly enmeshed in Europe’s global wars, and both the Company and its French counterpart would take to the field during the War of Austrian Succession.22 By 1784, these expanding conflicts had pushed the Company’s European officer corps into an increasingly complex hierarchy of nearly two thousand men.23 More significantly, their status in British society had also diverged radically from that of exiles like James Martin. Perhaps no one would be more responsible for the change in attitude toward Company commissions than Robert Clive, a writer (civil clerk) turned officer in the Company’s southerly Madras army. In 1756–57, Clive led an expedition from Madras to Bengal that culminated in the Battle of Plassey and the overthrow of the provincial ruler, Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah.24 The campaign is often said to mark the beginning of the Company’s territorial empire in India. Certainly, it marked the beginning of Clive’s personal enrichment: he acquired a vast fortune through presents and plunder on the expedition and was eager to translate it into elite status upon his return to Britain. Though he would never fully realise his ambitions, his storied wealth captured British imagination.25 Clive’s fortunes brought a flood of men to apply for service in the Company’s civil and military lines, determined to seize ‘golden dreams of Eastern magnificence’ Ibid., 1:435.

19

Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York, 2011), pp. 13, 61–82, 185–206.

20

For the Indian political landscape in this period, see Seema Alavi, The Eighteenth Century in India (Oxford, 2011).

21

Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, pp. 119–57.

22

East India Company, Proceeding[s] Relative to the Sending of Four of His Majesty’s Regiments to India, with Appendix (London, 1788), p. 11.

23

See Sushil Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757 (New Delhi, 2000).

24

For Clive’s fortunes and ambitions, see Bruce Lenman and Philip Lawson, ‘Robert Clive, the “Black Jagir”, and British Politics’, The Historical Journal, 26:4 (1983), 801–29; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York, 2005), pp. 28–44.

25

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of their own.26 Few would do so: rampant disease and the unhealthy nature of service in India meant that many continued to ‘have their Graves made for them’ in India.27 Nevertheless, the possibility made Company commissions an increasingly competitive source of patronage. Those who did strike it rich returned home eager to assert new influence in Britain. By 1780, twenty-seven Company servants, including both civil and military actors, had acquired seats in Parliament, mostly through the purchase of the infamous ‘rotten’ boroughs.28 Though those men rarely acted as a unit, their visibility in Parliament and elite society provoked alarm. Company agents who returned home wealthy were labelled nabobs. The term was a distortion of the Mughal nawāb (viceroy or ruler) that at once disdained the men as nouveaux riches and reflected deeper anxieties about the effects of imperial expansion on social order. Those alleged disruptions were widely pilloried in a flurry of pamphlets, in satires on stage, and in a flood of caricatures to which the rotund captain in The Unhappy Contrast belonged.29 The so-called nabob crisis reached its climax in the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings (1788–95), spearheaded by Edmund Burke, the Company’s most inveterate and eloquent opponent.30 Speaking to packed audiences in Parliament, Burke condemned the Company as an immoral enterprise and dubbed Hastings the ‘captain general of iniquity’, a violent despot who had carried out and permitted horrendous atrocities, especially against Indian women, in the name of profit and power.31 Because Hastings was a civilian administrator, Burke’s case against the former Governor-General focused on the Company’s civil infrastructure, especially his judicial and revenue policies. However, Burke made clear in his speeches that the Company’s military officers were hardly free from blame. Rather, they were complicit in Hastings’ despotism, having been seduced by promises of plunder to forget their honour and to act as ‘military farmers general’, feeding misbegotten profit into

Anonymous, Genuine Memoirs of ASIATICUS in a Series of Letters to a Friend During Five Years Residence in Different Parts of India (London, 1784), p. 1.

26

Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New York, 1999), p. 16.

27

Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, ‘“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain’, Albion, 16:3 (1984), 225–41, p. 228.

28

Smylitopoulos, ‘Portrait of a Nabob’; Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010).

29

For Burke’s critique of empire, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), pp. 153–89; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005), pp. 59–100.

30

PD, 28:1256. For the trial as spectacle, see Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, pp. 87–131.

31

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Hastings’ insatiable maw.32 Such depictions added weight to the popular perception of the Company’s officers as nabobs. No longer wayward sons or forgotten exiles, the Company’s officers were becoming increasingly visible in British society as symbols of avarice, ambition, and dishonour.

The Four Regiments Crisis The meeting that Hearsey convened in December 1787 occurred only a few months before the opening of Hastings’ trial. Already the officers’ discussions and proclamations offered a counter-narrative that would challenge Burke’s charge that they were ‘military farmers general’. Hearsey’s borrowed claim that they were men who ‘glor[ied] in the name of Britons’ hinted at the shape of that alternative. Officers sought to demonstrate that their actions in India had been in support of national honour, not the personal enrichment of nabobs. In this, officers maintained that they were no less deserving of praise and prestige than were their royal counterparts. Indeed, the meeting that Hearsey organised in London was not directly a protest against consolidation. Rather, the officers demanded ‘equality of rank’, challenging the convention by which Company officers stood below royal officers in formal military hierarchies.33 Such demands for ‘equality’ required officers to erode the imagery of The Unhappy Contrast, collapsing the perceived differences between the two officer corps. In so doing, officers would distance themselves from the Company’s civil administration, creating a new political identity – independent of the Company itself – centred on their professional ‘brotherhood’ of military service. Both the catalyst for officers’ efforts to challenge their public perception as well as the solution on which they would seize could be found in the American Revolution. The global defeat intensified ongoing demands to reform the Company, quickly bringing the debates to the forefront of British politics.34 Lurking behind this urgency was an undercurrent of anxiety that the Company’s territories might follow the American colonies into secession. As Burke complained, deliberations in Parliament about any potential policy for India bristled with ‘allusions to the loss of America … the activity and inactivity of America’.35 Importantly, such prophesying Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, 1786–1788, ed. P. J. Marshall and William B. Todd, vol. 6 (Oxford, 1991), p. 431.

32

Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, pp. 36–7.

33

Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, p. 406.

34

Edmund Burke, Mr. Burke’s Speech, on the 1st December 1783, upon the Question for the Speaker’s Leaving the Chair, in Order for the House to Resolve Itself into a Committee on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill (Dublin, 1784), p. 2.

35

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tended to assume that such a revolt would be led by Company officials themselves, not their Indian subjects. The Company’s armed and independent officers seemed a likely source for such a breakdown, and would-be reforms were met with persistent warnings by opponents that heavy-handed measures would have ‘the most alarming consequences’ within that corps.36 Almost immediately after defeat in America, such concerns added to the Crown’s sudden need to reconfigure Britain’s global strategic defence, making India an attractive and obvious place in which royal military power could be expanded.37 In 1783, several royal regiments already operating in India on a temporary assignment were transformed into the core of a permanent royal military establishment on the subcontinent, and, in 1787, the Crown moved to supplement that force with four additional regiments. The Company’s officers objected both to their depiction as would-be rebels and to the expansion of the royal establishment in India. Because royal officers by convention were granted superior rank to their Company counterparts, the presence of royal regiments in India, even without consolidation or dissolution, pushed Company officers out of the most senior posts on the subcontinent. Anxious to prevent their marginalisation, Company officers launched a campaign to demand ‘equality of rank’. The first such campaign took shape in the final months of 1783, when news of the royal expedition’s new permanent status reached India. Officers across the subcontinent held meetings and sharpened their grievances through complex correspondence networks that ran between garrisons. Hundreds signed a set of collective petitions, addressed to both the Crown and the Company, making the case that the ‘supersession’ of Company officers by their royal counterparts was both unjust and a threat to the survival of the British empire.38 Instead, they insisted that they constituted the empire’s best possible source of defence in India, a strength that would only be diminished by the addition of higher ranked royal officers. The campaign for ‘equality of rank’ drew on and engaged with contemporary discourse about the empire in India, but the officers’ status as military actors placed those ideas in a new context. Warren Hastings, defending himself against Burke’s charges of corruption and tyranny, had relied heavily on the assertion that India was simply too different, too exotic, too distant for British norms of governance to apply – an argument that Burke excoriated as ‘geographical morality’.39 For Company The Marquess of Landsdowne in PD, 27:231–2.

36

Alexander Dalrymple, Review of the Contest, Concerning Four New Regiments Graciously Offered by His Majesty to Be Sent to India on the Late Apprehension of War, and Then, Gratefully Accepted, by the Court of Directors of the East-India Company (London, 1788), pp. 11–14.

37

Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, pp. 86–9; W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army (Madras, 1882–88), 2: pp. 117–19.

38

Mukherjee, ‘Justice, War, and the Imperium’, p. 610.

39

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officers, that sense of difference was reframed as ‘geographical strategy’: warfare in India was described as idiosyncratic, requiring a specialised set of skills and knowledge. Officers in the Madras army petitioned that, as the armies of the Company are chiefly composed of natives of various countries and sects essentially differing from each other in religion, language, and manners, the study of these seems at least as necessary to unite the natives in action as the knowledge of military discipline.40

Like Hastings’ arguments about governance, the Madras officers emphasised India’s difference to reject the authority of central oversight, here in the guise of the British army. In contrast to Hastings, though, they operated in the realm of strategic efficacy, a less philosophically radical space than that of ‘morality’. Ultimately, assertions of India’s perceived differences formed a much less significant part of the officers’ campaign for equality of rank than they did in Hastings’ defence. Company officers were more interested in collapsing the apparent divide between India and the rest of the empire, situating themselves within Britain’s broader imperial military structure. The same petition from Madras provides an emphatic example of that avowal: ‘Your petitioners are British Subjects, actuated by the same Loyalty towards Your Majesty’s Person and Kingdoms, and fighting in the same Cause … with your Majesty’s Officers in India.’41 This claim relied on what was in effect a chronological coincidence. The American Revolution (1776–83) overlapped with two conflicts in India: the First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–82) and the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1779–84). This was not the first time that conflicts had so coincided: Clive’s lucrative victory at Plassey, for instance, had been celebrated in Britain as part of a string of global victories during the Seven Years War.42 Yet, where Clive’s success fed perceptions that warfare in India was a profit-driven enterprise, the Second Anglo-Mysore War offered a different narrative, one more in keeping with Britain’s broader experience of defeat in the 1780s. The war proved one of the most exhausting in which the Company would ever be involved.43 Mysore, a rapidly expanding political power in South India, pushed the Madras presidency to the brink of collapse.44 Company forces suffered major Quotes from Petition to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (1784), Papers of George, Lord Macartney, BL Western Manuscripts, Add MS 22432, 244–5.

40

Ibid.

41

Huw V. Bowen, ‘British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756–83’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26:3 (1998), 1–27, p. 4.

42

See G. J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation (New York, 2013), pp. 282–316.

43

Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002), pp. 269–95.

44

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defeats in the field, and hundreds of its officers, soldiers, and sepoys were taken captive in Mysore. The Madras government’s administration in turn proved unable or unwilling to meet the disruptions of the war, and its territories devolved into famine and spiralling debt as trade networks shattered. Officers drew on these hardships as evidence of their sacrifices, better resembling the emaciated, disabled, and sympathetic royal officer in The Unhappy Contrast than his fat-bellied counterpart. Colonel William Fullarton, commander of the Madras army, explained to Parliament: [The Company’s European officers] took the field with twelve, fifteen, nay, in some cases eighteen months arrears due to them … The junior officers had to sell their wearing apparel, nay, the very buckles of their shoes, to procure means of subsistence.45

Where Burke had vividly described atrocities committed against Indian inhabitants and detailed the profligacy of nabobs, Fullarton depicted the officers in terms of beleaguered benevolence, selling their own property to feed both themselves and the sepoys and soldiers under their command. The Second Anglo-Mysore War was thus invoked in campaigns for ‘equality of rank’ as a test of the Company officers, testing their virtue and endurance. As Hearsey smugly pointed out, unlike the royal officers in America, the Company officers had apparently passed the trial, having eked out a stalemate with Mysore and ‘preserved unblemished the honour of our country’.46 The petitions in which this rhetoric first debuted were in and of themselves hardly unusual. Such appeals to the Crown were among the most widely employed political tools in the eighteenth-century British empire, allowing subjects to make a direct connection with the king and to demonstrate their fidelity to the Crown.47 In the Company’s territories in Bengal, civilians used petitions to navigate their position within the competing jurisdictions of the Company, the British state, and Mughal imperial authorities.48 The officers’ memorials in 1783–84 conformed to this model in many ways, for instance in declaring ‘our inviolable loyalty to your Majesty’.49 Two aspects of the petitions, though, distinguish them from their civilian counterparts. First, their preambles identify them as addresses from the officer corps as a whole: ‘[t]he humble Petition of the Military Officers in the Service of the PD, 27:104.

45

Proceedings of the Committee, p. 2.

46

Hannah Weiss Muller, ‘From Requête to Petition: Petitioning the Monarch between Empires’, The Historical Journal, 60:3 (2017), 659–86.

47

Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (New York, 2007), pp. 200–1.

48

Appendix No. 12 in East India Company, Proceedings, 1788, 17

49

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United Company of Merchants trading to the East-Indies’.50 Second, the petitions were sent simultaneously to the Court of Directors and to the king, circumventing the Company’s internal chain of command. These idiosyncrasies made clear that officers located their collective right to appeal in a military identity, rather than in a rhetoric of civic subjecthood. As we will see in the closing section, this militarised form of collective identity diverged strikingly from Britain’s domestic political landscape, but, for the officers seeking ‘equality of rank’ in the 1780s, it was essential. Rather than trying to embody any sort of ‘civic responsibility’ – the idea of soldier as citizen – officers sought to demonstrate that their martial honour and duties as officers had insulated them from the civil society of nabobs widely excoriated as corrupt and degenerate. That disconnect was perhaps nowhere more clearly articulated than by John Scott, a major in the Bengal army who gained a seat in Parliament in the early 1780s as one of Hastings’ agents. By 1788 he was carefully working to distinguish himself from his former patron.51 He acknowledged the charges against Hastings, but insisted that they had nothing to do with the army in India: [W]here irregularities and acts of violence and rapine have been committed … they are more to be attributed to the vice of our government than to the fault of our officers … I do deny that this House has accused the Company’s officers of violence, rapine, or disorders of any kind.52

When Pitt’s administration proposed sending the four royal regiments to India in 1787, this rhetorical separation became a political tool. Officers, as we have seen, opposed the plan because of their royal counterparts’ relative superiority in rank. The Court of Directors also objected to the plan, but on financial grounds: the Company was obliged to bear the costs of any royal regiments sent to India, and Directors loathed the idea of such a new expense. Despite their shared reservations, though, the Company’s officers declined to make their protests in concert with the Directors. Instead, they elected a lobbying committee of seven officers, including Scott and A. W. Hearsey, to make their case independently to the Directors, the Board of Control, and the government’s ministers. In March 1788, those manoeuvres paid off. The divide they had created between themselves and the Company allowed the committee to operate across factional and institutional divides. Breaking from the Court of Directors, officers offered to support the plan for the four regiments if the Crown would grant the Company’s corps its long-desired equality of rank. Company officers in India were so impressed with the results that they called on the Ibid., p. 16.

50

Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, p. 380.

51

PH, 27:138, emphasis added.

52

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committee to continue its work. Though the committee dissolved in late 1788, it set a precedent for future lobbying, solidifying the officers’ role as autonomous actors in both the empire’s formal military networks and its political debates.53

Military Politics in Empire and Metropole Only three years after officers secured the ‘equality of rank’, British victory in the Third Anglo-Mysore War (1789–92) revealed a similar elevation in their social prestige and authority within the Company. In a neat concentricity of history, British forces in the war – a mix of royal and Company soldiers – were commanded by Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, who made up for his failure at Yorktown with a new chapter in empire-building.54 Widely disseminated images of Cornwallis’ victory – often depicting him taking two sons of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, as hostages to guarantee the terms of peace – pictured him flanked by both royal and Company officers.55 Rather than an unhappy contrast, such images allowed the two corps to share in a moment of imperial triumph. Cornwallis sought to follow up this exuberant victory by picking up where Dundas and Pitt had left off, reducing the institutional independence of the Company’s army. Cornwallis hoped that the grant of ‘equality of rank’ would quiet earlier objections, but the Company’s European officers still saw the prospect of consolidation as a threat. Determined to block the proposals, officers mobilised a protest that used many of the same mechanisms developed in the campaign for ‘equality of rank’.56 Despite his reputation, Cornwallis was unable to overcome the resistance, a failure that revealed the increasingly dominant status that the officers held in Company politics. Cornwallis’ would-be reforms, proposed in 1794 and 1795, had two major components: first, a standardisation of pay, hierarchy, and allowances and, second, a transfer of the Company’s European regiments to the British army proper. Both changes were poised to reduce the perquisites and promotions available to officers.57 Raymond Callahan has argued that the defeat should be seen as evidence Authentic Copies of the Proceedings and Resolutions of the Officers in the East-India Company’s Service in Bengal, Madras, and Bombay (London, 1789), pp. 31–2.

53

P. J. Marshall, ‘Cornwallis Triumphant: War in India and the British Public in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Trade and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India (Brookfield, VT, 1993), pp. 57–74, 48–58.

54

Ibid., pp. 62–4; Sean Willcock, ‘A Neutered Beast? Representations of the Sons of Tipu Sultan – “The Tiger of Mysore” – as Hostages in the 1790s’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:1 (2013), 121–47, pp. 126–9.

55

Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, pp. 166–9.

56

Charles Cornwallis, ‘Lord Cornwallis’s Plan for Military Arrangements’, 501–78, BL APAC IOR/H/85.

57

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of the Company officers’ myopic self-interest, here preventing improvements or the professionalisation of their corps.58 Certainly, avarice and ambition were prime motivators in the officers’ opposition, but that greed won out over Cornwallis’ plans only because the corps was not a static institution. On the contrary, officers had developed a sophisticated set of tools through which to vindicate their demands. In India, protests, secret meetings, and a flood of pamphlets – printed on the officers’ own press – gave their discontent coherence, and, in Britain, a newly elected committee brought those demands forward to the Directors, to Parliament, and to the British public.59 In forming the committee, officers spoke of the need to ‘assert their own rights’ as a collective and described their efforts to safeguard their privileges as ‘no less necessary to the welfare of that important branch [i.e. India] of the British empire’.60 No longer evidence of nabobery, officers’ demands for honour and prestige were cast as ‘the palladium of our defence in India, and the keystone by which our sovereignty is maintained’.61 At first glance, those lobbying efforts fly in the face of political conventions in eighteenth-century Britain. In an era when standing armies were viewed as potential sources of tyranny, military actors’ involvement in political affairs was in theory abhorred. The prospect of a state ruled by its army, a ‘stratocracy’, was deemed ‘the worst of all Slavery’.62 Whiggish narratives of history denounced Oliver Cromwell and James II/VII as exemplars of that evil and celebrated the ‘Glorious Revolution’ as a Parliamentary victory that saved ‘free-born Britons’ from the militarised despotism in which Catholic nations like France and Spain were supposedly mired.63 Instead, martial ideals in Britain were heavily dominated by what Ian Beckett usefully

Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, pp. 209–11.

58

Ibid., pp. 133–4. For example, see The Queries Answered; or Observations upon ‘The Points, Submitted by a Personage of High Rank for the Consideration of Certain Officers of the Honorable Company’s Service Now in India’ (Calcutta, 1794).

59

Anon., ‘Proceedings of the Representative Committee elected by the Officers of the Establishments of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, for the Purpose of Obtaining a REDRESS Of the GRIEVANCES peculiar to the Military Service of the East India Company Committee’, 1794, 8–9, BL APAC IOR/L/MIL/17/2/462.

60

Anon., Original Papers Elucidatory of the Claims Preferred by the Officers of the Honourable Company’s Army in India, 1795, BL APAC IOR/L/Mil/17/2/464, fol. 21v.

61

John Hervey, The Conduct of the Opposition, and the Tendency of Modern Patriotism, (More Particularly in a Late Scheme to Establish a Military Government in This Country) Review’d and Examin’d (London, 1734), p. 21.

62

Black, Geographies of an Imperial Power, pp. 49–51; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York, 2000), p. 8; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, rev. edn (New Haven, 2012), pp. 33–5.

63

The M ili ta ry L obby in Imper i a l Pol itics of the 1780s    163

termed ‘the amateur military tradition’.64 In the eighteenth century, this meant that the British army was supplemented and at times replaced by a hodgepodge of irregular, informal, and voluntary military bodies. The nature, function, and efficacy of these forces fluctuated considerably throughout this period, frustrating any generalisation about their use.65 Ideologically, though, supporters of this tradition drew on early modern thought, especially that of Machiavelli, in which militiamen were described as protectors of civic virtue – far superior to uncouth and disruptive professional soldiers, who served as potential tools of tyranny.66 The rhetoric subordinated military identity to civic order and hierarchy. Matthew McCormack’s study of the ‘New Militia’ after 1757 quotes one contemporary admonition that ‘Sir John or Sir Thomas must not be commanded by Squire any thing’. By implication, if ‘Sir John’ were to engage in politics, his actions would be seen and probably shaped more by that social status than his position as militia captain.67 In fact, as Hew Strachan has persuasively argued, the British army was never as isolated from politics as either contemporaries or subsequent scholars assumed.68 Throughout the eighteenth century, naval and military officers occupied numerous seats in Parliament.69 Though some officers’ political careers were a result of elite social qualifications more than their professional standing, military fame could generate real popular excitement for political candidates. After Admiral Edward Vernon’s naval victory at Cartagena, he was named as a candidate for six separate seats in the elections of 1741.70 Certainly, Vernon’s status as a naval officer made him more palatable to ideas of national ‘liberty’ than an army commander, but he had rough analogues among celebrated army officers throughout the Hanoverian period – stretching from Marlborough to Wellington.71 The prevalence of such Ian F. W. Beckett, Britain’s Part-Time Soldiers: The Amateur Military Tradition 1558–1945 (Barnsley, 2011), pp. 54–9.

64

Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack, ‘Defining Soldiers: Britain’s Military, c.1740– 1815’, War in History, 20:2 (2013), 144–59.

65

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), pp. 409–16.

66

Matthew McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (New York, 2015), p. 109.

67

Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (New York, 1997).

68

Ibid., p. 26.

69

Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past & Present, 121 (1988), 74–109, p. 90.

70

Wellington expressed reservations about his political career, in keeping with expected military norms. Norman Gash, ‘Wellesley [Formerly Wesley], Arthur, First Duke of Wellington’, in ODNB, 6 January 2011, https://doi-org.wooster.idm.oclc.org/10.1093 / ref:odnb/29001 (accessed 15 August 2019).

71

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figures has been easy to miss in part because – in sharp contrast to the Company’s officers – they avoided forming or appearing as a coherent lobby.72 As Hannah Smith has argued, even the most vehement supporters of the British army did not seek to topple the model of ‘civic responsibility’ idealised in the militia discourse of the period, but rather appropriated it, insisting that military discipline enhanced civic virtue.73 Though many British officers hailed from outside the upper classes, the officer corps as an institution worked to buttress Britain’s elite society, rather than forming a separate set of interests and identities.74 The Company officers’ lobbying campaigns, centred on a corporate identity as ‘brother Officers’, seem a radical deviation from this rhetoric. Rather than maintaining a plausible distance between military authority and political power, the Company’s colonial infrastructure from the late eighteenth century onward would be dominated by its officer class. Officials regularly described their empire as one ‘ruled by the Sword’, and this was no metaphor.75 As the Company’s territories expanded, military officers came to hold disproportionate influence in its governance. By 1799, for instance, there were more officers than civil agents acting as political residents, managing the Company’s interest and authority over its ‘subsidiary’ allies in India.76 The Company’s three administrative presidencies – at Bengal, Bombay, and Madras – were regularly governed by men with military backgrounds. Even when the governor was a civilian, the local commander maintained considerable authority as both a councillor and a driver of policy on the spot.77 When in 1809 a civilian governor, George Hilaro Barlow, sought to remove the commander of the Madras army from his council, the European officers responded with a violent mutiny, seizing control of forts, arresting Barlow’s supporters, and even firing upon his allies. The mutineers largely escaped punishment, while Barlow was recalled for threatening the empire’s stability.78 As Douglas Peers concluded, ‘[m]ilitarism was not the sole ideological

Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, pp. 26–8, 35–6.

72

Hannah Smith, ‘The Army, Provincial Urban Communities, and Loyalist Cultures in England, c. 1714–50’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15:1–2 (2011), 139–58, p. 143.

73

Colley, Britons, pp. 180–97; Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Law and Honour among Eighteenth-Century British Army Officers’, The Historical Journal, 19:1 (1976), 75–87, p. 9; Linch and McCormack, ‘Defining Soldiers’, p. 157.

74

Papers of Major John Munro, BL APAC MSS Eur D1146/1, 322.

75

Michael H. Fisher, ‘Indirect Rule in the British Empire: The Foundations of the Residency System in India (1764–1858)’, Modern Asian Studies, 18:3 (1984), 393–428, p. 407.

76

Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, pp. 87–91.

77

Alexander G. Cardew, The White Mutiny, a Forgotten Episode in the History of the Indian Army (Bungay, Suffolk, 1929), pp. v–vi.

78

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prop on which the empire depended, but it was the one that most easily and completely tied together the rest’.79 Some scholars have thus suggested that India along with the empire as a whole acted as a ‘safety-valve’ into which military actors too ambitious for the domestic sphere could be funnelled.80 This framing, though, obscures the broader implications of that divergence. Britons’ willingness to accept ‘rule by the Sword’ in the empire reveals a widespread acceptance of the idea that the liberties and character of the ‘free-born Briton’ were inapplicable in Indian society. Tracts on Indian history, many of which were written by officers in the Company’s service, described the subcontinent’s history as a perpetual cycle of war, conquest, and anarchy that could only be managed with a heavy military hand.81 India’s civil institutions, by contrast, were said to be weak, needing substantial development in the ever-distant ‘not yet’ of colonial rule.82 Until that vaguely defined future came to pass, militarism remained central to the Company’s empire. In many ways, this echoed the language by which Hastings had sought to defend his rule, assertions that Burke had condemned as ‘geographical morality’. Yet, rather than a source of condemnation or anxiety, the Company’s ‘rule by the Sword’ would be celebrated. The sea change was of course a complex historical development, but, as this chapter suggests, it was in part facilitated by the campaigns of the Company’s officers themselves. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the same increased patronage, wealth, and fame that contributed to the nabob crisis gave the officers unprecedented access to British elite society and political institutions. In the face of charges of corruption and accelerating calls for reform, officers emphatically sought to divorce themselves from their civilian counterparts in India, grounding their virtue not in their ‘civic responsibility’, but in their connection with the broader British military project. To do so, their claims relied less on arguments about the exceptional nature of warfare in India than on efforts to depict those contests as a necessary part of national defence. Such claims did little to resolve the ideological and philosophical questions at the heart of the imperial debates in this period, but they did offer a way to sidestep them. Insistence on the shared sacrifice and suffering 79

Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India, 1819–1835 (London, 1995), p. 245.

80

Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, p. 77.

81

Mukherjee, ‘Justice, War, and the Imperium’, pp. 605–7; Jack Harrington, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India (New York, 2010), pp. 51–69.

Martha MacLaren, ‘From Analysis to Prescription: Scottish Concepts of Asian Despotism in Early Nineteenth-Century British India’, The International History Review, 15:3 (1993), 469–501, pp. 482–4; for the idea of the perpetual ‘not yet’ of empire, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), p. 8.

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of officers under both Crown and Company suggested that Britain’s growing territories in India – at least when considered from a military perspective – could be a source of honour, not just dubious wealth.

Conclusion Well into the nineteenth century, the idealisation of military honour in the empire gave Company officers in general more prestige than their civilian counterparts. This new ‘unhappy contrast’ can be seen, for instance, in two of William Makepeace Thackeray’s characters: Vanity Fair’s Joseph Sedley, a collector in the Company’s Civil Service, and the eponymous colonel of The Newcomes, obviously in the military line. Sedley is introduced to the reader in the vicious terms: ‘lazy, peevish, and a bon-vivant’, given to loud waistcoats, luxurious living, and ‘extreme vanity’.83 The vivid imagery suggests that the caricature of the eighteenth-century nabob remained viable and recognisable into the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, Colonel Newcome appeared as ‘a figure of outstanding goodness’ to the extent that later critics found him insufferable.84 For Thackeray and perhaps for his audience, imperial honour was easier to imagine in military garb than in civilian clothes. Though the Company’s European officers would never be fully successful in securing the prestige and social status held by the most celebrated officers in the British army proper, in separating themselves from their civilian counterparts and the Company as a whole, the officers ensured that they could be seen as respectable actors in the empire. The ‘consolidation’ that Pitt called for in 1788 by the turn of the nineteenth century was no longer even a matter for discussion. Despite continued debates about the Company and its powers, most significantly the elimination of its trade monopoly in 1813, the corporation’s military autonomy endured largely without comment. Its soldiers and officers played significant roles in operations well beyond the Company’s formal territory, for instance in China during the First Opium War. The presence of such troops added a degree of institutional complexity to Britain’s military infrastructure in a period usually associated with increasing centralisation and national control. Only after the rebellions of 1857, when officers’ long-standing claim that they were ‘the palladium of our defence in India’ was nearly disproved, would this hybrid military system falter. As the Crown took direct administration from the Company, ‘amalgamation’ – which replaced ‘consolidation’ as the term for the incorporation of the Company’s forces into the British military – proceeded William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Open Road Integrated Media, 2017), pp. 20–1.

83

John Coates, ‘The Corruption of Colonel Newcome’, Essays in Criticism, 69:1 (2019), 74–89, p. 75.

84

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slowly, hindered by the same questions of relative rank and perquisites that had been raised in the 1780s.85 The relationship between the resulting British Indian army and the empire lies beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting in brief that it too fostered more expansive political authority to elite military officers than was permissible in India.86 Noting this trend, Hew Strachan observed, ‘[t]he difference between what was acceptable in India and what was acceptable in Britain was so obvious as not to need explicit formulation’.87 This chapter suggests that the campaigns for ‘equality of rank’ and debates over consolidation were key sites in which that ‘obvious’ fact was established. Company officers, eager to protect their interests against the royal army or their civil counterparts, used their expanding influence at home to solidify the British perception of Indian society as defined by war, conquest, and rule ‘by the Sword’. Their success, both in these debates and in setting the stage for the continued development of a militarised colonial ideology, lay in their ability to render that perception palatable, part of a broader understanding of martial honour, civil-military relations, and the stability of empire. Their elite status and the access this gave them in metropolitan politics facilitated their campaigns in a way that few other military actors in the empire could match. Nevertheless, their ambitions hint at a richer landscape in which Britain’s military development can be explored, in which questions of prestige and competing visions of martial virtue were fought out on a global stage.

Miscellaneous Papers relating to Amalgamation, Collection I, BL APAC MSS Eur F699/1/3/8/1.

85

Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, pp. 104–9.

86

Ibid., pp. 108–9.

87

Figure 4. J. W. Richards, ‘“A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One”’, Illustrated Chips, 22 November 1890, pp. 4–5.

Figure 5. J. W. Richards, ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’, Illustrated Chips, 22 November 1890), pp. 4–5.

8 ‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’, or, ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’: The Shift in Popular Perceptions of the Common Soldier in Late Victorian Britain, 1870–c.1910 Edwa r d Gosl ing

T

he cartoons ‘“A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One”’ and ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’ were published by Illustrated Chips on 22 November 1890. It could be argued that they are in poor taste. J. W. Richards’ illustrations are darkly humorous as he suggests that losing a leg on the battlefield is a ‘Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’, although of course, he is technically correct. And, to accompany a sketch of British soldiers charging into volley fire with the caption, ‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’, is sardonic to say the least. However, Illustrated Chips had not set out to denounce military service. Both cartoons appeared on the same double-page spread surrounded by other illustrations which were not related to the military. Other jokes poked fun at the hazards of serenading women armed with cricket bats, or the folly of a man visiting his hatter before his barber. This November issue of Illustrated Chips makes no further reference to the soldier or the army, nor do immediately previous and subsequent editions of the comic. These jokes are self-contained comic-book ‘gags’ intended to entertain. Despite their air of cynicism, however, the illustrations epitomise a shift in the way in which the regular army in Britain, and the common soldier of the rank and file in particular, was viewed and presented over the course of the late nineteenth century. They are not overly sentimental or sympathetic. Nor do they explicitly reference debates concerning the conditions of military service. But, crucially, the soldier is the focus. ‘A Soldier’s Life’ and ‘A Certain Cure’ suggest a civilian awareness of the soldier and a willingness to engage, albeit briefly, with the realities and potential dangers of life in the British army. They reflect, and even mock, the late Victorian fascination with the ordinary soldier and the growing enthusiasm for military themes as entertainment, which had emerged in popular culture by 1900.

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The British public had, of course, always been aware of the soldier. However, in general, and in peacetime in particular, the public traditionally engaged with the regular British army primarily at an institutional level. An examination of the press prior to the late 1870s would highlight that the soldier was well removed from public life. The British army was an institution of immense political and public interest, but that did not generally extend to its personnel, especially members of the rank and file. The army was frequently referred to in possessive and proprietorial terms by the press and members of the public; the phrase, ‘Our Army’, was commonly used when reporting on the state of the military. However, the discussion tended to revolve around public expenditure and military efficiency.1 Engagement with the nation’s army did not often include direct consideration of the nation’s servicemen. Where the soldier was considered directly, crime was a prevalent theme, the murder of a non-commissioned officer (NCO) by a disgruntled recruit for instance. Shootings at barracks at Aldershot, Dover and Devonport in 1869 had precipitated runs of articles reporting on the crimes and announcing the sentencing and punishment (in a civilian court) of the perpetrators.2 A direct interest in the ordinary soldier on ordinary terms, his life and his experience, was uncommon. By the mid-1880s, this state of affairs had started to shift. As David French has noted, the late Victorian soldier was a ‘paradox’.3 Socially, the common soldier was shunned by many in ‘respectable’ society; however, in the abstract at least, Private Tommy Atkins had started to gain cultural currency as a symbol of Britishness embodying attributes such as stoicism, strength, service and patriotism. Military themes developed a ‘powerful iconography’ as they became a hugely significant part of popular culture.4 Militarism and imperialism coloured the playbills of the music halls for all classes; military bands provided the accompaniment to the Victorian day out; ‘tin soldiers’ were popular childhood toys; and the soldier became a For example: ‘Our Army’, The Cornish Gazette, Falmouth Packet and General Advertiser, 5 March 1870, issue 3477; ‘Our Army’, The Morning Post, London, 22 May 1879, issue 33354; 23 May 1879, issue 33355; 26 May 1879, issue 55557; ‘Our Army’, The Belfast News-Letter, 22 May 1879, issue 19878; ‘Our Army’, The Morning Post, 26 May 1879, issue 33357; ‘The State of our Army’, The Preston Guardian, 4 November 1882, issue 3634.

1

For example: ‘A Soldier Attacked by his Own Sword’, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 7 June 1869, issue 4961; ‘Another Attempted Murder by a Soldier’, The Bradford Observer, 18 August 1869, issue 2077; ‘Brutal Assault by Soldiers at Brecon’, Western Mail, 17 August 1869, issue 93; ‘Execution of a Soldier at Winchester’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 12 September 1869, issue 996; ‘Execution of the Soldier William Taylor for the Murder of Corporal Skullen’, The Dundee Courier and Argus, 12 October 1869, issue 5053.

2

David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army and the British People c. 1870–2000 (Oxford, 2005), p. 334.

3

John M. MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester and New York, 1986), p. 3.

4

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    171

hero of adventure literature for children and adults alike.5 This shift culminated in the rise of youth movements, notably the Boy Scouts founded by Lt. Gen. Robert Baden-Powell in 1910, in which military skill, character and discipline were held up as virtues to which young people should aspire. However, the presence of soldiers on British streets continued to present a source of tension at a local level even into the 1890s. At the heart of this paradox was an increased readiness on the part of the general public to associate the army with the soldier in cultural terms, but an enduring unwillingness to consider the army to be socially acceptable, particularly as a career choice in the eyes of family and friends. Poor pay and relatively basic living conditions in particular continued to limit the appeal of military service. Importantly, however, in public discussion of the British military through the press and popular culture, soldiers came to represent the army where before they had been little more than figures on the balance sheet of the taxpayer’s annual expenditure. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, perceptions shifted and the ordinary soldier was placed front-and-centre in discussions of the military in Britain. This chapter will explore this shift in the popular perception of the common soldier in late Victorian Britain. It will argue that there was no single cause, but a number of factors which influenced and impacted upon one another. The change in the status of the soldier could be argued to have derived from government reforms to issues relating to the public-facing image of the army and the relationship between the recruit-giving classes and the military. But the shift was also caused by a heightening in press coverage of both peacetime reforms and wartime dramas which dragged the army further up the ladder of newsworthy content. The new-found cultural fascination with the soldier, which remained somewhat distinct from the less rapidly changing social relationship, was arguably accelerated by Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads (1892), which both fed and fed off a broader trend towards opposition against the prejudices which had traditionally worked to keep the soldier isolated within the military institution.6

War Office Reform – the Driving Force for Change? The foundation of the shift in status of the soldier lay in the War Office reforms of the 1870s and early 1880s. The ‘Cardwell-Childers Reforms’ began under the Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell, during William Gladstone’s first ministry (1868–74) and were amended under Cardwell’s Liberal successor at the War John M. MacKenzie, Popular Imperialism and the Military 1850–1950 (Manchester and New York, 1992), p. 15.

5

D. Bradshaw, ‘Kipling and War’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. H. J. Booth (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 80–2.

6

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Office, Hugh Childers (1880–82). They addressed a range of issues relating to the organisation and administration of the British army, working to reconfigure it into a modern military institution. The reformers dealt with the dual leadership of Horse Guards and the War Office, they abolished the system of promotion by purchase in the officer corps, they restructured the regimental system, and they reformed recruitment into the rank and file.7 The Victorian British army, unlike its major continental counterparts, was reliant on volunteers and not conscription to source recruits for its ranks. The military authorities therefore faced a constant challenge to attract desirable men in sufficient numbers.8 In an attempt to find a solution, the War Office reasoned that it would be necessary to convince, particularly the recruit-giving working class, of the merits of military service as a source of employment.9 It was still a commonly held preconception that a man would only join the army as a last resort, to escape difficulties in his old life, or to avoid jail. This encouraged the ongoing prejudice which assumed that only socially undesirable men took the Queen’s shilling. Therefore, a key objective for both phases of the reforms was to change the social status of soldiering in Britain. To that end, a series of initiatives were introduced, including two key reforms, informally referred to as ‘Short Service’ and ‘Localisation’. Among other things, it was these reforms which started to draw greater public attention to servicemen as individuals. It highlighted the humanity of the soldier, imperfect in nature and often considered in the abstract, but a figure to be engaged with as a man, not a statistic. The 1871 Army Enlistment Act, alias ‘Short Service’, sought to raise the rate and effectiveness of recruitment by facilitating the desire of young men to experience military life without committing their whole life to it. Cardwell reduced the minimum terms of service from twelve years to six. This, it was hoped, would open up military service to desirable young men, for whom the opportunities for travel, a smart uniform and the military lifestyle, appealed. Requiring a man to dedicate the best years of his life to service in barracks or overseas before being discharged too old to learn a new profession and easily start a family had acted as a long-standing barrier to soldiering as a career. Serving only six years in the colours before transferring to the reserves removed this barrier. This figure was extended to eight years in 1880, but still it was hoped that returning to civilian life at around twenty-six to twenty-eight years of age would provide ample opportunity for the short-serviceman to start a successful new life. See Edward M. Spiers, The Late-Victorian Army (Manchester and New York, 1992); A. Bruce, Purchase System and the British Army, 1860–1871 (London, 1980).

7

See Alan Ramsay Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home (London, 1977).

8

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers: Army Reorganisation: Report of a Committee of General and Other Officers of the Army on Army Organisation (Airey Committee Report), 1881 [c.2791], 87.165–172, p. 32.

9

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    173

The Localisation Acts (1872–73) were intended to further enhance the status of the military career by appealing not only to would-be recruits, but their family, friends and home communities as well. Instilling greater regional character in the regiments of the British army by building on pre-existing, if vague, local connections, regiments were furnished with new central depots and recruiting was focused into sixty-six districts. This pattern was intended to shift the focus of recruitment away from the towns and cities and to create an even coverage across the country. Over time, Cardwell hoped to see a regional character develop in the county regiments which local communities could engage and associate with. The status of soldiering would rise through the closer connections which would develop on both sides of the civil-military divide. Inspiration for the scheme came from the Prussian army’s 1866 Landwehr system which structured its army regiments around the local militia battalion, thereby firmly rooting regimental life in the home district, and removing both the dislocation of the soldier from his home and the imposition of strange troops on a local community. It was a system much admired in Britain by the military authorities and the press. As Captain C. B. Brackenbury noted in a lecture to the Royal United Services Institute in 1871, ‘There can be but good feeling [in Prussia] between the soldiers and the civilian population and the soldier is never quite out of reach of the tender advice of a mother and the softening influences of home.’10 The crucial difference between Cardwell’s system and that of the Prussian army was that the British were compelled to rely on voluntary enlistment, not conscription. This meant that to draw recruits from the local populace evenly across the country required the delicate fostering of civil-military relations and proactive recruiting strategies to entice men from diverse communities into the military in the first place. In order to address this difference, these key reforms were supported by a range of further initiatives designed to maximise their effectiveness. Most notably, the recruiting service was professionalised during the second wave of reforms under Childers from 1880. This was, from a public perspective, an attempt to remove the malice of the recruiting sergeant, whose presence on British streets, preying on vulnerable, young, and often drunk men had long been a particular public relations disaster for the army. It was a source of deep-rooted civil-military tension, so persistent that George Farquhar’s infamous play The Recruiting Officer (1706), which featured such unscrupulous practices, continued to have a common relevance in the 1870s. The earlier Localisation Acts had worked to reduce the negative stereotypes surrounding the army by creating a more familiar presence for the regiment and ties predicated upon local connections and tradition. The professionalised recruiting service appointed reliable soldiers into the recruiting officer position on the basis Captain C. B. Brackenbury, ‘The Military Systems of Prussia and France in 1870’, in Notes on Mr Cardwell’s Speech, ed. A. Robertson-Cunningham (London and Edinburgh, 1871), p. 11.

10

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of a good service record. Crucially, the recruiter’s pay became salaried, rather than dependent on the number of recruits he acquired. This, it was hoped, would remove the worst excesses of recruiters targeting vulnerable young men in order to secure an easy recruit.11 The efforts of the recruiting officer were supported by a new recruiting pamphlet which was designed to provide potential applicants with the information they required. The content mirrored the new, non-threatening recruiting officer; the pages were devoid of glamour and glory, instead attempting to sell military service as a career by outlining the pay and promotion prospects and the leisure activities military life offered. In short, the new recruiting literature presented enlistment as a contract of employment between the individual and the state.12 This was supplemented from 1882 with the launch of a press and advertising campaign which was supported by the colossal presence of the Post Office to distribute poster advertisements and recruiting literature.13 The War Office wanted the public to view military service as a profession – a job to enter into for a few years as a young man, or a long-term career with the potential for promotion and status. So, they designed a reputable face for recruitment to ensure what the public saw of the army did nothing to suggest it attracted low-status individuals. The War Office presented its desire to forge closer links between the army and British society as an issue which extended beyond the fundamental necessity of recruitment. Foreshadowing the positive re-imagining of the soldier as a symbol of British strength and patriotism to come, there was also the sense that military virtues of discipline and duty could render the soldier an example to society as a whole. During a speech given on the subject of conscription in 1871, Edward Cardwell had stated that, There are moral qualities developed in the training of a recruit which springing as it were from the army as a source, permeate through the lower strata of society, and add largely to those qualities which make up the greatness of a nation.14

Edward Gosling, ‘Tommy Atkins, War Office Reform and the Social and Cultural Presence of the Late-Victorian Army in Britain, 1868–c.1899’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Plymouth, 2016), pp. 94–114.

11

Army Recruitment Notices, Royal Mail Museum and Archives, POST 30/647, Sub File XI.

12

RECRUITING: General (Code 25(A)): Arrangements for increasing rate of recruitment: Advertising in Post Offices and Press, TNA, WO 32/6886. Use of paid recruiters. Expenses involved.

13

Colonel A. Cunningham-Robertson, ‘Notes on Mr Cardwell’s Speech and Suggestions for the Debates which are to Follow’, in Blackwood’s Magazine (London and Edinburgh, 1871), p. 1.

14

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    175

This was a convenient narrative to present as it challenged the notion that the rank and file was populated by men whose profession offered little opportunity for personal or social advancement. This was tied into a range of further concerns relating to the public image of the army in Britain. Desertion, for instance, was a relatively common occurrence thanks to the ease with which a man could enlist under a false name repeatedly, to receive the pay and equipment offered as inducements before absconding only to repeat the process at another regiment. Likewise, the practice of the courts in offering military service as an alternative to a prison sentence continued to reinforce perceptions within the respectable working class that to enlist as a soldier was to associate with members of the criminal class. The War Office’s campaign to present the army as a source of legitimate employment sought to erase those negative associations by repositioning the army as a pillar of the imperial state. The shift in attitudes towards the soldier can therefore be attributed to the Cardwell-Childers Reforms, but only to an extent. They certainly attracted considerable attention in the press and raised the public profile of the institution of the British army which became a common feature of the newspaper columns. Stereotypes surrounding the army and the soldier were often more difficult to fully erase. The removal of the disreputable old recruiting officer, for example, was lauded by some in the press as one of the triumphs of the Cardwell-Childers Reforms. The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post had described the old system as ‘cruel’ and ‘unworthy’ in March 1883, as it claimed that Sergeant Kite, the infamous figure from Farquhar’s play, had finally been abolished by the introduction of the professional recruiting service.15 ‘It is a relief ’, the article noted, ‘to know that we have changed all that. Recruiters do not now depend for their livelihood upon the number of men they can catch.’16 The article, as the word ‘catch’ strongly indicates, underlines how the recruiting practices of old were perceived; men were not enlisted into the army, they were caught by it. In spite of the positive tones of the Mercury’s article, the public’s mistrust and dislike of the presence of military recruiters on British streets never fully vanished. J. B. Yates’ cartoon, ‘Pleasures of the Recruiting Sergeant’ (1897), illustrates that the concept of the unscrupulous recruiter, taking advantage of drunken men in pubs and taverns as easy prey, had not yet been eradicated.17 Furthermore, the official and ‘honest’ recruiting literature which formed a key link in the modernised recruiting service did not meet with universal applause. Some veteran soldiers, in their published memoirs, made reference to recruitment in the late nineteenth century. They suggested that unscrupulous practices did not die out entirely in the 1880s, and that standards were not always maintained. In a ‘Recruiting in the Army’, The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 7 March 1883, issue 10861.

15

Ibid.

16

J. B. Yates, ‘Pleasures of the Recruiting Sergeant’, Judy, 24 March 1897, p. 143.

17

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Figure 6 (above). J. B. Yates, ‘The Pleasures of the Recruiting Sergeant’, Judy, 24 March 1897, p. 143. Figure 7. (right) Anonymous, ‘Military Sketch No.2 – A Poser for Childers’, Moonshine, 2 April 1881, p. 165.

generally positive account of military life, Horace Wyndham noted of the recruiting sergeants in 1899 that, ‘[in their] anxiety to earn their fee, recruiting sergeants are wont to regard as fish practically all who come to their nets and eagerly jump at almost anyone who likes to present himself ’.18 The Cardwell-Childers Reforms did, however, raise the soldier to occupy a position of vague public interest. Wide-ranging as they were, there were a number of issues in which the ordinary soldier did not feature and, given the Liberal government’s drive for retrenchment, cost and efficiency remained the more dominant subjects. Certainly, the attempt to convince the working classes that enlistment in the army was a sensible career move did not entirely hit the mark. Short Service attracted public attention, but not for the reasons the War Office had been hoping. As ‘Military Sketch No.2 – A Poser for Childers’, a cartoon from Moonshine, highlights, an unintended side-effect of Short Service was to lower the average age of the soldier and lose for the army many capable men just as they reached the age and

H. Wyndham, The Queen’s Service: Being the Experiences of a Private Soldier in the British Infantry at Home and Abroad (London, 1899), pp. 3–5.

18

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    177

experience to become good soldiers and NCOs. The press started to raise fears that the British soldier required a schoolmaster, not a drill sergeant. This was the conception of the soldier that the public latched onto. Recruiting figures gradually did improve from 1871 onwards and a reserve force of c.80,000 men was created, an important advance in the British military’s organisation in preparation for a large-scale war. However, this increase was largely consumed by the higher turnover of men through the army in a short period. More importantly in this case, the reform did not engender positive attitudes towards military service as much as it created a fear that the nation’s military was now populated by under-aged, under-developed boys. Furthermore, Gladstone’s Liberal governments of the 1870s and 1880s introduced many reforms beyond the army, including the Education Acts which had made it mandatory for children to attend school. That new system was enforced by the School Board Inspector. Reform saturation further lessened the impact of the War Office’s schemes.

The Press Despite the War Office’s attempts to encourage a change in perceptions of soldiering, the reforms were not the sole driving force behind the shift that was beginning to build by the late 1870s. Criticism of those policies was often more dominant than the intended message, particularly in terms of the efficacy of the short-service soldier. They did provide the foundation for change however. In the wake of the reforms, wider debate arose around what standards the nation should hope to expect in its soldiers. Anxieties over the loss of the seasoned warrior formed part of a wider reassessment of the quality of the men in the army. The Graphic in 1879, for instance, considered the number of still-serving soldiers in prison. It considered it to be unfortunate but inevitable that a lower class of man would sometimes be needed to fill the ranks. The article, written by the noted investigative journalist James Greenwood, reasoned that: At a time when the ranks require strengthening the recruiting officer cannot afford to be scrupulously particular. Provided a man is sound in wind and limb and of an acceptable age, and he is not notoriously an evil doer, he is accounted ‘rough-stuff ’ good enough to be converted into an efficient red-jacket.19

It was not necessarily the narrative that the War Office had been striving for in terms of convincing the public that soldiering was a vocation to which respectable men could aspire. But, by 1881 the decade of trial-and-error reform had worked to push the army to the front of the news agenda and the public were quicker to engage 19

James Greenwood, ‘Soldiers in Prison’, The Graphic, 13 September 1879, issue 511.

Figure 8. W. Reynolds, ‘Why Do Not Working Men Enlist?’, Funny Folks, 30 October 1880, p. 347.

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    179

with the soldier in terms beyond that of a numerical figure, albeit still with a strong sense of pragmatism. The introduction of schemes such as Short Service had the effect that the issue of army recruitment had been raised repeatedly. As a result, pertinent questions started to emerge in the press, questions which explored a more ‘human’ side to the issue of military recruitment, questions like, why would good working men continue to reject the army as a career? Funny Folks pondered this problem in October 1880. With a sardonic humour similar to ‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’, the cartoonist, W. Reynolds, presents the ‘advantages’ of joining the army. He notes an interesting range of factors which might deter good men from joining the army, including, loss of liberty, the risk of injury and poor prospects. The insightful cartoon encapsulates perfectly the myriad of barriers to enlistment, responsibility for which lay with no single source. Some blame is placed with the army itself, particularly in frames two and three where an uncomfortable uniform and poor treatment by the officers are offered as factors. Loss of liberty is indicated in frame four. Perhaps more interesting are the frames which indicate public prejudice against soldiers as a barrier to satisfactory recruitment. The image of a soldier being denied entry to what appears to be a music hall in frame five is accompanied by the caption, ‘He will be tolerated in no place of public resort, so cannot waste his money there.’20 As with the other captions, sarcasm plays a central role in the humour as it is suggested that social ostracism is an effective method for saving money and therefore an attraction for military service. Alongside frame six, which highlights the bleak prospects available for the soldier who has given his youth and health for his country in a society which does not value or support veterans, the cartoon paints a damning impression of civil-military relations at home. Reynolds is engaging with the issues of recruitment from an unusual angle for the early 1880s; encouraged by the Cardwell-Childers Reforms, which were about to enter their second phase, he is exploring the problems at hand through the experience of the soldier directly, and highlighting the shortcomings of the authorities and public in the source of the quandary. The War Office recruitment drive did not succeed outright, but it did lay the foundations for greater consideration within the civilian world of the realities facing British soldiers. That the press itself encouraged a renewed engagement with the ordinary soldier from the late 1870s is not necessarily surprising. The extraordinary expansion in the press, following the lifting of stamp duties in 1855, allowed for cheap, mass-circulation newspapers. There were already 1,500 separate newspaper and magazine titles by 1860. This increase in material, combined with a corresponding expansion in readership, raised the likelihood that the army would find a consistent W. Reynolds, ‘Why Do Not Working Men Enlist?’, Funny Folks, 30 October 1880, p. 347.

20

180    E dwa r d G osling

presence in the newspapers. However, press interest drew the army into society and facilitated a wider engagement with the military. The reporting of events in war certainly helped to raise the army’s profile and encourage a more active public reception. Following the Ashanti Campaign in 1874, for example, the press spread the desire to welcome back the troops. The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle announced that ‘Every effort [was] being made to secure for our soldiers and sailors, upon their arrival at Portsmouth from the Gold Coast … the heartiest welcome’.21 A local show of support in Portsmouth was heeded across multiple counties. And it reached not only readers in the south of England, it was echoed in newspapers across the country. A letter to the Leeds Mercury for instance noted how ‘Our hearts have joined in the enthusiastic welcome given to our brave troops upon their arrival in Portsmouth’.22 This continued in a similar vein throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The campaigns in Zululand, Egypt and the Sudan incited momentary spikes of interest in the press. As the 1880s progressed, such excitement around colonial episodes acquired an increasingly arrogant tone as the culture of high and popular imperialism started to emerge. Lingering not far beneath the surface was a sense of imperial insecurity, which would come to haunt the late Victorians.23 Geopolitical events like the Scramble for Africa, and the Great Game with Russia fuelled anxieties at home that British supremacy overseas was under threat. Although they ended in 1882, the exposure drummed up by the reforms had combined with the public interest in Britain’s military campaigns and desire to preserve the nation’s imperial status and this helped to maintain public interest in the soldier. ‘Tommy Atkins to the Front’, a cartoon and poem which appeared in 1885 in Judy, the sister publication of Punch, illustrates this particularly well. It presents the soldier facing up to Russian imperialist aggression threatening Afghanistan, the buffer state protecting British India. An awareness of the hardship of military service is indicated as the poem notes the soldier is a ‘plaything’ who fights for ‘scanty wage’, but added to this is an ideological undertone which would soon form the foundation of the soldier’s cultural popularity. Drawing on familiar imagery of English oak, something more readily associated with the Royal Navy, and toy soldiers, Judy presents Tommy Atkins as a source and defender of Britain’s strength abroad. As a result, the press did encourage wider public engagement with the soldier, helping to break down the institutional barrier facing men whose life was spent ‘The Return of Soldiers and Sailors from the Ashantee War’, The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 14 March 1874, issue 4338.

21

‘An Appeal for British Soldiers’, Leeds Mercury, 1 April 1874, issue 11224.

22

J. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow, 2005), pp. 196–7.

23

Figure 9. Anonymous, ‘Tommy Atkins to the Front’, Judy, 25 March 1885, p. 142.

182    E dwa r d G osling

overseas, and confined to barracks and garrison towns. That is not to suggest, however, that the press treatment of the army at home was always positive. The failure of Short Service to fully rehabilitate the reputation of the soldier was largely thanks to the unfavourable coverage of it in the press which encouraged the concept of a juvenile and inadequate soldier rather than a young and ambitious one. And reports on instances of public disturbances involving soldiers, civilian criticism of the conduct of servicemen, and the anxieties of communities near garrison towns also peppered the newspapers and periodicals of late Victorian Britain.24 To consider the British soldier, rather than the British army, as an institution was an important step.

The Soldier’s Life – a Theme in Popular Culture Militarism and imperialism grew in popularity towards the end of the 1880s. The soldier was a prominent feature of this culture and his life was a common backdrop. It was in this climate that the cartoons ‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’ and ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’ appeared. The change, however, was spurred on not just by interest in the press. Military-themed popular culture allowed for a wider engagement with the soldier. Arguably the most significant example of the soldier entering late Victorian popular culture was in Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads, which first appeared in 1890 and were published as two collections in 1892 (Barrack Room Ballads) and 1896 (The Seven Seas). Inspired by songs of the music hall, they were remarkable because they introduced the public to the ordinary soldier in an explicit, if exaggerated, way. Kipling’s use of vernacular, usually cockney, language created a persona for Tommy Atkins which captured the public imagination and gave the soldier a ‘voice’. In the long term, this ‘persona’ was criticised for creating ‘a great deal of prejudice to the soldier in the eyes of the public’ by presenting a crude and unrepresentative caricature of the common soldier.25 However, the impact of the Barrack Room Ballads, alongside Kipling’s other soldier-themed works like the Soldiers Three (1888), helped to galvanise public interest in the rank and file. The Barrack Room Ballads alone were very popular; within one year three editions were published to meet demand. By 1890 Kipling already had gained a reputation for his literary work published in India and Britain. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) had been published first through the Civil and Military Gazette in Bombay and, alongside Soldiers Three, it had created a stir for its lively use of language and characterisation. Kipling’s style garnered not only critical praise but also ‘Soldiers a Danger to Public Peace’, The North Eastern Daily Gazette, 8 September 1890; ‘Conflict between Soldiers and Civilians’, The Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser for Lancashire, Westmorland and Yorkshire, 18 June 1890, issue 6087.

24

R. Blatchford, My Life in the Army (London, 1910), p. 125.

25

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    183

criticism for his creation of an ‘unapologetic and unacceptable relationship between art and practical life which in this case explored the administrative labour of the Empire’.26 To explore the common soldier in his own right, at home or in the empire, especially in the manner Kipling employed, was radical indeed in English literature. Kipling would become one of the most celebrated authors of the fin de siècle with works such as The Jungle Book (1894) and If (1910) destined to become classic works of literature. An ultimate indication of Kipling’s influence and success was being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He was the first English recipient. His influence on public perceptions of the soldier was a key part of his success. As the citation noted, ‘In Kipling the British Army has found a minstrel to interpret … the toils and deprivations through which it has to pass, and to depict its life and work with abundant acknowledgment of the great qualities it displays’.27 In addition to providing Tommy Atkins with a ‘voice’ and establishing the position of the common soldier as a central figure in British imperial identity, Kipling also directly challenged the prejudices to which he (the soldier) had been subjected. Several of Kipling’s ballads criticise the public’s treatment of its servicemen. His position was made apparent in the opening dedication to the collection, with the lines: ‘I’ve tried for to explain, both your pleasure and your pain’, and ‘Oh there’ll surely come a day when they give you all your pay, and treat you as a Christian ought to do’.28 Other ballads such as ‘Tommy’ and ‘Shilling a Day’ addressed the challenges soldiers faced when at home in Britain. ‘Tommy’, echoing the fifth frame of the Funny Folks cartoon ‘Why Do Not Working Men Enlist’, highlighted the hypocrisy of the civilian refusing to serve a man in uniform in peacetime while being very willing to praise the soldier in times of war. ‘Shilling a Day’, by contrast, focused on the fate of veterans and the expectation that the limited prospects for ex-servicemen would be acceptable despite their service to queen and country. These ballads, along with many others, drew public attention to the realities facing soldiers in their experiences at home, overseas and in retirement. The Barrack Room Ballads provided colour, detail and relevance to the life of the soldier where, in the civilian mind, there had not been before. In writing his Barrack Room Ballads, Kipling was heavily influenced by the cultures of the music hall. The poems are in fact ballads, reminiscent of the call-andrepeat songs popular on the music hall stage. Upon moving to England from India in the late 1880s, Kipling had been taken with the songs he heard in Gatti’s Music S. Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late-Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 74–5.

26

C. D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, ‘Presentation Speech for the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature to Rudyard Kipling’, 10 December 1907, https:// www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1907/ceremony-speech (accessed 26 July 2019).

27

R. Kipling, ‘To T.A.’, in Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (London, 1892), p. 2.

28

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Hall and his soldier-themed works such as Soldiers Three (1888) had recently been published.29 The Barrack Room Ballads brought together Kipling’s interest in the soldier in India with the music hall culture back in Britain. The music hall scene had a tradition of using military themes in the songs, displays and melodramas which formed the background of this particular brand of popular entertainment. G. W. Hunt’s hugely popular 1877 piece, ‘McDermott’s War Song’, helped to popularise the significance of military and naval themes to the music hall scene by bringing the new and aggressive ‘jingoistic’ style of popular imperialism into the mix.30 The song does not directly reference the soldier but the confident assertions it makes about Britain’s willingness to chastise the Russian ‘bear’ place a clear importance on the British military’s past and present ability to provide staunch opposition. More generally, dozens of songs, alongside melodramas and plays, featured military characters and themes. As Penny Summerfield has noted, the army and navy were popular vehicles for the melodramas enjoyed by the middle and upper classes in particular as the characterisations of Tommy Atkins and Jack Tar came to represent Britain’s place on the positive side of the ‘dichotomy of good and evil’ that characterised the world stage as imperial Britain saw it.31 The music hall songs featured the soldier in a variety of ways, from an incidental appearance to the central theme. Jingoistic songs in a similar vein to ‘McDermott’s War Song’ continued to appear during the remainder of the nineteenth century but with increasingly explicit references to the soldier. Leslie Stuart’s ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ (1899), for instance, held the soldier up as the root of Britain’s imperial success. The song denounces diplomacy in favour of military action in a style reminiscent of ‘McDermott’s War Song’, but the dominant message is praise for the soldiers at whose feet Britain’s present global power and influence was being placed: It’s the soldiers of the Queen, my lads, Who’ve been my lads, who’ve seen my lads, In the fight for England’s glory, lads, When we have to show them what we mean. And when we say we’ve always won, And when they ask us how it’s done, We’ll proudly point to every one Of England’s soldiers of the Queen.32 A. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London, 1999), p. 188.

29

G. W. Hunt, ‘McDermott’s War Song’ (London, 1875).

30

Penny Summerfield, ‘Patriotism and Empire: Music-Hall Entertainment 1870–1914’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. J. M. MacKenzie (Manchester, 1986), pp. 17–49, p. 31.

31

Leslie Stuart, ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ (Toronto, 1899).

32

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    185

The Second Boer War (1899–1902) provided a further important turning point in the soldier’s emergence from the shadows of the military institution, especially in popular culture. The War Office reforms and subsequent press interest had served to raise the issue of the soldier, and the earlier popular culture of Kipling and the music hall had rendered the military a familiar theme. However, culturally and socially, the soldier continued to exist as an ‘other’, a man distinct and removed from normal society. Music hall songs like G. W. Hunt’s ‘Bom, Bom, Bom, (the Tragedy of Pretty Polly Pringle)’ (1873) or ‘Good-Bye Dolly Gray’, performed in 1898 by Tom Costello, treated the soldier as an outsider and an often dangerous suitor of women.33 Other songs like ‘Saved by the Stroke of a Pen’ (1896) by Bernard Dyllyn, ‘Four Fingers and a Thumb’ by Charles Coborn and Eldred Powel (1895) or W. P. Dempsey’s ‘Second Hand Clothes’ (1899) expressed some concern for soldiers and veterans facing a future of poverty due to poor fortune or disability.34 The rise of tensions in South Africa saw a large influx of civilian volunteers into the British army in response to the needs of the imperial power. This worked to begin to break down the long-standing barriers which stood between the soldier and the civilian. Once again, the music hall contributed to the process. The final verse in Stuart’s ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ repeats the line, ‘An Englishman can be a Soldier too’, as it pressed the audience to attribute Britain’s imperial success to the soldiers of the queen. Another particularly significant example is ‘The Absent Minded Beggar’, a poem by Rudyard Kipling set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan. The song was intended to help raise funds for the families of the men who had enlisted to fight in South Africa. A considerable success when it was released in 1899, the song furthered the notion that any man could be a soldier, and that the soldier was an everyman. The uniting element for any man enlisting into the army, Kipling and Sullivan suggested, was a sense of duty and a need to have his interests at home attended to in his absence, as the following refrain demonstrates: Duke’s son, Cook’s son – son of a hundred Kings (Fifty-thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay!) Each of ’em of doing his country’s work (and who’s to look after their things?) Pass the hat for credit’s sake, and pay pay pay!35

G. W. Hunt, ‘Bom, Bom, Bom (the Tragedy of Pretty Polly Pringle)’ (1873); Will D. Cobb and Paul Barnes, ‘Good-Bye Dolly Gray’ (c.1898).

33

Bernard Dyllyn, ‘Saved by the Stroke of a Pen’ (1895); Charles Coborn and Eldred Powel, ‘Four Fingers and a Thumb’ (1895); Norton Atkins and A. E. Durandeau, ‘Second Hand Clothes’ (c.1899).

34

Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Sullivan, ‘The Absent Minded Beggar’ (1899).

35

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Philanthropy in support of soldiers and their families was not new to the South African war; the late nineteenth century saw the rise of several charities for widows and orphans of soldiers, the establishment of Soldiers’ Institutes for serving men and veterans’ charities for ex-soldiers. But, raising the issue of the challenges facing the families of soldiers when they were serving overseas in the context of civilian volunteers helped to further break down the barriers of understanding between the civilian and military worlds. From the 1890s onwards, this interest in the soldier was also reflected in the press. There were popular serials like Penny Illustrated Paper’s (PIP) ‘Trooper Tommy Atkins’, which ran for twenty-six weeks in 1895 and was written by two soldiers who had ‘been through the mill’.36 The series presented to PIP’s readership a narrative account and insight into life in the Victorian army, from recruitment and training to barrack life, guard duty and active service. This series was followed immediately by another in PIP, ‘Tommy Atkins Goes to War’, which followed a similar vein.37 Other publications, including the Graphic, also printed accounts of the soldier’s life and experiences.38 Serialised accounts of military life in the press were mirrored by the steady publication of military memoirs penned by ex-soldiers which, in greater detail, outlined the idiosyncratic world of army life. Recruitment, life in barracks and training frequently constituted lengthy portions of these publications with many spending little to no time on topics of overseas service or combat. Public understanding of what life in the army meant was on the rise. As a result of this increased public appetite for military material, the cultural status of the soldier underwent a notable transformation. Desirable qualities such as manliness, stoicism, patriotism, qualities which under the influence of popular imperialism were prevalent in the music hall scene, were cast onto the British soldier. The rise in direct accounts of life in the military allowed this narrative to be evidenced with ever greater effect. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, this heightened public engagement with the ordinary soldier enabled popular perceptions to be realigned to reflect positive aspects of military life. The time spent engaged in wholesome pursuits such as physical training, reading, or attending army school became more widely acknowledged, partly thanks to the work of the military memoirists but also the War Office’s campaign to present life in the army as a respectable one through public display and recruiting literature. The role of the army in organised sport which, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was coming into its own, was pronounced, with military and naval teams common in the early ‘Trooper Tommy Atkins’, I–XXVII, Penny Illustrated Paper, 5 January 1895–6 July 1895.

36

‘Trooper Tommy’s “First War” or Tommy Atkins on Active Service’, I–XXIII, Penny Illustrated Paper, 13 July 1895–14 December 1895.

37

‘A Day in the Life of Tommy Atkins’, The Graphic, 21 December 1895, issue 1360.

38

The S hif t in Popul a r Perceptions of t he Co m mon Sol dier    187

years of association football and rugby.39 It helped to undermine the stereotype that soldiers were border-line criminals or habitual drunks. As Field Marshal Wolseley announced in a speech in Norwich, repeated via telegram in Freeman’s Journal in December 1895: The private soldier was treated as an unreasoning being and his social benefit was very little considered. Those days have happily gone by and we now [try] to elevate our soldiers by treating them as persons whose wishes ought to be consulted. The rank-and-file [are] the most sober classes in England and there [is] less crime in the army than in any corresponding class.40

Change often begets change. As Lord Wolseley’s statement highlights, a greater engagement with the soldier facilitated a reassessment of what the general public considered the ordinary soldier to be. One further consequence of this was that prejudice against men in uniform, particularly NCOs and other ranks, was increasingly challenged.

Prejudice against Soldiers: The Response Reflecting the public’s new fascination with tales of military life, a swathe of military memoirs were published throughout the late nineteenth century recounting life as a soldier. The writing of military memoirs, alongside similar civilian accounts of experiences in conflicts such as the Indian Mutiny, was not uncommon throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, an even greater proliferation of military memoirs appeared in the years following the Napoleonic Wars.41 The memoirs of the latter nineteenth century, perhaps reflecting the absence of a major European conflict since the Crimea, often offered a broad overview of life in the army, at home and overseas. Some, in much the same style as PIP’s ‘Trooper Tommy Atkins’, sought simply to present to an increasingly interested public something of life in the army. Others, such as Horace Wyndham, author of The Queen’s Service: Being the Experiences of a Private Soldier in the British Infantry at Home and Abroad, occupied a more forthright position. In certain examples, the authors proclaimed a hope to exploit the new cultural significance of the soldier to challenge the misconceptions and prejudices held by the civilian world regarding military men. They touched upon Tony Mason and Eliza Riedi, Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 2010).

39

‘Lord Wolseley on the British Soldier’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 20 December 1895.

40

N. Ramsay, Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780–1835 (Farnham, 2011), p. 193; M. McCormack and K. Lynch (eds), Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society 1715–1815 (Liverpool, 2014).

41

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issues ranging from continuing the ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the social image of the soldier, to rejecting estimations of the value of the army’s contributions to the empire, or challenging Kipling’s portrait of Tommy Atkins. Former soldiers like Wyndham dwelt on themes connected to home service and the truth behind what the public thought they knew about men in barracks. As Wyndham explained in his introduction, he sought to offer ‘the general public – whose interest in everything appertaining to the army is wide and sincere – some authentic information regarding the life and conditions of service of non-commissioned officers and private soldiers’.42 Memoirists sometimes took the opportunity to debunk myths and challenge common misconceptions and negative stereotypes, particularly with regard to crime and drink, which even by the 1890s were closely associated with the common soldier in Britain. As another memoirist stated, ‘I have heard about the common soldier of the British Army from the officer and civilian source, and I will say that their opinions are ignorant, for neither are well-enough acquainted.’43 In the press, too, soldiers sometimes spoke out against unfavourable treatment, keen to capitalise on the favourable climate. Public discussion of military issues by serving soldiers was forbidden, but some simply wrote to newspaper editors anonymously through the use of initials, monikers or pseudonyms such as ‘One Who Has Served’ or ‘Ich Dien’ (I Serve). More generally, however, they chose to express objections to prejudicial treatment through civil-military newspapers such as The Broad Arrow.44 Protests from members of the public against the open prejudice displayed to men in uniform from some in Britain had been present since the early 1880s. Particularly following the highly publicised conflicts in Zululand, Egypt and the Sudan, calls for the better treatment of soldiers were emerging. A letter to the Editor of The Standard created a ripple of interest in 1882, for instance, as its author described his mortification upon witnessing first-hand the prejudicial treatment of a soldier friend who was denied entry to a hotel bar because he was in uniform.45 The Western Mail published an article reflecting on the existence of prejudice against soldiers and called for a change in attitudes to reflect the new and more respectable soldier of the Cardwell and Childers mould.46 Wyndham, The Queen’s Service, p. vii.

42

Welsh (pseud.), Recollections of an Old Soldier by One of the Rank and File (Birmingham, 1886), p. v.

43

The Broad Arrow was a London-based, weekly periodical, aimed primarily at the military and civil services. It ran from July 1868 until November 1917.

44

‘Soldiers in Uniform’, The Standard, 25 April 1882, issue 18024.

45

‘Soldiers in Uniform’, The Western Mail, 1 May 1882, issue 4047; ‘The Army and the People’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 18 January 1882.

46

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As the strength and frequency of these instances increased, the protests began to be echoed publicly by the army itself. By the mid-1890s, the military authorities had started to publicise the strategies it was employing to combat the prejudicial treatment of its servicemen by civilian businesses. Most prominently, the orchestration of military boycotts, instructing servicemen to refrain from frequenting certain establishments whose proprietors had refused to serve soldiers, was passed on to the local and London newspapers. At first unwilling to reveal the identities of the proprietors involved, or the exact details of their establishments, the War Office and military command advertised their boycotting strategy. All establishments of Messrs Brickwood & Co., proprietors of the Parade Hotel in Southsea, Portsmouth, for instance, were boycotted by the army under the instruction of Lt. Gen. Sir Baker Russell, commander of the Southern Military District in 1899, following refusal by the Parade Hotel to serve two uniformed sergeants in the Royal Artillery. As the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle noted, the boycott caused ‘surprise in local “trade” circles’.47 Public protest followed the military authorities’ example, calling into question the legitimacy of denying soldiers service in public places on account of their presence in uniform. The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, for instance, had published a lengthy attack on the mistreatment of soldiers following a similar incident in an unnamed establishment, again in Portsmouth, in 1895. ‘Does an Englishman forfeit the right to the respect of his fellow-countrymen when he dons the Queen’s uniform’, it asked, adding that, ‘the mere fact that such a question is necessary is a disgrace to us a nation who brag and boast of the conquests “we” have won, and of the battles fought for us while we have been sleeping in our beds’.48 Criticising the hypocrisy of those who would praise the soldier in war and shun him in peace, the article concluded with a final dig: ‘with educated people this is already understood, but there are still far too many who require education on the subject’.

Conclusion The process by which popular perceptions of the soldier changed during the final decades of the nineteenth century was complex. The forces acting on the social status of the military in Britain were in varying ways political, social and cultural and were perpetually cross-pollinating. The Cardwell-Childers Reforms present a logical starting point for examining the status of soldiering because they constituted a clear and concerted attempt to manipulate public opinion for the purposes ‘Refusal to Serve Soldiers’, The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 19 August 1899, issue 4622.

47

‘A Soldier’s Rights’, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 15 August 1895, issue 12758.

48

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of military efficiency. The War Office raised the profile of the rank and file by encouraging public discussion of the conditions of service in the British army. The professionalisation of the recruiting system, Short Service and ‘Localisation’ all incited a closer examination of the soldier, particularly in the press. Discussion of ‘Our Army’ expanded to consider not only the extent to which the army was operating at full established strength, as voted for by Parliament, but also issues relating to recruitment, retention and military life. The issue of who was enlisting and under what terms became important. In reality, the War Office’s aim of attracting a ‘higher class’ of recruit into the ranks by restyling military service into a respectable career, was never fully realised. A healthy level of public scepticism remained regarding the conditions under which men served. Most importantly, the pay of the soldier was never raised in line with equivalent positions of civilian employment. Low pay undermined the rehabilitation of military service and limited the extent to which the status of soldiering could rise in social terms, in spite of the improvements made by the military reformers. However, the reforms did succeed in raising public awareness of the humanity of the rank and file. Late Victorian society’s relationship with the soldier followed on from political attempts to address negative stereotypes which were hindering recruitment. Awareness of the soldier grew from the late 1870s, slowly and imperfectly. The wars in West and South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan added to the growing public interest in the soldier. The impact of the Second Boer War and First World War, and the large-scale enlistment of those conflicts, was key to finally breaking down the barrier between the military and civilian worlds. However, they were part of a long-term transformation in the relationship between the British public, the soldier and military service. That transformation was significant because it allowed for the movement of the soldier into the public’s perception of the regular army. It challenged the socially isolated nature of the military institution which had hitherto maintained a barrier to a public appreciation of who and what the ordinary soldier was and allowed prejudice and preconception to conceal the soldier’s identity from the outside world. Prior to the early 1880s, popular discussion of the army spared little time for the soldiers themselves, and for good reason – it is more straightforward to ignore the needs of the man who wears the uniform if discussion of the military is confined to figures and statistics. The reforms to recruitment and fears over the stability of British power in the world encouraged a revision of the realities of soldiering, and with it grew a cultural interest in military life, helped along by the press, memoirs and Kipling. By engaging with the life and humanity of the soldier through these channels, the figure of Tommy Atkins was recast into a world which could be relatable for the wider population. As a result, the conditions and experiences which defined military service gained a new relevance which, supported by the efforts of the War Office reformers, acquired increasing legitimacy as a way of life.

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A further consequence of these shifts in the position of the soldier in relation to the civilian world was a pronounced increase in the willingness of different groups to come to his defence. Just as Kipling bluntly challenged the prejudices and poor conditions to which the British subjected their servicemen, veterans and friends of soldiers became, tentatively, more vocal in opposing acts of discrimination against men in uniform, especially in print and particularly in the newspapers. In other cases, religious and philanthropic groups followed the War Office’s example in seeking to rehabilitate the soldier by improving the fabric of military life. Garrison libraries, temperance societies and Soldiers’ Institutes represented some ways in which the character of the soldier was advanced through education and finding alternatives to alcohol for passing the time in barracks. And the military authorities likewise followed the example of the public, developing an increasingly militant stance on establishments known to discriminate against soldiers, organising, and publicising, boycotts of offending hotels and taverns in the 1890s. Mistreatment of the soldier became progressively less socially acceptable as a result of the political and cultural rehabilitation that had taken place. ‘A Soldier’s Life is a Merry One’ and ‘A Certain Cure for Gout and Rheumatism’ summarise this shift with tongue-in-cheek humour. Simple as they are, they encompass a range of themes – life, health, wounding, emotion and death – which were unlikely to be explored in the context of the common soldier, in any real detail or in peacetime, prior to the 1880s.

9 Irish Military Cultures in the British Army, c.1775–1992 Timothy B owma n

I

reland can claim to have a series of lengthy and important military cultures or traditions. The most obvious is, perhaps, what could be termed a republican military culture. This dates from the United Irishmen formed in the 1790s and inspired by the ideology of revolutionary France. The United Irishmen, who recruited amongst both Catholics and Presbyterians, were responsible for a series of localised risings in 1798, most notably in Counties Antrim, Down and Wexford, and for Robert Emmet’s rebellion of 1803 in Dublin. This republican military tradition can then be traced through the Young Ireland Rising of 1848, Fenian Rising of 1867, Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish War of Independence of 1919–21, the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 and later Provisional Irish Republican Army campaign of 1969–98. Almost as well known is what could be termed the ‘Wild Geese’ tradition. With the end of the Williamite Wars, with the Treaty of Limerick in 1692, and subsequent penal laws, Irish Catholics were prohibited from enlisting in the British army, due to fears of continued Jacobite sympathy. They were, however, able to enlist in ‘Irish Brigades’ in the French and Spanish armies. Only with the repeal of the penal laws regarding army enlistment and the decimation of the Irish Brigades during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did this tradition fully end, though by the 1790s it is clear that very few of the rank and file in the Irish Brigade in the French army were actually Irish born. In terms of overseas service, one might also look to the large numbers of men of Irish birth who served in both the Union and Confederate armies during the American Civil War, those who served in the various South American wars of liberation of 1815–28, and the Irish battalion which served in defence of the Papal States in 1861. There was also a Protestant volunteering tradition, which might be traced back as far as the Ulster plantation of the early seventeenth century, when those granted lands under the plantation settlements were meant to bring in settlers from England and Scotland who would serve in a Protestant militia in time of war. This Protestant volunteering tradition can certainly be dated to the local forces raised for the successful defence of Enniskillen and Londonderry in 1688–89 during the Williamite Wars. It resurfaced in 1775 when the removal of regular troops from

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Ireland during the American War of Independence saw the formation of a largely Protestant volunteer movement for home defence. This force soon took on a deeply political agenda, pressing for a form of colonial self-government, with much more autonomy for the Protestant-dominated Irish Parliament. However, the end of the American War of Independence saw the movement decline rapidly. The threat of invasion and insurrection during the French Revolutionary Wars was then to see the formation of the overwhelmingly Protestant yeomanry in 1796. This force had strong links with the ultra-Protestant Orange Order, to the extent that the Whig government disbanded it in 1834, convinced that its lack of impartiality made it useless as a police force. The Protestant volunteering tradition then encompasses the Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1913 to resist Home Rule for Ireland, and various paramilitary groups (principally the Ulster Defence Association and newly-formed Ulster Volunteer Force) which emerged from 1966.1 This chapter is concerned with another well-known Irish military tradition, that of service in the British army. Elements of the other traditions were subsumed into this. Most obviously, the Protestant volunteering tradition did much to produce the 36th (Ulster) Division which was incorporated into the British army in 1914 as one of the divisions of Lord Kitchener’s new armies. The republican military tradition sought, at various periods, to subvert those Irishmen serving in the British army, and the Irish Brigade in the French army was, effectively, incorporated into the British army during the French Revolutionary Wars. The issue of ‘green redcoats’ has long puzzled historians and some patterns of Irish service in the British army do not fit readily accepted norms. Those visiting the Ulster Tower at Thiepval, completed in November 1921 by the Northern Ireland government as the official memorial to those killed during the First World War, or, indeed, those looking at wall murals concerning the 36th (Ulster) Division in East Belfast, might simplistically conclude that the Irish participation in the British army was largely Protestant and drawn from the North-East of Ulster.2 This was not the case in the First World War itself and, more broadly, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ulster Protestant involvement in the British army was notably limited. Some historians have taken an extremely contrary position, with David Fitzpatrick and Catriona Pennell suggesting that Irish recruitment fitted a ‘British pattern’ in 1914–16: this ignores the politicised recruitment campaigns which boosted Irish recruitment, the failure of the British army to develop ‘Pals’ units aimed at middle-class recruits in Ireland and For a discussion of these themes, see Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, ‘An Irish Military Tradition?’, in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–25.

1

Cyril Falls, History of the 36th (Ulster) Division (Belfast, 1922), frontispiece; Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 107–43; N. C. Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 105–7.

2

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the lack of a Territorial Force in Ireland.3 The most notable Hibernian exceptionalism within the British army was the decision by the British government not to introduce conscription into Ireland between 1916 and 1918, nor conscription or national service into Northern Ireland between 1939 and 1962.4 While there is a tendency to think that most of those Irishmen who joined the British army over this period were effectively ‘green redcoats’, men who were Irish nationalists in their political sympathy, but who, for economic reasons, had little choice but to enlist, the reality is that there were a number of military cultures in Ireland which, collectively, explain the rationale for Irish enlistment rates. Perhaps most famously there was an Anglo-Irish officer culture; indeed the concept that the Irish Protestant gentry were disproportionately represented within the officer corps is an enduring one. The Protestant volunteering tradition, seen, most famously, with the example of the 36th (Ulster) Division which served with distinction during the First World War, is also an obvious Irish military culture. Others, less well known, encompass an Irish nationalist tradition which occurred briefly during the First World War when John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule movement, encouraged his supporters to enlist in the 16th (Irish) Division; a part-time Irish militia tradition which was most obvious in the period from 1854 to 1908 and what could be termed a ‘non-political’ regular soldiering culture.

The Anglo-Irish Officer Culture There is a tendency to see the Anglo-Irish officer as over-represented in the British army, at least in the higher ranks; Field Marshals Harold Alexander, Claude Auchinleck, Alan Brooke, John Dill, Herbert Kitchener, Bernard Montgomery and Garnet Wolseley are only some of the most obvious. H. J. Hanham noted that, ‘In terms of officers per head the Church of Ireland … was presumably the most army-orientated denomination in the British Isles.’5 Correlli Barnett went even further, concluding that the Anglo-Irish were a British version of the ‘Prussian Junker class’.6 However, David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Logic of Collective Sacrifice: Ireland and the British Army, 1914– 1918’, Historical Journal, 38:4 (1995), 1017–30; Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), pp. 195–7.

3

Timothy Bowman, William Butler and Michael Wheatley, The Disparity of Sacrifice: Irish Recruitment to the British Armed Forces, 1914–1918 (Liverpool, 2020); J. W. Blake, Northern Ireland and the Second World War (Belfast, 1956), pp. 194–9.

4

H. J. Hanham, ‘Religion and Nationality in the Mid-Victorian Army’, in War and Society: Historical Essays in Honour and Memory of J R Western 1928–1971, ed. M. R. D. Foot (London, 1973), p. 162.

5

Correlli Barnett, Britain and Her Army, 1509–1970: A Military, Political and Social Survey (London, 1970), pp. 314–15.

6

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Nick Perry’s careful study of this issue suggests that the Anglo-Irish gentry were as likely to be commissioned into the army as Scots gentry (40 per cent of male gentry of military age), whereas the English and Welsh figure stood at 30 per cent.7 There are significant problems of interpretation in this area. Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington’s view on his nationality is well known, he supposedly having commented, ‘Just because a man is born in a stable, it doesn’t make him a horse’.8 Many other Anglo-Irish officers were effectively ‘sons of the regiment’, like Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, whose father was an army officer and who was brought up in India and England. Indeed, it comes as something of a surprise to find a chapter devoted to Auchinleck in a book entitled Nine Ulster Lives. While Auchinleck could claim to be an Ulsterman by heritage, and made a number of visits to the province, he does not appear to have lived there for any extended period of time, making T. G. Fraser’s claim that, ‘Two things stand out from Auchinleck’s background and early life: his sense of identity as an Ulsterman and his commitment to India’, difficult to justify.9 Very few Anglo-Irish officers were schooled in Ireland and their experiences at English or Scottish public schools probably saw them identify with a larger ‘British imperial’ identity instead of or as well as an Irish identity.10 There were also some prominent Irish Catholic gentry families represented in the officer class; Major-General W. B. Hickie, who commanded the 16th (Irish) Division, 1915–18, is a very good example, as is Lieutenant General Sir William Butler (husband of Lady Elizabeth Butler, the famous military artist who painted, amongst much else, Listed for the Connaught Rangers), who refused a command in South Africa at least partly due to his Irish nationalist sympathies.11

Nicholas Perry, ‘The Irish Landed Class and the British Army, 1850–1950’, War in History, 18:3 (2011), 304–32. Mr Perry is currently undertaking research for a PhD thesis, at the University of Kent, entitled, ‘The Irish Landed Class and the Regular Officer Corps of the British Army, 1775–1903: A Distinctive Irish Contribution?’

7

Richard Holmes, Wellington: The Iron Duke (London, 1996), p. 1.

8

T. G. Fraser, ‘Claude Auchinleck 1884–1981: Military Leader’, in Nine Ulster Lives, ed. Gerard O’Brien and Peter Roebuck (Belfast, 1992), p. 36. For a more detailed biography, see John O’Connell, Auchinleck (London, 1959).

9

Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford, 2006), pp. 1–10.

10

I. F. W. Beckett, A British Profession of Arms: The Politics of Command in the Late Victorian Army (Norman, OK, 2018), p. 67; Terence Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: The 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War (Dublin, 1992), p. 57; Catherine Wynne, ‘From Waterloo to Jellalabad: The Irish and Scots at War in Elizabeth Thompson Butler and W. F. Butler’, Journal of European Studies, 41:2 (2011), 143–60.

11

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The Protestant Volunteering Tradition An Irish Protestant defence or volunteering culture was not constant throughout the period under review but became highly significant at various times. The locally-raised forces which held Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, for William III in 1688–89, were incorporated into the regular army, becoming the basis of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons and 27th Regiment (later Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers).12 These regiments soon lost their Irish Protestant identity, though, as the introduction of the penal laws, in the early eighteenth century, which were aimed to prevent Irish Catholics, with Jacobite sympathies, from enlisting in the British army, were applied in such a way that no Irish Protestant could enlist in the ranks of the army either, though significant numbers of Irishmen continued to receive commissions. Army recruiters were ordered not to accept any Irishmen as recruits, as it was feared that otherwise Irish Catholics would simply claim to be Protestants and be enlisted as such. In any case, it was felt that recruiting Irish Protestants into the British army, which would almost inevitably see them sent abroad, would weaken the ‘Protestant interest’ in Ireland.13 The 27th Regiment supposedly recruited no Irishmen between 1724 and 1748 despite being quartered in Ireland for part of this period. From 1748 they were permitted to enlist those ‘properly attested to be good Protestants’.14 Indeed, it was to be the Seven Years War of 1756–63 before Irishmen, including Catholics, were again recruited into the British army in large numbers.15 With the outbreak of the American War of Independence and removal of most of the British army garrison in Ireland in 1775–76, the Protestant amateur military tradition reasserted itself. Initially, only fifteen companies of volunteers were formed, as a meagre replacement for the 4,000 troops sent to North America. However, between 1778 and 1782 as many as 60,000 men, mostly Protestants, enlisted in volunteer companies formed all over Ireland. This mass volunteer movement took its lead from the Belfast Volunteer company formed in March 1778 whose members signed a declaration of principles, the most important of which was that they E. S. Jackson, The Inniskilling Dragoons: The Records of an Old Heavy Cavalry Regiment (London, 1909), pp. 1–11; Regimental Historical Records Committee, The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers: Being the History of the Regiment from December 1688 to July 1914 (London, 1928), pp. 1–4.

12

Thomas Bartlett, ‘“A Weapon of War Yet Untried”: Irish Catholics and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–1830’, in Men, Women and War, ed. T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (Dublin, 1993), pp. 68–9.

13

The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, p. 61.

14

Bartlett, ‘“A Weapon of War Yet Untried”’, p. 69; Stephen Conway, ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century British Isles’, English Historical Review, 96:468 (2001), 863–93, p. 871.

15

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refused to accept financial assistance from the government. Initially, the force was simply an anti-invasion force, concerns having been raised at the ease with which an American privateer had entered Belfast Lough and the dangers of French and Dutch involvement in the conflict. However, volunteers soon developed a political motivation, campaigning for greater legislative independence for the Protestant-dominated Irish Parliament. As the leading historian of the Irish Volunteers put it, ‘the typical Volunteer had a kind of split personality, regarding himself on one level simply as an armed inhabitant of Ireland protecting his country from invasion; and on the other as a free citizen of Ireland with political rights and aspirations’.16 The Irish government did not formally recognise the volunteers as part of the Crown forces. In the summer of 1779 the Irish Privy Council authorised the issue of militia arms by county governors to volunteer companies, and the Irish Parliament passed a vote of thanks to the volunteers in October 1779, but concerns raised by James Hewitt, 1st Viscount Lifford, and Arthur Annesley, 8th Viscount Valentia, regarding the legality of the volunteers were ignored.17 By mid-1782 both the British government and military leadership in Ireland wanted to form six fencible regiments in Ireland, which would replace the volunteer movement. General Burgoyne, commanding the troops in Ireland, believed that the volunteers were militarily inefficient and six fencible regiments, essentially regular regiments but serving in Ireland only, would be a much more satisfactory force. Elements within the Dublin Castle administration sought to tame the political inclinations of the volunteers by granting commissions to noted moderate volunteer officers, who, it was believed, would act as excellent recruiting agents for the new regiments. In Neal Garnham’s view, The Fencible scheme was instrumental in dividing, diminishing, radicalising, and further alienating from government the Volunteer movement in Ireland. The Patriot interest was similarly divided over the scheme, with the more conservative elements likely to support or at least acquiesce in it, and the more combative members comprehensively and vituperatively opposing it.18

P. D. H. Smyth, ‘The Volunteer Movement in Ulster: Background and Development, 1745–85’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1974), pp. iii–iv; see p. 67 for the formation of the Belfast company. Smyth’s, sadly unpublished, thesis remains the best work on the volunteer movement of this period.

16

P. D. H. Smyth, ‘The Volunteers and Parliament, 1779–84’, in Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1800, ed. Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (Belfast, 1979), pp. 113–36, pp. 116–17.

17

Neal Garnham, The Militia in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: In Defence of the Protestant Interest (Woodbridge, 2012), p. 133.

18

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These splits, and the end of the American War, meant that, by November 1784, there were perhaps no more than 18,500 volunteers across the country and the movement continued this sharp decline. The volunteer movement was effectively in abeyance between 1784 and 1792. The outbreak of war with France led the British government, as noted below, to form a militia in Ireland, on the English and Welsh model, due to concerns that a reformed volunteer force would again prove radical in its politics. Indeed, some of the reformed volunteer units of 1792 were styling themselves ‘National Guards’ and evoking sympathy for the French Revolution. However, in 1796, faced with a growing threat of both invasion and insurrection, yeomanry units were formed in Ireland. These were not entirely Protestant – the famous Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell served in the Dublin Lawyers Company for example – but they were largely Protestant in composition and, indeed, quickly developed strong links with the Orange Order formed in 1795. Equally, it should be noted that, especially in Belfast and Counties Antrim and Down, the United Irishmen, espousing the ideals of the French Revolution, provided a contrary outlet for a ‘Protestant volunteering tradition’ with many Presbyterians and former volunteers serving in the ranks of that movement. The yeomanry was not as socially exclusive as its counterpart in Great Britain as it was largely an infantry force, whereas in Great Britain the yeomanry were entirely volunteer cavalry units. At its height, the yeomanry had 80,000 members and despite part-time training, with few experienced officers or instructors, its units generally performed well in the 1798 Rebellion. The mounted element of the force proved to be useful in guarding extended coastlines against threatened, or indeed, in 1798, real, French landings. However, the yeomanry earned a grim reputation in the casual violence used in ‘disarming’ suspected United Irishmen in 1797 and, more generally, in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion. Ultimately a Whig government was to disband the yeomanry in 1834 when they were regarded as more of a liability than an asset in dealing with policing matters, especially as the County Constabulary, formed in 1822 and which recruited both Catholics and Protestants, was a much more effective force.19 The distinctly Protestant amateur military tradition re-emerged in 1913 with the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Unionist opposition to the Third Home Rule Bill had been growing since 1911 and the UVF drew on drilling which had already been carried out by Orange Lodges and Unionist Clubs. What might be regarded as the premier UVF unit, the Enniskillen Horse, had been formed in mid-1912 by William Copeland Trimble, editor of the Impartial Reporter. Trimble, with his journalistic instincts, was conscious that the visit of the Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, to the small market-town of Enniskillen at the start of a series Allan Blackstock, An Ascendancy Army: The Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998).

19

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of rallies around Ulster, which would culminate in a mass-rally in Belfast on 28 September 1912 to mark the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant opposing Home Rule, might not look that impressive to visiting journalists from Great Britain. He therefore took it upon himself to form the Enniskillen Horse which would act as a cavalry escort to Sir Edward during his visit and which would also celebrate the defence of the town by locally raised forces during the Williamite Wars. Trimble’s actions neatly serve to demonstrate that elements of the UVF were, as some of the nationalist press happily dubbed them, ‘a cinematograph army’ designed to impress popular opinion in Britain and Ireland, rather than anything approaching a proper army. Carson himself was certainly a reluctant Generalissimo and when the retired Lieutenant General Sir George Richardson was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the UVF, Carson happily referred all questions about military strategy to him. Ultimately the UVF was to number as many as 110,000 men with perhaps 50,000 rifles amongst them. If attendance at drills and training was relatively poor, and many of the rifles verging on obsolete, there were still many committed ‘hawks’ within the movement, who pushed the leadership towards some sort of military showdown with either the Irish National Volunteers, the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary or the British army. Carson was caught in a difficult balancing act; the UVF, whatever the views of its extremists, as a whole, provided a disciplined organisation through which Unionists could oppose Home Rule. Ultimately the solution to Carson’s dilemma came with the outbreak of the First World War. Carson, a convinced patriot as well as a consummate politician, adopted what could be termed an ‘Empire first’ policy. Having made some arrangements with the War Office over the suspension of Home Rule until the end of the war, officer appointments, battalion titles and a divisional badge, Carson began a major recruiting tour in Ulster in September 1914, encouraging his followers to join the 36th (Ulster) Division. Carson’s call led to an immediate response in Belfast, with the 107th Brigade formed in a matter of days, but elsewhere, especially in rural Ulster, Ulster Volunteers showed no greater tendency to enlist than others. Partly this was due to economic factors; the Land Acts had created a nation of peasant proprietors and such small farmers were reluctant to abandon their farms. Politics also played a major part as many Ulster Volunteers felt that they could not trust the British government not to implement Home Rule while the 36th (Ulster) Division was overseas. Carson had tried to address this squarely, for example stating to 738 men of the North Belfast Regiment who assembled on 4 September 1914, to enlist into the 15th Royal Irish Rifles: while you are away I and those who remain behind will take care that Ulster is no invaded province … May you come back filled with honour and glory and victory, and you will have helped once more to maintain that position which your

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ancestors so often helped to maintain – your position in the greatest Empire the world has ever seen.20

By the end of the war it has been estimated that 30,000 Ulster Volunteers enlisted in the British armed forces, disproportionately in the 36th (Ulster) Division.21 During 1854–1908 elements of the Irish Protestant volunteering culture were to be found in the Irish militia. Indeed, as William Butler has shown, special arrangements seem to have been made so that skilled workers, largely Protestant, in the Belfast shipyards could enlist in the 4th Royal Irish Rifles, whereas in Great Britain the militia recruited the vast majority of its men from the ranks of the seasonally unemployed.22 At the time of the Third Home Rule Crisis the North Irish Horse were deemed to be ‘black Protestants’, who would desert to the UVF at the first sign of trouble, by Brigadier General Count Gleichen, who was commanding British troops in the north of Ireland during the crisis.23 The Territorial Force (TF) of 1908 was established in Ireland in only the most limited way and it too emerged as a largely Protestant force. The Rifle Volunteers of 1859 had not been raised in Ireland, and repeated attempts to introduce legislation to extend them to Ireland had failed, so there was not the basis for the TF in Ireland which there was elsewhere in the United Kingdom; so no Territorial infantry or cavalry units were raised in Ireland. Officer Training Corps (OTC) units were established as part of the TF at only four schools in Ireland, all Protestant foundations. In addition, Trinity College Dublin, an Anglican university, had an OTC, which also effectively encompassed smaller OTC units at the Royal College of Surgeons and Royal Veterinary College. Queen’s University Belfast, non-denominational, but with a largely Protestant student body, also formed an OTC. The Territorial Army (TA) was extended in Belfast in 1937, with recruiting opening in August, but with initially only the formation of the 188th (Antrim) Heavy Battery, Royal Artillery, and the Antrim Fortress Company, Royal Engineers, both designed for the defence of Belfast Lough in the event of war. It appears that it was not until April 1939 that even these small units were at full strength. In May 1939 the North Irish Horse was reformed as an armoured car regiment, but most wartime recruitment in Northern Ireland was managed through either regular units or the Northern Whig, 5 September 1914, p. 7.

20

Timothy Bowman, Carson’s Army: The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1910–22 (Manchester, 2007); Bowman et al., The Disparity of Sacrifice, ch. 3.

21

William Butler, The Irish Military Tradition in the British Army, 1854–1992 (Manchester, 2016), pp. 85–6.

22

I. F. W. Beckett (ed.), The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (London, 1986), p. 391, citing Trevor to Childs, 14 March 1914, Nuffield College, Oxford, MS. Mottistone 22, fols 191–4, enclosing intelligence notes compiled by Gleichen.

23

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Supplementary Reserve, which was very different in structure, organisation and recruitment from the TA.24 It is unclear to what extent recruitment in Northern Ireland in 1938–45 drew on a Protestant volunteering tradition for units which served overseas, but when the Ulster Home Guard was formed in 1940, it developed very much within this tradition, with very few Catholic members; perhaps as few as 150 out of a total strength of 26,000.25 This was not surprising as the decision was made by the Northern Ireland government that the Ulster Home Guard should be based on the organisation of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), given that Northern Ireland had a tiny TA infrastructure. The USC had been formed as a paramilitary, armed police force in late 1920 at the height of the Irish War of Independence and it was soon placed under the control of the Northern Ireland government. At its height, in 1922–23, the USC had three divisions: the 3,000 strong full-time ‘A’ Specials, the 25,000 strong part-time ‘B’ Specials, and the nominally 15,000 strong ‘C’ Specials, organised as an infantry division for emergency use. The ‘A’ and ‘C’ Specials were disbanded in 1925, the ‘Troubles’ of the early 1920s having been seen to have passed and the new Northern Ireland government desperately trying to save money. The USC still lacks a proper history and the historiography on it is incredibly partisan. Sir Arthur Hezlet published what was, effectively, the official history of the force shortly after its total disbandment in 1970. He firmly placed it in the Protestant defence tradition or, indeed, in the British volunteer tradition, of men selflessly devoting long periods of time to defend their communities for little pay or reward. By contrast, Michael Farrell places the USC much more in the ‘black and tan’ tradition, believing that the British government effectively armed some of the most dangerous elements within loyalism and left them to carry out reprisals on their Catholic neighbours. Certainly, it is clear that the USC was an almost entirely Protestant force from its inception in 1920 through to disbandment in 1970.26 The Protestant volunteering tradition again became problematic when the TA was formed on a wider basis after the Second World War. Sir Basil Brooke, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, was keen that the province would be seen to play a full role in UK defence policy with the creation of a TA brigade group, based around three infantry battalions. By 30 November 1949 the TA in Northern Ireland had an establishment of 11,766 men, but an actual recruitment figure of just 2,680. Lengthy J. W. Blake, Northern Ireland in the Second World War (Belfast, 1956), pp. 60–6; David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany 1919– 1945 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 63–4.

24

William Butler, ‘The Formation of the Ulster Home Guard’, Irish Historical Studies, 40:158 (2016), 230–46, pp. 236–9.

25

Michael Farrell, Arming the Protestants: The Formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary and the Royal Ulster Constabulary 1920–27 (London, 1983); Arthur Hezlet, The ‘B’ Specials: A History of the Ulster Special Constabulary (London, 1972).

26

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discussions suggested that many young Protestants preferred to join the USC than the TA, helped by the fact that the former had no medical examination as part of its recruitment process. Interestingly, it was noted that there was no problem in recruiting almost 1,000 women for the local Auxiliary Territorial Service units, as the USC had no female enlistments.27 The TA somewhat unfortunately used the word ‘Volunteer’ as the title for some of its units, such as the 40th (Ulster) Signal Regiment (Volunteers) and 4th (Volunteer) Battalion, Royal Irish Rangers (North Irish Militia). In the United Kingdom this term was meant to evoke memories of the Rifle Volunteers of 1859–1908 and to provide a decisive break with the reliance of the TA on reservists completing their National Service; in Northern Ireland it raised the problematic legacy of the UVF which must have proved a disincentive for some Catholics to enlist. Still, the TA remained remarkably neutral in politics throughout the troubles of 1956–62 and 1969–98. The high point of the TA in Northern Ireland was seen in 1954 when it consisted of just over 7,000 men and women.28 What might be regarded as the last definitive example of the Protestant volunteering tradition within the British army came with the formation of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) in 1970. This regiment was formed to replace the USC, following a report on policing in Northern Ireland chaired by Lord Hunt. The Hunt report felt that the new regiment would be more politically neutral, as it would be placed under the control of the GOC Northern Ireland, rather than under the Northern Ireland government, and it would therefore attract Catholic recruits. Initially, the UDR had a substantial Catholic membership, as high as 25 per cent of applicants by January 1970 (though even this was below the planned figure of 30 per cent), but the regiment soon reverted to a predominantly Protestant force as Catholic members left due to intimidation. The Catholic membership fell to 12 per cent by October 1972 and to as low as 3.3 per cent in February 1973.29 Chris Ryder, a well-known Belfast security journalist, wrote of what could, most charitably, be termed the ‘bad apples’ in the UDR, noting various incidents of collusion with loyalist paramilitary groups. The figures he gives for 1985 to 1989 are that six policemen

‘Territorial Establishment in Northern Ireland: manpower committee’, Public Records Office Northern Ireland (henceforth PRONI), CAB9/CD/85/5; ‘Territorial Army and Air Force Association, Co. Londonderry’, Memorandum, ‘Proposals for effecting a revised Territorial Army organisation in Northern Ireland submitted by HQ Northern Ireland District for consideration by the Government of Northern Ireland’, 24 September 1946, PRONI, D3703/E/2/2.

27

I. B. Gailey, W. F. Gillespie and J. Hassett, An Account of the Territorials in Northern Ireland 1947–1978 (Belfast, 1979).

28

Butler, Irish Amateur Military Tradition in the British Army, pp. 105–6.

29

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and eight regular soldiers were convicted of scheduled offences, compared to twenty-­nine members of the UDR.30

The Irish Nationalist Tradition There is, of course, an Irish Republican tradition within the British army. In the 1790s United Irishmen infiltrated some regiments, claiming that there were 15,000 militiamen who were sympathetic to their cause by mid-1796. Thomas Bartlett notes that ‘active disaffection’, as he terms it, was exaggerated. Most of the Irish units amongst the British forces performed well during the 1798 Rebellion, and the Royal Irish Dragoons were broken up due to alleged disaffection after they had performed well at the Battle of New Ross.31 In the 1860s attempts were made by members of the Fenian movement to infiltrate various regiments, with little success and widespread informing about their activities by Catholic Irish soldiers. Indeed, while the Fenian leadership claimed that 8,000 soldiers serving in the British army were sworn members of their organisation, the fact that no unit disobeyed orders and, following investigations, only 150 men were tried by court martial for Fenian activity demonstrates that the reality was very different.32 During the First World War, a number of future IRA leaders, Tom Barry and Emmet Dalton being very good examples, served in the British army. They seem to have only become associated with the Republican movement after leaving the British service.33 However, advanced nationalists, certainly from the time of the South African War, sought to dissuade young Irishmen from enlisting in the British army, portraying the army as a den of vice and disease and Irish soldiers as dupes of imperialism.34 The Irish nationalist tradition which is most noticeable with regard to the British army, though, is that of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and Irish National Chris Ryder, The Ulster Defence Regiment: An Instrument of Peace? (London, 1991), p. 184. See also Butler, Irish Amateur Military Tradition in the British Army, pp. 132–3.

30

Thomas Bartlett, ‘Indiscipline and Disaffection in the Armed Forces in Ireland in the 1790s’, in Radicals, Rebels and Establishments, ed. P. J. Corish (Belfast, 1985), pp. 115–34; Thomas Bartlett, ‘Defence, Counter-Insurgency and Rebellion: Ireland, 1793–1803’, in Bartlett and Jeffery, A Military History of Ireland, pp. 263–4.

31

Virginia Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in 19th Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996), pp. 107–8; Eva Ó Cathaoir, Soldiers of Liberty: A Study of Fenianism 1858–1908 (Dublin, 2018), pp. 118–38; A. J. Semple, ‘The Fenian Infiltration of the British Army’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 52:211 (1974), 133–60.

32

Tom Barry, Guerilla Days in Ireland (Dublin, 1962), pp. 1–4; Sean Boyne, Emmet Dalton: Somme Soldier, Irish General, Film Pioneer (Dublin, 2014).

33

Terence Denman, ‘“The Red Livery of Shame”: The Campaign against Army Recruitment in Ireland, 1899–1914’, Irish Historical Studies, 29:114 (1994), 208–33.

34

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Volunteers (INV) concerning recruitment to the British army in 1914–15. The INV, the nationalist counterpart to the UVF, possibly numbered as many as 180,000 men by the late summer of 1914. John Redmond, the IPP leader, pledged these men for the defence of Ireland on the outbreak of the First World War and by September 1914 was encouraging his supporters to enlist in the British army. John Redmond certainly had problems in bringing his supporters with him (about 10,000 formally split away from the INV to form the Irish Volunteers), but there was definite INV recruitment to the British army, most notably in formed parades in West Belfast, Derry City and Enniskillen, which produced just over 1,800 recruits for the 16th (Irish) Division.35 John Redmond was conscious that asking Irish nationalists to enlist in the British army was quite an undertaking and his careful language to the Belfast Regiment of the INV in October 1914 shows the difficulty of his task: I have no right to say to any man to enlist; I know not the circumstances of each man, they are known to himself alone. I speak of Ireland as a nation and I say that if, as a nation, it is said of us when this war is over that we beat our drums and blew our bugles and paraded with our rifles here at home, and that we allowed other men to fight our battles on the battlefields of Europe we would bring down disgrace on the fame of the ancient land of Ireland.36

The IPP soon felt that they had been let down by the War Office, which they had hoped would arm the INV, especially when Lieutenant General Sir Lawrence Parsons GOC 16th (Irish) Division refused some of their requests over officer commissions and battalion badges and mascots. John Redmond seems to have seen himself as a Dominion Prime Minister in waiting, attempting to form an Irish Army Corps, following the passing of the Home Rule Bill in September 1914. He received

Anon., ‘For the Irish Brigade: Two Hundred Nationalists Enrol in Derry’, Derry Journal, 30 November 1914, p. 2; Anon., ‘Irish Brigade at Fermoy: Derry and Belfast Men among Those Inspected by Mr. Devlin M.P.’, Derry Journal, 20 January 1915, p. 3; Anon., ‘The Irish Brigade: Another Contingent from Derry’, Derry Journal, 1 February 1915, p. 4; Anon., ‘The Irish Brigade: A Rally to the Colours’, Derry Journal, 3 February 1915, p. 6; Anon., ‘Fermanagh Volunteers and the Irish Brigade’, Fermanagh Herald, 28 November 1914, p. 2; Anon., ‘Off to Fermoy: Belfast Recruits for Irish Brigade’, Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 20 November 1914, p. 5; Anon., ‘More Belfastmen for the Irish Brigade’, Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 25 November 1914, p. 5; Anon., ‘For Irish Brigade: Departure of Belfast National Volunteers’, Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 26 November 1914, p. 5, Anon., ‘The Irish Brigade: Another Belfast Detachment for Fermoy’, Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 19 February 1915, p. 4; and Royal Irish Constabulary, Inspector General’s report for November 1914, TNA, CO904/95.

35

National Volunteer and Ulster Guardian, 31 October 1914, p. 8.

36

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a rude awakening when the War Office treated him simply like a troublesome backbench MP.37

The Irish Militia The Irish militia, such as it existed between the early seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, seems to have fitted within the Protestant volunteering culture.38 Only in 1793 was the militia organised in Ireland as a conscript force encompassing both Catholics and Protestants, formed using the ‘militia ballot’ which had been introduced into England and Wales in 1757. County-raised militia regiments were created with an officer corps drawn from the local gentry, which meant that most regiments had a disproportionately large number of Protestant officers, while Protestants were very much a minority in the force, as a whole, outside units raised in Ulster. Importing an English military model into Ireland was fraught with many other problems and this was initially seen with the riots which marred the attempt to create registers and ballot militiamen. Thomas Bartlett has estimated that some 230 people were killed in eight weeks of rioting, which extended throughout the island and was particularly fierce in Connaught. Despite this rioting, the militia had raised 9,600 men out of its establishment of 15,000 by the end of 1793.39 The Irish militia, in the aftermath of these riots, was not entirely trusted and, as noted above, was subject to some United Irish infiltration. However, the force as a whole performed well during the 1798 Rebellion. At the ‘disaster’ of Castlebar, Ivan Nelson argues that the defeat inflicted by veteran French forces on a mixed force of regulars, fencibles and militia was due to poor command, poor dispositions and confused tactics, notably the withdrawal of light companies, rather than United Irish infiltration of

James McConnel, ‘Recruiting Sergeants for John Bull? Irish Nationalist MPs and Enlistment during the Early Months of the Great War’, War in History, 14:4 (2007), 408–28, rather underestimates the importance of some IPP MPs in recruiting work, notably Joseph Devlin, MP for West Belfast. See also: Bowman et al., The Disparity of Sacrifice, ch. 3; Charles Hannon, ‘The Irish Volunteers and the Concepts of Military Service and Defence 1913–1924’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University College Dublin, 1989), pp. 58–104; and Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers, pp. 19–58.

37

Garnham, Militia in Eighteenth-Century Ireland; D. W. Miller, ‘Non-Professional Soldiery c. 1600–1800’, in Bartlett and Jeffery, A Military History of Ireland, pp. 315–34.

38

39

Bartlett, ‘Defence, Counter-Insurgency and Rebellion: Ireland, 1793–1803’, p. 254. See also: Thomas Bartlett, ‘An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793’, Past & Present, 99 (1983), 41–64; Henry Mc Anally, The Irish Militia 1793–1816 (Dublin, 1949), pp. 28–51; I. F. Nelson, The Irish Militia 1793–1802: Ireland’s Forgotten Army (Dublin, 2007), pp. 28–53.

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the militia.40 In the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion, the Irish militia provided something of a manpower reservoir for Britain’s military needs as a whole. In 1799 the King’s County Regiment and Wexford Regiment served for one year in the Channel Islands, having volunteered to undertake this overseas service. Starting in 1800, Irish militiamen were permitted to volunteer into line regiments for either life or wartime service only. In 1800, 8,138 Irish militiamen so volunteered, and the figure for 1808–09 was 3,378.41 As in the rest of the United Kingdom, the Irish militia was disembodied in 1816. When it was reformed in Ireland in 1854, it was a very different force formed as an all-volunteer body. The force never reached its established strength; in 1860, when the establishment was 20,309, its strength was just 11,141. The high-water mark of Irish militia recruitment was in 1880 when there was an establishment of 32,813 and strength of 26,399. Having observed this overall shortfall, it should be recognised that the militia in Ireland did draw on skilled workers, at least in major cities. In Great Britain such men would have enlisted in Rifle Volunteer units, with their less onerous training requirements, but in Ireland special arrangements seem to have been made so that some of the ‘aristocrats of labour’, those working, for example, in the Guinness Brewery in Dublin or Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, were able to enlist. Politics was a concern in the militia after 1854. The decision was made not to recruit or call militiamen out for training between 1865 and 1870, out of concerns about Fenian infiltration, and again in 1879–82 militiamen were not embodied due to concerns connected to the widespread agrarian agitation, known as the Land War. Nevertheless, Irish militia units volunteered, and were accepted, for overseas service during both the Crimean and South African Wars. This was most remarkable in the latter case as Irish nationalists of all shades were pro-Boer in their attitudes, but this did not stop men from eight Irish militia regiments, including the Donegal Royal Garrison Artillery, 3rd Royal Munster Fusiliers and 4th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, from serving in South Africa itself. The Irish militia, in the 1854–1908 period was much more definitely a recruiting agent for the regular army than in 1793–1816; between 1882 and 1904 one-third of Irish militiamen enlisted into the line.42

Nelson, Irish Militia, pp. 175–226.

40

Mc Anally, Irish Militia, p. 230; Nelson, Irish Militia, pp. 234–41.

41

Butler, Irish Amateur Military Tradition in the British Army, pp. 12–26, 84–92, 141–8. See also Timothy Bowman and William Butler, ‘Ireland’, in Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902, ed. I. F. W. Beckett (London, 2012), pp. 41–56.

42

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A Non-Political Regular Soldiering Culture The concept of a non-political regular soldiering culture is a somewhat difficult one given that few regular soldiers left accounts of their military service, much less outlining their reasons for joining the army. For most of the period from 1793 to 1914 the Irish were over-represented in the British regular army and, as noted above, the Protestant volunteering and Irish nationalist traditions only go a small way towards explaining this. In 1830 the Irish made up 32.3 per cent of the UK population, but 42.4 per cent of the army. The Irish famine of 1845–52 drastically altered the population ratio but, by 1881, when the Irish made up 14.8 per cent of the population, they still made up 20.9 per cent of the army. It was only in 1911 that the Irish share of the army equated with their population ratio within the UK.43 Before the army reforms of 1868–81 there were comparatively few regiments with Irish titles in the British army, with Irishmen spread throughout many units which were nominally English, Scottish or Welsh. The origins of the Royal Munster Fusiliers and Royal Dublin Fusiliers both lay in the European regiments of the East India Company army, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. The four line regiments which most successfully promoted their Irishness during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were the 18th (Royal Irish), 27th (Inniskillings), 87th (Prince of Wales’s Irish) and 88th (Connaught Rangers), the latter two ‘new’ regiments formed in 1793–94. The 87th went into action with its band playing ‘Gary Owen’ and ‘St Patrick’s Day’, two popular Irish airs, and ‘St Patrick’s Day’, then fast emerging as an unofficial Irish national anthem, was adopted by the 88th Regiment as its regimental march.44 The regional recruitment breakdown was, perhaps, not what would be expected. From 1881 to 1914 Irish recruits were much more likely to come from Dublin, Cork or the ‘garrison towns’ of southern Ireland than they were from Belfast and largely Protestant areas in North-East Ulster. In the recruiting year of 1912–13, 2,655 men from Ireland enlisted in the British army. Of these 608 came from Ulster (380 from Belfast alone); whereas Dublin provided 832 and Cork 351.45 Of course not all Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly, The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training and Deploying the British Army, 1902–14 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 50–1; Hanham, ‘Religion and Nationality in the Mid-Victorian Army’, p. 162.

43

J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 177–8; Catriona Kennedy, ‘“True Britons and Real Irish”: Irish Catholics in the British Army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, in Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850: Men of Arms, ed. Catriona Kennedy and Matthew McCormack (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 37–56.

44

The General Annual Report of the British Army for the year ending 30th September 1913 (1914, Cd.7252). It should be noted that army statistics included Co. Louth as part of Ulster and it was grouped as part of the 83rd Royal Irish Rifles recruiting area.

45

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recruits from Ulster were Protestants and not all from southern Ireland were Catholics but the disparity is still noteworthy and demonstrates that while in the Victorian and Edwardian period Irish Unionists treasured their place in the empire, they did not show a marked enthusiasm to serve it in arms. Emigration was, of course, a norm in Irish life over this period, but while emigration was largely a rural experience, enlisting in the British army was largely an urban phenomenon.46 For impoverished boys growing up near garrisons in large towns or cities in southern Ireland, the sight of comparatively well-dressed and well-fed soldiers must have exerted some sort of attraction to a military life, whereas their counterparts in industrial Belfast could hope for better civilian employment opportunities. There were also a number of what could be termed army families; William Magee, who was killed in action in 1915 serving with the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was the third generation of his family to have served in the regiment.47 The existence of this non-political regular army tradition in southern Ireland may explain why British army recruitment remained relatively high in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and, indeed, after partition and the creation of the Irish Free State. In 1920–21 Irish recruitment rates essentially returned to a 1912–13 pattern, though they fell markedly in 1921–22 as the British army ended active recruiting in the Irish Free State and the new Irish army sought large numbers of recruits from traditional garrison towns. This tradition might also have accounted, to a large degree, for the large number of those who enlisted from the Irish Free State into the British army during the Second World War, at least 40,000, though the figure is keenly contested given the incomplete returns kept by the British army at the time.48 The idea of regular soldiering being ‘non-political’ might be questioned, given the frequent portrayal of the mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India in 1920 as a political act, with men wanting to bring attention to ‘black and tan’ outrages in Ireland. However, the most recent academic work on this topic suggests that David Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration, 1871–1921’, in A New History of Ireland VI: Ireland under the Union II, 1870–1921, ed. W. E. Vaughan (Oxford, 1989), pp. 607–10; Alvin Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960’, in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford, 2006), pp. 141–2; Keith Jeffery, ‘The Irish Military Tradition and the British Empire’, in ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Keith Jeffery (Manchester, 1996), pp. 94–5; Kevin Kenny, ‘The Irish in the Empire’, in Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, pp. 106–8; Edward Spiers, ‘Army Organisation and Society in the Nineteenth Century’, in Bartlett and Jeffery, A Military History of Ireland, pp. 340–1.

46

The Sprig of Shillelagh [regimental journal of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers], IX 105 ( July 1915).

47

Brian Girvin, The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939–45 (London, 2006), pp. 256–82; Keith Jeffery, ‘The Post-War Army’, in A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War, ed. I. F. W. Beckett and Keith Simpson (Manchester, 1985), pp. 218–19.

48

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the mutiny occurred largely due to internal regimental problems and was on a much smaller scale than popularly imagined.49 The reasons for Irishmen, and after 1917, women, to enlist in the British army were many and varied. The role of economics within this should not be discounted; most of those enlisting in the regular army or militia were from impoverished backgrounds and often, at least seasonally, unemployed, prepared to subscribe to a non-political regular army culture. However, it would equally be wrong to overlook the importance of politics within Irish recruitment. This was particularly important during the First World War when major recruiting campaigns during 1914–15 were organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force; it was to be 1918 before there was a properly organised, centralised, government-backed recruiting campaign and, by its own standards, this failed markedly. Unlike in Great Britain there was little involvement of ‘civic society’ in recruitment efforts in Ireland and attempts to tap skilled working-class and middle-class recruits on the ‘Pals’ model, used elsewhere, were extremely limited. While the army may be viewed as a unionist organisation, between 1881 and 1913 the vast majority of recruits were from Catholic backgrounds and likely to be sympathetic to Home Rule, with Belfast having a noticeably low level of recruiting. It is also noticeable that normal British military practice was often tailored to meet Irish demands. The Irish militia, as established in 1854, clearly made provision for skilled working-class men to enlist, allowing them to forgo the lengthy four-month initial training period. Similarly, the Ulster Home Guard was allowed to develop as an almost entirely Protestant force, due to administrative convenience.

Mario Draper, ‘Mutiny under the Sun: The Connaught Rangers, India, 1920’, War in History, 27 (2020), 202–23.

49

Part 4

Military Identity and Memory

10 ‘Fond of Shooting?’: The Social Bonds of the Indian Army Officer Corps, 1858–1901 A da m Pr ime

F

rom the transfer of authority to the British Crown from the East India Company (EIC), until 1917, the Indian army was commanded solely by European officers. An Indian officer could not rise above the rank of Risaldar-Major (cavalry) and Subadar-Major (infantry). These roles, as well as the subordinate ranks of Risaldar, Subadar and Jemadar, were effectively a conduit between the private Indian soldiers and their European officers, occupying a space between the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and the officers, to which there was no equivalent in the British army. The rank of second lieutenant upwards was exclusively European during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Only in 1917, as recognition for the Indian contribution to the First World War and as an attempt to appease rising nationalism, were a small number of commissions to be awarded to Indians. As a result of the maintenance of the Indian army officer corps as the preserve of European, predominantly British, men, the social and cultural background from which they were drawn was narrow. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, the officers’ background will be assessed and established, creating a general picture of the shared background of Indian army officers. This commonality ensured that men entered the Indian army with pre-existing connections and shared experiences with their fellow officers. Secondly, this chapter will examine the connections officers maintained during their service in the Indian army. The playing of sports and socialising were important parts of army life in India. Making connections this way could help an officer progress his career or gain a favourable posting. Alternatively, failing to make connections, remaining aloof from fellow officers and not partaking in sport could see an officer ostracised. An officer who did not play sport or join in with the various activities in a regiment officer’s mess ran the risk of gaining the mantle of a ‘mug’.

214    A da m Pr i me

The Military in India British India was garrisoned, controlled and defended by two separate elements. The first was the British army. The second was a force purposely raised for the subcontinent. Granted royal charter in 1600, the EIC had initially recruited men in Britain to join their own army and be permanently stationed in India. These European battalions guarded factories, outposts and trading stations. Such early, coastal possession grew into the presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras.1 In 1773, the Governor-General of Bengal became the Governor-General of India; likewise the Commander-in-Chief of the Bengal army had overall command of the military on the subcontinent – the three armies were not formally unified until 1895. The EIC’s main rival in India was France; it was they who were the first to experiment with the use of locally raised soldiers in India. The French organised local recruits along European lines. These sepoys – a derivative of the Persian word sipahi meaning infantry soldier – quickly mastered European drill. Both the French and British realised that these troops were cheaper, already acclimatised and much more numerous than European soldiers.2 British officers belonging to the EIC commanded these Indian troops. From 1756, EIC sepoys began to be organised into battalions and companies. Consisting of around 1,000 men, battalions were organised in a similar manner to those of the British army. A lieutenant-colonel commanded the battalion, supported by two majors, who commanded a wing, or half battalion, each. The battalion was then divided into ten companies, each commanded by a captain or lieutenant.3 The EIC overcame their French competitors during the Seven Years War, finding themselves free of European competition in India. The EIC’s armies grew and further victories followed, their territory swelled. After victory in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, Lahore was annexed, as were several other states that were unable to resist the EIC militarily. The British then annexed Awadh in February 1856 under the pretence

Douglas M. Peers, ‘Gunpowder Empires and the Garrison State: Modernity, Hybridity, and the Political Economy of Colonial India, circa 1750–1860’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27:2 (2007), 245–8; T. A. Heathcote, The Military in British India: The Development of British Land Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 21–37; Rajendra Singh, History of the Indian Army (New Delhi, 1963), pp. 61–5.

1

Heathcote, The Military in British India, pp. 29–31; Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Recruitment and Reform in the East India Company Army, 1760–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 15:1 (1975), 89–111.

2

Heathcote, The Military in British India, pp. 24–6.

3

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that the kingdom was corrupt. This proved to be a crucial step on the road to rebellion as Awadh was a sizeable recruiting ground for the Bengal army.4 In the years preceding 1857 there had also been a tightening of discipline within the EIC’s army and unpopular changes to sepoy uniform. In place of baggy native dress, sepoys wore tight red coats and close-fitting trousers, as well as heavy, brassrimmed shakos, and leather stocks around their necks. The Bengal army had borne the brunt of EIC expansion, undertaking the bulk of the fighting in Afghanistan, the Punjab, and China.5 The officer–ranker relationship was significantly damaged prior to the Great Rebellion also. Officers often became bored and, in some cases, lazy. They looked to leave regiments at the first opportunity in favour of civilian employment that could be both more lucrative and enjoyable. In the eighteenth century officers had taken Indian wives, which naturally helped them pick up vernacular languages, and assimilate with Indian culture. By 1857, an influx of European women meant such practices had died out. There were several cases in the 1840s and 1850s of sepoys being court-martialled for insolence simply because they had grown exacerbated trying to make themselves understood.6 The 1856 General Service Enlistment Act demanded that sepoys agree to serve abroad if required. This was intended to make the army more flexible and was only applicable to new recruits. Yet, it was feared that all sepoys would be sent abroad. This unpopular change was further exacerbated by the fact that, prior to its annexation, Awadh had been treated as service ‘abroad’. Sepoys serving there had been eligible for extra pay.7 The most often-cited cause of the 1857 Rebellion is the issue of ammunition greased with either cow or pig fat, offensive to Hindus and Muslims respectively. The ammunition for the newly distributed Enfield rifle came in the form of paper cartridges, which were opened and loaded by biting. Both Muslim and Hindu sepoys were greatly concerned by this; even if the cartridges being used were not greased with the offensive material, the rumour was powerful – troops sent to depots to train with this new weapon risked being stigmatised. Solutions were numerous. Alternative lubricants such as beeswax or coconut oil were authorised.

Saul David, The Indian Mutiny 1857 (London, 2002), pp. 7–9; Heathcote, The Military in British India, pp. 88–9; Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords and the British Raj, Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 36–43.

4

Irfan Habib, ‘The Coming of 1857’, Social Scientist, 26:1/4 (1998), 6–7.

5

David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 37–40.

6

Ibid., pp. 19–33; Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford, 2010), pp. 33–44; C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 180–1.

7

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In Madras, the cartridges were distributed ungreased and the sepoys supplied their own lubricant.8 In Bengal, however, the rumours not only persisted but also grew. It began to be said that the paper for the cartridges was also made from forbidden animals and that the bones of both cows and pigs were being ground down by the British and added to flour. Acts of defiance ensued at Berhampur and Meerut amongst troops who opposed the issuing of the new cartridges. It was Meerut where the military mutiny truly began. Dissenters were arrested and imprisoned only for their comrades to spring them from jail and begin to attack Europeans. Swelled by civilians and mutineers from other regiments, these rebels left Meerut and headed for Delhi.9 EIC rule in Awadh quickly disintegrated. The scenes in Meerut were echoed elsewhere. As garrisons of sepoys mutinied, their ranks were enlarged by civilians, turning a military mutiny into a rebellion. Heavily populated cities such as Cawnpore, Delhi and Lucknow became centres for the rebellion.10 The rebellion never spread beyond Bengal and was stamped out by July 1858. It was the greatest challenge to British authority the empire had faced since the American Revolutionary War and signalled the end of the EIC. The British Crown replaced the EIC and began to implement changes to the Indian army. Sepoys were still required to serve in the military and it was not financially viable to garrison India with British army troops alone. Changes began to be discussed in order to make service in the Indian army more satisfactory. The uniform was adapted to better assimilate it to the climate and customs of the subcontinent. The tight red coat worn by the sepoys was replaced by a looser-fitting tunic, and the leather stocks and heavy shakos were replaced.11

The Indian Army Staff Corps As part of the reformation in light of the Great Rebellion of 1857, the Indian Staff Corps was created in 1861. Despite its name, this was not a staff corps in the usual sense. Officers would be commissioned to the unattached list of the Staff Corps. From this central pool of manpower all regimental postings would be filled. Similarly, David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 52–66; Wagner, The Great Fear, pp. 27–32, 69–70; Tapti Roy, ‘Visions of the Rebels: A Study of 1857 in Bundelkhand’, Modern Asian Studies, 27:1 (1993), 205–28; Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 66–70; Heathcote, The Military in British India, pp. 90–1.

8

Wagner, The Great Fear, pp. 69–70; Heathcote, The Military in British India, pp. 90–1.

9

For an overview of the 1857 Rebellion see Kaushik Roy, The Army in British India: From Colonial Warfare to Total War 1857–1947 (London, 2013), pp. 9–15.

10

David, The Indian Mutiny, p. 403.

11

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any staff positions and civilian roles were also drawn from the Indian Staff Corps. This central organisation was established to avoid one of the main pitfalls of the EIC’s regimental system. Under the EIC, officers had been guaranteed promotion. An officer belonged to a single regiment, promotion was based on seniority and it was a case of simply waiting in line. Promotion was therefore slow, with an officer waiting for the man ahead of him to gain promotion, retire or die, whichever came first. Each of the presidency armies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras had their own corps but officers could transfer between them. Promotion was not tied to a single regiment and promoted officers could fill vacancies in any regiment. The Indian Staff Corps gave officers far greater scope for promotion.12 As part of the process of replacing the EIC’s regimental promotion system and creating the Indian Staff Corps, the required length of service for promotion was laid down in 1861. Promotion from lieutenant to captain was set at sixteen years’ service. For a captain to be promoted to major, he had to have served twenty-six years, and a major could be promoted to lieutenant-colonel after thirty-five years’ service.13 This was a significant decrease of the lead time on promotion under the EIC. The EIC’s Board of Control estimated that it took the average officer forty-eight years to progress from ensign to colonel prior to 1857. Under the EIC, war or epidemic were an officer’s best hope for a speedy promotion, provided they survived themselves.14 To make this new system work, a proportion of the older colonels of the EIC had to be pensioned off.15 Four years later, in 1865, the requirements for promotion were reduced. The required length of service for promotion to captain was reduced to twelve years, a major reduced to twenty years and twenty-six years for promotion to lieutenant-colonel.16 This was a significant decrease from the regimental system that had been in place just seven years earlier. The decision made by a would-be officer to travel to, live and work on the subcontinent was a conscious decision made for reasons pertaining to at least one of the following: family, familiarity or finance, if indeed not a combination of the three. Pre-established connections to India, the military or both, as well as the opportunities the subcontinent afforded an officer, encouraged men to join upon graduating T.A. Heathcote, The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–1922 (Newton Abbot, 1974), pp. 136–7.

12

Inter-departmental committee on recruitment and regulations re officers of Indian Army; correspondence with War Office, 1912, British Library (henceforth BL), India Office Record, IOR/L/MIL/7/2593.

13

Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–1835 (London, 1995), pp. 78–9; Heathcote, The Indian Army, pp. 131–3.

14

Sir John Lawrence to Sir Charles Wood, 10 August 1861, BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/13488, Number of British Officers with native regiments to be reduced to six.

15

Lawrence to Wood, 27 July 1865, BL, European Manuscripts, F90/28, no. 47.

16

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from the Royal Military College Sandhurst, or to transfer to the Indian army from the British army – usually having experienced military life in India whilst serving there in a British regiment.

Family Officers of the Indian army, for the most part, followed their fathers in one of two ways. First, they took the same career path as their father and joined the armed forces. Secondly, they would follow their father’s, or family’s, lead by taking up residence and working in India. In many cases, joining the Indian army saw men follow the example of not only their father, but also previous generations and extended families; much like the dolphins in Rudyard Kipling’s story The Tomb of His Ancestors. Kipling wrote: ‘certain families serve India generation after generation as dolphins follow in line across the open sea’.17 Around one-third of the officers who joined the Indian Staff Corps between its foundation and the end of the Victorian era had a father who served in the Indian army or its EIC predecessor. On top of this, 20 per cent of Indian army officers had a father who had served in the British army. Furthermore, a number of officers could claim a father who held military rank. It is, however, unclear as to whether this was the British or Indian army. A small number also had fathers who had served in the Royal Navy. In total, around 60 per cent of the officers of the Indian army in the late Victorian period had a father who had served in the military.18 The family of Vincent Ormsby is a useful case study when considering this concept of men following the path of their fathers, as well as preceding generations. Captain George F. Ormsby was posted to Benares in 1863 with the 2nd Dragoon Guards. The Benares district commander was Major-General Sir Stuart Corbett, a veteran of the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the 1857 Rebellion. Captain Ormsby was made aide-de-camp to Corbett and married his daughter in 1864. One year later, in 1865 – the same year Sir Stuart Corbett passed away – Vincent Alexander Ormsby was born. From school, Vincent went to Sandhurst, passing out in 1885. From Sandhurst, Ormsby was commissioned into the 2nd battalion, the East Surrey Regiment. Vincent’s father, George, was able to get his son posted to the 1st East Surreys instead by calling in favours from his various military connections.19 Quoted in David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London, 2007), p. 29.

17

See Adam Prime, ‘The Indian Army’s British Officer Corps, 1861–1921’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2018), pp. 45–6.

18

Vincent Alexander Ormsby papers, an account of his life, mainly up to 1902, compiled by Ruth Fell from a memoir left by him and other sources, pp. 1– 27, BL Mss Eur C837;

19

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The 1st battalion East Surreys were garrisoned in India. Thus, Vincent Ormsby found himself on the subcontinent just as his father and grandfather had done before him. Sir Stuart Corbett, Vincent’s maternal grandfather, had belonged to the Bengal Cavalry and it was a family understanding that Vincent would follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Vincent was reluctant to transfer into the Indian Staff Corps; he had bonded with his fellow officers in the East Surreys and felt he had a good rapport with the other ranks. Towards the end of 1888 Vincent received a note from his father informing him that the annual stipend of £120 he had been sending to his son was to cease. Vincent, who had been planning to marry, now sought transfer to the Indian Staff Corps, needing the higher pay that came with Indian service to fund his forthcoming nuptials. The stature of his grandfather, as well as his other family connections to India, ensured that his application was successful.20 Around 45 per cent of Indian army officers were born in India. It was not solely service in the military, Indian or otherwise, that accounted for this and encouraged men to elect to serve on the subcontinent. Many officers’ fathers belonged to the Indian Civil Service. This suggests that either these men were born whilst their father was working, or serving, on the subcontinent; or, their family took up residence permanently in India. Parents taking up residence or serving in India would appear to have encouraged the son to follow in their footsteps.21 They would have a pre-existing familiarity with India, which would aid them upon their arrival, or return, to the subcontinent. They may have had experience of the climate and be accustomed to some of the peoples of India, their creeds and cultures. Men born elsewhere in the British empire were also drawn to service in India. A father’s military service may account for some of these officers’ birthplaces but not all. For example, Major Guy La Bertouche, who joined the Indian army in 1896, was born in Australia. La Bertouche’s father was a secretary of railways based in Melbourne.22 Similar observations can be made for those who were born outside of India, Britain, or the empire. Again, some of these men had fathers in the armed forces. Others had fathers who were traders and merchants. A number of these birthplaces were linked to Britain, India, and the empire through trade, such as China. This suggests an affinity with the British empire or at least the trade routes – Britain’s informal empire. Granville Pennefather Evans is one example of this. Matthew Pennefather Evans, Granville’s father, was born in Ireland in 1836 and left the ‘Corbett, Sir Stuart’, in Charles Edward Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London, 1906), p. 94. Prime, ‘The Indian Army’s British Officer Corps’, pp. 46–7; Vincent Alexander Ormsby papers, an account of his life, pp. 1– 27, BL Mss Eur C837.

20

Prime, ‘The Indian Army’s British Officer Corps’, pp. 45–6.

21

Ibid., pp. 48, 206.

22

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country to make his fortune as a tea trader, first in China, where Granville was born, and then in Ceylon.23 Familiarity with the British empire, having spent time travelling and living within it, and its broader connections as part of their father’s career, might have encouraged men to make a career within the British empire themselves, and the Indian army would offer such an opportunity. These men may have found that they had more in common with Britons across the empire, with whom they shared a bond of experience, than with those who had been brought up in Britain, unaccustomed to life away from the metropole. British people returning from India and elsewhere struggled to adapt to everyday life in Britain having grown used to a very different lifestyle.24 Of course, Britain itself also accounted for a considerable portion of the birthplaces of officers who joined the Indian army in the late Victorian period. Under the East India Company, the South-East of England proved to be a fertile recruiting ground for officers, as did Scotland.25 Under the Crown, the South-East of England continued to be a rich source of officers – London, Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire all provided the Indian army with a considerable number of officers. Counties with large ports, such as Gloucestershire, with its proximity to Bristol, Sussex with the seaport of Shoreham, and Devon with the port of Plymouth, all provided a higher than average number of officers for the Indian army.26

Finance Vincent Ormsby followed his father into the military, and his maternal grandfather into the Indian army. This is certainly suggestive of a ‘dolphin’ family as written about by Kipling. However, finance also played a part in Ormsby’s decision to transfer into the Indian Staff Corps. Service in India under the EIC had been popular with men from the British middle class, enticed to the subcontinent by the higher wages on offer. Families would elect to send their sons into the EIC because they could not afford to purchase a commission for them in the British army. The lure of higher wages continued under the Raj. Upon being commissioned into the Indian Staff Corps, a second lieutenant could expect to earn Rs. 425 per month alongside Other Days: copy of extract from memoir by Lt.-Col. Granville Pennefather Evans, 1890– 1920, pp. 1–4, BL Mss Photo Eur 288.

23

Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004), pp. 188–9, 198–9.

24

P. E. Razzell, ‘Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Army: 1758– 1962’, The British Journal of Sociology, 14:3 (1963), 248–60.

25

Prime, ‘The Indian Army’s British Officer Corps’, pp. 47–8.

26

The S o ci a l B on ds of t he I n di a n A r my Of f icer Cor ps    221

a regimental allowance of Rs. 150 for a cavalry officer and Rs. 100 for an infantry officer, around £35 per month. In comparison, a British army second lieutenant earned around £7 10s per month – nearly five times less than the Indian equivalent.27 Officers’ pay in the British army was set in 1806 and not revisited until 1914, but officers in the British army were not expected to live off their pay. A private income was required to pay for uniforms, mess bills, sports, hobbies and other social functions. An infantry officer in a British line regiment needed an additional £150 annually to pay their expenses – for a fashionable cavalry regiment this could be closer to £600.28 Many who lacked an additional income, such as Vincent Ormsby, opted to join the Indian army where wages were higher and the cost of living much lower. Lower living costs meant that officers could afford luxuries in India that they could ill afford in Britain. Accommodation, internal travel, food, drink, and servants were all far more affordable on the subcontinent. In 1862, the Secretary of State for India was given the ability to appoint twenty cadets to Sandhurst each year. Prior to 1857, the EIC directors had funded would-be officers’ patronage. Hence, what this subsequent decision did was transfer this military patronage to the Secretary of State. The cadets were known as Queen’s India Cadets and cadetships were only open to the sons of former Indian servants, both civil and military. Potential cadets had to pass the Sandhurst entrance examination and the decision as to which applicants were awarded the cadetships was based on the ‘length and distinction’ of their father’s service.29 There was no obligation for cadets to join the Indian army upon leaving Sandhurst but the majority did as it was unlikely that the son of an Indian Civil Servant or army officer could afford to join the British army instead. What this did, even if in a small way given the number of annual cadetships, was to reinforce the ‘dolphin families’ continuation of family service on the subcontinent. It also encouraged men who may not otherwise have afforded to attend Sandhurst to do so and, subsequently, elect to serve in India. Most of the Indian Staff Corps followed their father in one form or another. They directly followed their father into the armed forces, opted to live in India, or both. This provided the Indian army with a body of men who had shared experiences, had similar connections and belonged to similar communities. This would have greatly helped them assimilate to army life, to Indian service, and bond with each other. It is to the bonding process that this chapter now turns. One of the main ways in which From the 1870s onwards the rupee to pound exchange rate was Rs. 10 to £1. From 1899 the exchange rate became Rs. 15 to £1. Source: John F. Richard, ‘Fiscal Strains in British India 1860–1914’ (Helsinki, XIV International Economic History Congress, 2006), Session 57.

27

Edward Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 104–6.

28

Specimens of forms used in recruitment of Indian Army and Indian Army Reserve officers, 1910, BL IOR/L/MIL/7/19350; Heathcote, The Indian Army, pp. 135–6.

29

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men of the Indian Staff Corps bonded was through sport, whilst those who did not join in risked ostracism.

Sport Sport played a key role in the lives of Indian army officers. Officers encouraged their men to play sports, often joining in themselves. Harry Ross of the 13th Bombay Infantry and his men played hockey two or three times each week. Ross and his sepoys played against teams from other Indian regiments as well as the Royal Artillery and the Norfolk Regiment. In his diary Ross recorded a tournament being held at Gujarat towards the end of 1900.30 Team sports built esprit de corps between ranks and, according to Konrad Lorenz, readied men to make a sacrifice for a common cause whilst remaining disciplined and retaining formation. British officers in India also had a belief that Indian soldiers did not have the same physical prowess as European troops and that this had to be built up through sport to give the sepoys a greater fighting capacity. On top of which, sport was an opportunity to impart British values to the sepoys.31 Given the prominence sport began to assume in the Indian army as the nineteenth century progressed, it became a useful tool on campaign as a means of providing continuity for troops removed from the subcontinent. For example, when based at Kandahar in 1879 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Sir Donald Stewart was faced with an outbreak of cholera. Stewart was able to maintain morale in several ways. First, he would visit the cholera hospital in person and converse with the ill soldiers. Secondly, to distract the rest of his command from the outbreak, Stewart organised weekly gymkhanas. These provided both amusement and exercise for the sepoys and their officers as well as diverting their attention from the threat of cholera.32 Similarly, during lulls in the fighting during the Tirah Campaign (1897–98) gymkhanas were organised and there were regimental competitions between Indian and British regiments in football and hockey.33

Memoirs of Colonel Harry Ross, Indian Army 1892–1924, pp. 103–6, BL Mss Eur B235/1.

30

Tony Mason and Eliza Reidi, Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 4–6, 253–6; James D. Campbell, ‘The Army Isn’t All Work’: Physical Culture and the Evolution of the British Army, 1860–1920 (Farnham, 2012), pp. 81–7, 93–100.

31

G. R. Elsmie (ed.), Field-Marshal Sir Donald Stewart GCB, GCSI, CIE, An Account of his Life, Mainly in his own Words (London, 1903), p. 318.

32

Vincent Alexander Ormsby Papers, ‘Battalion on the Tirah’, November 1899, pp. 50, 60, BL Mss Eur C837.

33

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In addition to arranging sport for their troops, officers also devoted much of their free time to sporting pursuits. During the second half of the nineteenth century, it was believed that sport made men out of boys, and organised games were considered masculine. Those who did not join in were deemed non-masculine; manliness was something to be earned. Sportsmanship, strength and endurance were all key aspects of masculinity in Victorian Britain. Other peoples and cultures whose men did not partake in organised sport were deemed to be lacking this same manliness; playing games with standardised rules marked the British out as ‘civilised’ in their own minds.34 The Indian Staff Corps mirrored British society in its uptake and promoting of sport to maintain manliness, something that officers would have been first exposed to at school. Sports were heavily encouraged in schools with headmasters aiming to bring out ‘muscle, pluck, self-reliance, independence – the animal man’. This Social Darwinist approach was intended to ready boys for a life of conflict, whilst also using sport as a means to instil both Christian and chivalrous values into pupils.35 Most went from public school, to Sandhurst or Woolwich, then into the mess. Thus, the public school atmosphere remained in the all-male environment of the officer corps.36 Those who did not take to the field of play in their spare time risked being ostracised, acquiring the mantle of ‘mug’. A ‘mug’, according to George Younghusband, did not enjoy hunting or sports, they drank only water in the mess, went to bed early and swotted for examinations. On top of this, as sport was a means of remaining healthy, it was believed that those who did not partake ran the risk of becoming ill. This was something one Indian army officer, Alexander Fenton, clearly believed in. Fenton wrote home that once his debts were cleared he would have Rs. 150 per month remaining. His intention was to use this money to play tennis and fund hunting expeditions. In his letter home, Fenton stressed the importance of sports, as recreational pursuits helped maintain good health. According to Fenton it was the ‘stay at homes’ who often became ill.37 These concepts of sports and masculinity were echoed in the British army. One of the Victorian era’s most celebrated soldiers, Garnet Wolseley, wrote in 1869: ‘Being a good sportsman, a good cricketer, good at rackets or any other manly game, is no mean recommendation for staff employment. Such a man, without book lore, is preferable to the most deeply-read one of lethargic Patrick McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880–1935 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 1–4.

34

J. A. Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism and Upper-Class Education in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 27:1–2 (2010), 98–117, p. 86.

35

Campbell, ‘The Army Isn’t All Work’, pp. 9–10, 18–19.

36

Fenton to ‘Mama’, 18 December 1879, Alexander Bulstrode Fenton Papers, 1875–90, BL Mss Eur C404.

37

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habits.’38 Wolseley’s statement would suggest that ‘mugs’ were unpopular figures in both armies. For those who were keen sportsmen, service in India provided considerable opportunities. In some cases, men continued to play the sports they had played previously. For example, Harry Ross, who joined the Indian Staff Corps in 1892, played cricket at school and went on to captain the Sandhurst cricket team. He attributed his lowly passing out rank at Sandhurst to his concentration on sport rather than his studies. Ross began to play cricket, as well as tennis, from almost the moment he arrived on the subcontinent. Using leave, Ross joined various cricket tours around India. One tour to Umbala included a game against the Patiala XI assembled by the Maharaja of Patiala. The Maharaja used to bring together the best players in India, according to Ross. The team against which Ross played included J. T. Hearne, an England test match bowler.39 Ultimately, Ross had to seek a secondment, taking a commissariat role with higher pay to fund his cricket tours – he had to turn down a tour invitation in 1893 because he could not afford the travel costs.40 Similarly, polo was a popular pastime in India which came with considerable costs. Walter Long was told by his wife ‘no polo, no promotion’ and thus he began to learn to play. Promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel was based on length of service and ability under examination. There is no evidence to support Long’s wife’s assertion. However, Long became a talented polo pony trainer and this provided him with a significant supplementary income. Furthermore, Long’s capabilities with polo ponies saw him offered free membership to Willingdon Sports Club, Bombay.41 Access to Willingdon would have brought Long into contact with fellow military men, belonging to both the British and Indian armies, as well as Indian Civil Servants and other high-ranking civilians. The club, the hunt and the playing field all presented an officer with the opportunity to showcase his talent and catch the eye of his superiors as well as get to know them in a more informal environment.

From Colonel Garnet Wolseley, The Soldier’s Pocket-Book for Field Service (London, 1869), p. 63; Campbell, ‘The Army Isn’t All Work’, p. 9.

38

Memoirs of Colonel Harry Ross, pp. 49–50, 64, BL Mss Eur B235/1. Maharajas supported numerous sports and provided patronage for individuals and teams not just for cricket but also polo, wrestling, horse racing, and golf. The reasons for this patronage included the potential for social mobility, an opportunity to take on and defeat the British overlords, and a way to play out rivalries between princes. See Borja Majumdar, Cricket in Colonial India, 1780–1947 (Abingdon, 2008), pp. 2–5.

39

Memoirs of Colonel Harry Ross, pp. 45–9, BL Mss Eur B235/1.

40

Walter Edward Lionel Long papers. ‘In Search of Fun’: undated memoir, pp. 82–3, BL Mss Eur B306.

41

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Nigel Woodyatt was another keen polo player during his time in India, but rather than acting as a means to gain entry to an exclusive local club, it acted as a recruiting tool encouraging Woodyatt to transfer from the British army to the Indian Staff Corps. Service in India as part of the British army was generally unpopular during the nineteenth century. The Cardwell Reforms of the 1870s abolished the purchase system, as such, men could no longer sell their commission if their regiment was earmarked for India. This brought more officers out to India, many of whom could then transfer to the Indian army if they found life in India to be enjoyable. The abolition of the purchase system came at the same time as the mortality rate in India was decreasing and the opening of the Suez Canal reduced the time it took to travel to and from the subcontinent. Transfer from the British to Indian army was popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century, so much so that it had to be stopped at the turn of the century as transfers were restricting the opportunities for newly commissioned officers.42 As well as polo, Woodyatt was able to hunt whilst on the subcontinent and enjoyed attending race meetings at the Ambala racecourse – described by Woodyatt as the ‘Aintree of India’. Woodyatt admits in his memoir that he was wholly ignorant of India as he had no family or connections there, but he enjoyed it greatly when he arrived with the Cheshire Regiment in 1883.43 Woodyatt decided he would request a transfer to the Indian Staff Corps in order to remain in India. At twenty-six Woodyatt was above the official age for transfer, but he got an interview with the Deputy Adjutant-General of the Army of Bengal. After initially being told there was little that could be done for him as he was over twenty-six, he was asked, ‘fond of shooting?’ by the Deputy Adjutant-General, to which he answered, ‘yes, sir, very’. He was subsequently admitted into the Bengal Staff Corps.44 By putting this question to Woodyatt, the Deputy Adjutant-General was assessing his suitability for the Indian army. Not wanting to admit a ‘mug’ to the Indian Staff Corps, he was checking that Woodyatt would be compatible with his fellow officers. Hunting was particularly popular in India and also took on considerably more symbolic meaning than other sports. From the 1860s onwards, a new kind of literature began to be published in increasing numbers: the hunting memoir. These were a means of both highlighting the author’s own virility and passing on advice in order for the next generation of hunters and sportsmen to continue to show and promote British values and manliness. At a regimental level, the officers’ mess would often be Viscount Morley to War Office, 27 June 1912, Inter-departmental committee on recruitment and regulations re officers of Indian Army; correspondence with War Office, BL IOR/L/MIL/7/2593.

42

Nigel Woodyatt, Under Ten Viceroys; The Reminiscences of a Gurkha (London, 1922), pp. 13–17, 29–31.

43

Ibid., p. 57.

44

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adorned with hunting trophies. Keeping such trophies was a means of highlighting the collective manliness and success of the regiment. Those who did not wish to join the hunt were again unpopular and seen as ‘mugs’ failing to contribute to the regiment’s display of collective masculinity and British values.45

Marriage The general perception within British communities in India was that a man, whether he belonged to the army, Indian Civil Service, or other civilian employment, should not marry before the appropriate time. To marry outside of the perceived timescale was to risk ostracism or damage to career prospects. In terms of the Indian army it was said, ‘subalterns must not marry; captains may marry; majors should marry; and colonels must marry’.46 The Victorian ideal was that sexual fulfilment was something that was linked to marriage. Young subalterns lived the lives of bachelors: drinking, gambling and sports. The officers’ mess demanded loyalty to the regiment through camaraderie and esprit de corps. Subalterns were deemed to be married to the regiment. Wives and daughters of the regiment were welcome in the mess for special occasions only. One young officer, Alexander Fenton, was aghast to discover the mess of the 3rd Light Cavalry was ‘petticoat ridden’. All but two officers of the regiment were married; instead of the usual billiards table the 3rd’s mess had a piano and was frequented more regularly by the officers’ wives than the officers themselves. As for the two subaltern bachelors, Fenton wrote home that the ‘unlucky young men cannot call the mess house their own’.47 Marriage before the age of thirty was considered to be adultery against both brother officers and the regiment. It could have an adverse effect on an officer’s relationship with his fellow regimental officers and also his career. Granville Pennefather Evans married soon after transferring to the Indian Staff Corps, whilst still a lieutenant. He later wrote in his memoirs that should a young officer wish to progress in the Indian army, he should postpone marriage until he reached captain, if not major.48 Similarly, Vincent Ormsby’s father, himself a former officer in India, John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times’, in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York, 1987), pp. 178–81, 190–2.

45

Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj: From the Mutiny to Independence, 1858–1947 (London, 1990), p. 102; Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics, and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester, 2002), pp. 30–1.

46

Letter to Violet, 4 January 1882, Alexander Bulstrode Fenton Papers, BL Mss Eur C404.

47

Other Days: copy of extract from memoir by Lt.-Col. Granville Pennefather Evans, p. 105, BL Mss Photo Eur 288.

48

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viewed his son’s fiancée, Agnes, as an ‘undesirable addition to the family’. He feared for the prospects of a married young officer.49 Interestingly, when men did eventually marry it was often to the daughter of a fellow officer. Titles and noble lineage were few and far between in India. These were replaced instead by a family history of imperial service. It was deemed desirable for men and women with imperial heritage to marry in the hope that their offspring would in turn carry on the imperial traditions of both families.50 Vincent Ormsby, like his father before him, married his commanding officer’s daughter, in both cases ensuring they were marrying someone with imperial heritage. Furthermore, marrying a woman who had experience of living in India and of being part of a military family, as the Ormsbys both did, was seen as favourable because it meant that she was already accustomed to the ways of life involved in being an officer’s wife on the subcontinent. Similarly, Walter Long married Mary, the sister of a Royal Artillery officer who was stationed in India. She had joined her brother in India to keep his house and so would have been accustomed to India at the time of her marriage.51 Marriage was seen as potentially damaging for a young officer. Equally, when the usually male-dominated environment of the officers’ mess was inhabited by too many married men and their wives, bachelor officers could object. However, when men did marry they often looked for a wife who had experience of either India, the military or both. By doing this these families continued their family’s imperial connections.

Patronage So far, this chapter has shown that officers of the Indian army arrived on the subcontinent by and large with a similar social background and most could list the military, India or the British empire in their recent family history. On top of this, once they reached India, these officers moved in the same circles, partook of the same hobbies and married into families with similar backgrounds to their own. This interconnectedness could have further implications, however, than just helping the settling in of a new officer or making for a comfortable life for others. These links could prove advantageous for an officer’s career. During his time as Commander-in-Chief, India, in the years following the Great Rebellion, Sir Hugh Rose had moved to eradicate patronage from the Indian army. Patronage had dogged the military of the EIC. Rose, a hero of the Great Rebellion,

Vincent Alexander Ormsby papers, an account of his life, p. 42, BL Mss Eur C837.

49

Procida, Married to the Empire, pp. 39–40.

50

Walter Edward Lionel Long papers, p. 73, BL Mss Eur B306.

51

228    A da m Pr i me

stated that ‘patronage should go by … merit only’.52 Under the EIC, patronage helped a young officer further his career far more than any form of military capability. For instance, the EIC introduced restriction on the appointment of officers as adjutants or interpreters unless they were in possession of a basic qualification in written and conversational Hindustani in 1837. This was followed in 1844 by the introduction of a regulation whereby an officer could not become a troop or company commander unless they passed a Hindustani examination. Yet, in practice, this was not adhered to. Patronage remained the key to career progression. Issues of patronage and language were raised by respondents to the commission set up in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion.53 As part of the modernising reforms under his stewardship, Rose introduced a process whereby an officer had to be passed fit for promotion by their commanding officer, before replacing this in 1865 with a series of examinations. Within three years of service an officer was required to pass an examination known as ‘higher standard Hindustani’ and a professional examination. Further professional examinations were introduced for an officer to progress to major and lieutenant-colonel. These reforms were all designed to improve the calibre of the Indian army officer corps and for the most part this was achieved. The total eradication of patronage, often owing to the connections discussed in this chapter, was never realised. Extra-regimental appointments, namely to staff positions, continued to be open to accusations of patronage. Rose himself, although based on his high opinion of the officer, appears to have used his position to give Sir Donald Stewart – future Commander-in-Chief, India, himself – the role of Deputy Adjutant-General in 1862.54 Lord Roberts and Sir William Beresford were both accused of using their position to help those they had a connection with. Roberts, who began his military journey in the artillery of the EIC, himself had had help in his career from both his father’s connections in the military and then from those he became acquainted with during the Great Rebellion. As Commander-in-Chief himself, Roberts was accused of jobbery by the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. Roberts wanted to see his friend, George White, be promoted to the rank of major-general. ‘I greatly objected’, wrote Cambridge, ‘not because Colonel White was not a good officer, but because his selection passes him over the head of 250 officers.’ Cambridge wished to see seniority blended with merit when considering promotion, on top of which he was opposed to both Roberts and his rival Garnet Wolseley advancing Stanley, pp. 270–1.

52

See Royal Commission to inquire into Organization of Indian Army, Report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the organization of the Indian army; together with the minutes of evidence and appendix (London, 1859); David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 37–40.

53

Elsmie, Field-Marshal Sir Donald Stewart, pp. 144–5.

54

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their protégés.55 As one officer wrote: ‘Bobs never forgot his old friends and comrades, and took care to advance their sons in the services … naturally out of a host of equally competent officers chose those whom he knew most about.’56 For example, in 1884 Roberts secured a staff position for Henry Rawlinson, whose father was a friend and fellow advocate of firm action against Tsarist Russian expansion in Asia.57 Sir William Beresford, Viceroy’s Military Secretary between 1881 and 1894, assisted an officer with whom he had only a distant connection. J. M. Stewart was aided by Beresford three times between 1883 and 1888. Stewart was transferred to the 1st Sikhs, Punjab Frontier Force, after a distant relative had written to Beresford on his behalf. Two years later Beresford approved Stewart’s transfer to the 5th Gurkhas. Finally, Beresford saw to it that Stewart’s guard duty in Simla came to an end so that he could re-join his regiment, which was part of the Hazara Field Force campaigning on the North-West Frontier.58 Whilst none of the assistance meted out by Beresford to Stewart aided in any promotion, the two transfers were to sought-after regiments and the final act of assistance saw Stewart able to join his regiment for active service, again something that most officers of the Indian army sought. What the cases of Roberts and Beresford show is that, despite efforts to modernise and professionalise the Indian army, patronage persisted and as such the social connections of an officer remained important.

Conclusion The social bonds of the Indian army officer corps were immensely important and shared backgrounds would have helped men assimilate with each other. Many would have left Sandhurst to join the Indian army with a prior knowledge and understanding of India, the military or both. This would also have given them prior connections to the subcontinent and the military which again would help their acclimatisation and integration but possibly also help them further their position through their connections. The case of Lord Roberts highlights this as he regularly looked to help his friends or the sons of men with whom he had previously served in India. Patronage was nothing new in India, it had been rife during the time of the EIC. Nor was it the preserve of the Indian military. What marks patronage in India out is that it was afforded at a time when the Indian army was attempting to improve its professionalism and modernise. Even Sir Hugh Rose, Rodney Atwood, The Life of Field Marshal Lord Roberts (London, 2015), pp. 140–1, 156–7.

55

Ibid., p. 152.

56

Mark Jacobsen (ed.) Rawlinson in India (Stroud, 2002), p. xvii.

57

The Memoirs of Major General J. M. Stewart, KCB, KCMG, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force), pp. 9, 16, 23, The Gurkha Museum Archive.

58

230    A da m Pr i me

the man who attempted to kick-start reform by creating the Indian Staff Corps, was guilty of helping out a friend. The majority of the British army’s officers were Anglo-Saxon Protestants with a rural or middle-class professional background. The Indian army drew upon a much larger recruiting pool. The Indian Staff Corps attracted men from not only Britain, but also India and the British empire more broadly. As such the Indian army was made up of men of a lower social status. Whereas the British army contained many men of noble birth, such lineage was rare in the Indian army. Instead it was familial connections to India that were important. Not all officers elected to serve in India owing to their connections to India. Nigel Woodyatt, for example, was the son of a vicar who had no prior association or knowledge of India. The majority of officers did, however, have connections to India before arriving there and they looked to extend these connections when selecting a wife. The bonds men arrived in India with could, though, become strained or fractured if men broke the expected mould. Marrying out of turn or choosing books over hunting or sport was to risk being ostracised, and prior connection would count for little if a man was viewed poorly by his fellow officers – particularly at the close-knit regimental level. It was expected that officers would live a virile, bachelor lifestyle at least until they were promoted to major, at which point taking a wife was seen to be advisable. Ultimately, officers trod a fine line in order to maintain their connections and avoid ostracism on the subcontinent. Engagement and marriage were not to be undertaken too early by an officer of the Indian army; or else they were perceived to have committed adultery against their brother officers. Similarly, officers had to select a bride carefully. Ideally, they needed someone who would fit into Indian society and was acclimatised to military life. There was regimental pride in the Indian army. However, officers could transfer between regiments, undertake staff appointments or other extra-regimental work. Loyalty could often centre on the Indian Staff Corps as a whole. Each officer was required to uphold the social expectations placed upon them as members of this corps. They were expected to play sport, hunt and not marry out of turn. Any and all regimental messes were intended to remain as male preserves, regardless of regiment, as per Alexander Fenton’s complaint. The Indian Staff Corps brought men of varied backgrounds together and constituted their reason for being in India. As such, they were expected to maintain certain standards and traditions.

11 The Social Reality of the British Army in Interwar Britain El e a nor O’ Keeffe

B

rian Bond once said that the ‘fortunes’ of the British army in the interwar years would be best expressed as a graph that plotted a consistently, if not uniformly, downward trajectory.1 There are many things that went wrong for the British army in the decades immediately preceding the Second World War: cuts to infrastructure; modernisation stymied by politicians and parsimony; recruitment in the doldrums; not to mention the wider political and cultural climate of the UK, all of which presented the first significant challenge to the modern British military. Indeed, it is difficult to consider the military’s interwar decades outside the review of performance failures of the British army, 1940–42.2 Revisionist arguments have emphasised that, especially in comparative terms, the army’s funding and technocratic capabilities were never that deprived.3 This chapter offers another perspective on military purpose and organisation in Britain, examining the social realm to assess the vitality of the army in this context. This is not an investigation of how the Army Council, Territorial Associations, or commanding officers, utilised leisure to respond to the acute problems of the interwar years (e.g. to tempt the working class back into the recruitment ring). It is an investigation of the effervescence of social activity at all levels of military organisation within the wider social context. This was

Brian Bond, ‘The Army between the Two World Wars 1918–1939’, in Oxford History of the British Army, ed. David Chandler and Ian F. W. Beckett (Oxford, 2003), pp. 256–71.

1

See John Ferris, ‘Treasury Control, the Ten-Year Rule, and British Service Policies’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 859–83, for the need to treat the interwar decades as ‘autonomous’. More often, we see the interwar decades within analysis of the Second World War, e.g. David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany, 1939–45 (Oxford, 2000).

2

See Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge, 2019), part 1. A stand-out reassessment of interwar military capacity can be found in David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006).

3

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important for military purpose and legitimacy, at a time when a question mark was raised against both. In traversing this ground, this chapter puts forward two related arguments about military identities in Britain. First, we should not be blindsided by the imperial purview and function of the British army. As this chapter shows, the army had a social presence – a ‘mundane’ social reality4 – in the home island nation that has largely evaded historical reckoning.5 British military-ness was not absent in the interwar years, even in the age of the ‘peaceable Kingdom’.6 However, its integration into ideas of national identity was complex, highly localised – representative of its own fragmented cultural existence. It is perhaps no wonder it slips under our radar, but it didn’t for the men and women who lived it. Second, and related to this first point, we need to deepen our consideration of the ways in which military identities were constructed. David French’s path-making analysis of military identities in the regimental system remains integral to this mission, fifteen years after its original publication.7 It testified to the importance of cultural effort to army function, and the constructivist approach the British army took to military identity. We cannot return to a more simplistic view, that class or local identities alone mattered for military organisation and cohesion. However, this chapter views military identities as a composite creation, the result of crucial intercourse between civilian and military communities and ideas. In this, it explores what that meant for military communities and for Britain as a whole. This explains the approach to military life in Britain presented here. This is a case study of military society in Glasgow, which demonstrates we have yet to fully recognise the relative importance of soldierly identities, partly due to a historical marginalisation of local lives and study. To some degree, this new perspective on military identities reflects a new awareness of the importance of urban and municipal societies for life and citizenship in Britain and the historical appreciation of the significance of associational life and culture.8 Debates remain ongoing as to the political character and effects of interwar associational life and examining military Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge, 2013), p. 3.

4

Heather Streets has also noted the failure to recognise the ‘military influence’ within nineteenth-century society and culture in Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2014), pp. 116–55.

5

Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and Fear of Brutalisation in Post-World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 75:3 (2003), 557–89.

6

David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People, c. 1870–2000 (Oxford, 2005).

7

E.g. Tom Hulme, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Woodbridge, 2019).

8

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activity may be illuminating in this context.9 However, undoubtedly, joining an association became part of what many interwar citizens believed was appropriate, indeed necessary, social behaviour. It became an important means to realise and express social identities in Britain, both nationally and locally. As this chapter argues, the considerable emphasis on sociability and associational life within military communities represented an important social intervention.

Glasgow’s Military Realities Glasgow, with a large population and complex social and industrial hierarchies, was home to various strands of army infrastructure, which had condensed in the city since the nineteenth century. Its Cardwell-Childers barracks, in the north-west suburb of Maryhill, had been a training base for artillery in the late nineteenth century, but the post-war period brought change. In March 1921, the artillery moved out to the Firth of Forth, and the infantry moved in, as the Highland Light Infantry (HLI) formalised its notional connections to the city.10 What might have been a simple victory for regimental self-identification turned into a more meaningful presence. A national overhaul of depot operations, which was trialled by Northern Command in 1921, was implemented elsewhere the following year. Depots would take a more active role in the creation of soldiers, training men for twenty-four weeks before being prioritised for the overseas battalion.11 Glasgow thus had a new military reality, albeit one that was represented by a small cadre of permanent staff, who dealt with the irregular appearance of recruits through the door. By 1926, the notes of the Highland Light Infantry Chronicle came prefigured with a cartoon of a sergeant pushing a pram of wailing soldier-babes. Visiting battalions increased the military population somewhat in the interwar years: both the Royal Scots Fusiliers (RSF) and Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) ended up long-staying guests. Numbers swelled occasionally with the call up of reservists in 1921, 1926 and 1936, but these soon subsided. For the depot, life was feast or famine, punctuated by training routines and the issue of recruits to the railway station. As with other barracks across the UK, Maryhill underwent gradual modernisation, as the British army realised for the first time that poverty was no longer the

For alternative readings of British associational culture, see Helen McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations and Democratic Politics in Inter-War Britain’, Historical Journal, 50:4 (2007), 891–912; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998).

9

Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, April 1921, p. 30 (henceforth HLIC).

10

General Annual Report of the British Army (London, 1921), p. 7 (henceforth Annual Report).

11

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persuasive recruitment sergeant it once had been. The barracks had been infamous for their ventilation, which brought icy gusts of wind in winter and froze the plumbing. In 1924, electric lighting came to the barracks; an expansion of recreational and leisure facilities followed.12 This prioritisation of comfort and modern facilities envisaged the broader engagement of the British army in the business of recruitment, an issue it would continue to struggle with as pay and incentives remained low.13 In 1921, recruitment was taken out of the hands of depot commanders, who were thought to prioritise regimental needs over national interest, and into the hands of permanent recruitment staff.14 Recruitment offices in Glasgow’s central Bath Street upped their game: displays of old band photos and parades were replaced by a set of more sophisticated offers to the city’s men about the benefits of army service.15 Posters and pamphlets promoted ‘Army Ways Now-a-Days’ – the healthful diet, or the sports and recreation facilities available to the modern recruit.16 Open days at the depot brought photographers and journalists to muse on the life of ‘A Modern Recruit’, down to the daily menu.17 Then, of course, came the volunteers. Glasgow’s high population, its mix of industrial and commercial hierarchies, had provided a particularly fertile ground for the volunteer movement from 1859: it had raised nearly 100 separate corps of rifle companies, 15 artillery corps and engineer units in the nineteenth century.18 This had been systematised under the Territorial Force reforms to eight infantry battalions, and one field artillery brigade, with an additional two engineer units. After reconstitution in 1920, in the climate of post-war parsimony, its substantial Territorial infrastructure was ripe for cuts and amalgamations: all elements of public expenditure, and particularly defence, were under review.19 The 8th HLI did not make it through reconstitution at all. In 1922, the 8th Cameronians fell to frugality, Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Localities of Memory, Localities of Mobilisation: British Military Communities and the Great War, 1919–39’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2015), pp. 71–2.

12

David French, Army, Empire, and Cold War: The British Army and Military Policy (Oxford, 2012), ch. 8.

13

Annual Report, 1921, p. 7.

14

HLIC, April 1920, p. 34.

15

Glasgow Evening Citizen, ‘Army Ways Now-a-Days’, reprinted in HLIC, April 1925, p. 172.

16

Glasgow Herald, 18 April 1932, p. 3.

17

See list of Glasgow units in Ray Westlake, Directory of Rifle Volunteers (London, 2007), pp. 29–34; Ray Westlake, Royal Engineers (Volunteers), 1859–1908 (Wembley, 1983); E. H. Litchfield and Ray Westlake, The Volunteer Artillery: 1859–1908: Their Lineage, Uniform and Badges (Nottingham, 1982), pp. 1–6.

18

John Roberts, Safeguarding the Nation: The Story of the Royal Navy (Annapolis, 2009), pp. 35–6; Peter Dennis, The Territorial Army (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 93–9.

19

S o ci a l R e a li t y of t he Br i t i sh A rmy in Interwa r B r ita in    235

amalgamating to make the 5/8th, a unit that really preserved the traditions and locale of the 5th Cameronians, Glasgow’s most socially elite unit.20 Glasgow’s volunteer cavalry – the ‘Queen’s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry’ – were converted to artillery. Still, by the 1930s, the city was home to an establishment of just over 4,500 officers and men, administered through fifteen units – a large cohort of infantry and artillery units, with a substantial Signals section, and small specialist units (Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC)).21 As a command centre, the city was second to Edinburgh in terms of military hierarchy, but it housed offices for the 52nd Lowland Division and its two brigades, all three located within the corporate areas of the ‘Merchant City’. Glasgow’s military establishment was probably no bigger or smaller than its population warranted, according to the logic of the Cardwell-Childers system. Whatever its Associations’ apparent strength, articulated by its laissez-faire attitude to the loss of the bounty, it struggled with retention and recruitment, particularly when it came to officers.22 Certainly, more people would associate the labour movement or labour contestation with Glasgow’s interwar history. This argument, however, is less concerned with the levels of military enterprise or enlistment successes per se, which goes against the grain of how we write the military history of peacetime organisation. David French has argued that the failure to make a reality of localisation, with recruiting zones providing only an average of 28 per cent of local men to the home regiments in the interwar decades according to the General Reports of the British Army, typified the divisions between army and society and explains why regimental identity was necessarily a constructive, not organic, enterprise.23 The evidence presented here suggests an alternative reading of British army organisation and its use of localisation during these decades. We certainly need a more detailed, holistic, analysis of regimental enlistment to appreciate how recruitment organisation functioned: the figures recorded in enlistment books, for instance, often have little in common with those published in annual army reports.24 Importantly, however, the system itself was still locally facing. The aforementioned changes of 1921 were designed to improve the recruitment organisation by David Martin (ed.), The Fifth Battalion, the Cameronians, Scottish Rifles, 1914–1918 (Glasgow, 1936).

20

The nature of TA units changed over the interwar years. This description refers to the 1931 establishment of Glasgow’s Territorial Association. See O’Keeffe, ‘Localities’, Appendix F Glasgow and Newcastle TAA Establishment/Strength, 1921–1937, p. 397.

21

See O’Keeffe, ‘Localities’, pp. 98–112; Dennis, The Territorial Army, p. 116.

22

French, Military Identities, pp. 46–8, 58.

23

See O’Keeffe, ‘Localities’, figures 5 and 6, pp. 89–90, which examine local and command-based components in the Highland Light Infantry (Scottish Command) and Northumberland Fusiliers (Northern Command).

24

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making it more local, not less: it was better to have people who knew the recruiting bent of local life, so ‘recruiting officers and recruiters learn by experience where to look for recruits and how to obtain them’ and ‘so that potential recruits know better whom to approach’.25 Paid pensioner recruiters learned the best spaces and sources of manpower; they could better respond to shifts in local experiences of unemployment. Local placement also drew in other elements of military infrastructure in the services of recruitment. In 1928 (1934 for Scotland), recruitment organisation was realigned to accord with Territorial divisional command areas, recognising the key role that local Territorial administrators and officers played in gaining recruits.26 Localisation also brought military organisation in close proximity to that of social security: the Employment Exchange remained an important, if not guaranteed, source of manpower. Each of the committees of Glasgow’s Employment Exchanges in industrial areas (Govan, Partick) contained representatives of Territorial Army Associations, usually the commanding officers of local units. Organisation thus created local military ecosystems, more than a nationalised infrastructure. Local identity was still considered important for the health of regimental community. Recruitment zones operated with command organisation and, after April 1923, interacted to support the new depot system and ensure ‘batches’ (not ‘driblets’) of recruits showed up through the door. Zones within each recruitment area were formed into groups, with each tasked to concentrate their efforts on forming squads of thirty at the depot ‘of the group’ in turn.27 Interwar organisation thus aimed to create a command-based cohort where possible, before looking nation-wide. It proposed a regional solution to manpower, much in the same vein as the post1917 system during the Great War, elucidated by Helen McCartney.28 Of course, as French argues, a local body of men was not always possible. Scottish Command was a particularly overcrowded watering hole, sapped by rural crises and depopulation. The HLI’s social cohort, perhaps like all regiments of the command, fitted the narrative of interwar nationalisation better than others, although its percentage of local recruits and command-based recruits outstripped the averages listed in the army’s reports. Evidence drawn from newspaper reports suggests, however, that the increase of Scottish recruitment in the early 1930s had its effect and the regiment (and presumably other Scottish regiments) did far better from their zones than in the mid-1920s.29 Annual Report, 1921, p. 9.

25

There were minor modifications to the system in 1932 and 1938.

26

Annual Report, 1922, p. 8.

27

Helen McCartney, Citizen Soldiers: Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 62–5.

28

Glasgow Evening Citizen, 7 July 1934, p. 8.

29

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What matters more for this argument, however, is not whether Scottish Command’s regiments, or the HLI in particular, were full of Scottish men, but that the organisation was locally facing. Army infrastructure drew from local societies in important ways, but it also existed as part of them. Depots, recruitment offices, command centres, and drill halls all nurtured a small, but important, permanent staff that located themselves within Glasgow’s society. There were also times when the military population was high, and not through the occasional swell of reservist numbers. Battalion movements, certainly through Maryhill, were more leisurely by the late 1920s and early 1930s when the international situation was more stable. The 1st RSF’s departure after a long stay in the mid-1920s caused some dismay in the depot notes; the 2nd Cameronians were similarly long-term guests at Maryhill from 1931 to 1933.30 Reservist populations, too, lived within the city, although numbers are difficult to judge. Their understandings of themselves as soldiers and their sense of military purpose were also drawn from their experiences of the city and their understandings of themselves as part of local society. This was the ‘mundane’ existence of the quintessential state institution (the British army).31 At ground level, these elements of military organisation met and interacted with an associational organisation, which was generated in part via regimental infrastructure. David French recognised the power of the Executive Committees of Regimental Associations as cultural producers of regimental identity. He had little scope to investigate their various manifestations in local society.32 In their mission to draw soldiers and veterans together to realise the regimental family and the eternal regimental spirit, however, all executives authorised branches at ground level. These were generally created ‘from below’ – either by a group of interested veterans or, sometimes, permanent staff, eager to generate a social scene around them after a new posting. Branches generally applied for recognition from the Executive but were self-governing on most issues: Regimental Executives had little time or interest in micro-managing. This led to a proliferation of local branches for each regiment. In general, investigation of Scottish regiments, as well as the Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery, suggests that historic patterns of militarisation and recruitment generated associational cells; they also traced the pattern of existing military infrastructure. The coincidence of lots of veterans within major cities was always important. Most regiments, for instance, nurtured London branches. Glasgow’s high population and HLIC, July 1926, p. 158. Colonel H. H. Story, The History of the Cameronians, Scottish Rifles, vol. 2, 1910–1933 (Aldershot, 1957), p. 390; 598 men listed on the 1931 census were mainly from the 2nd Cameronians: Table 1 Population of the City of Glasgow in 1931, Report on the 14th Decennial Census of Scotland Vol 1 Part 2 (Edinburgh, 1932), p. 59.

30

Joyce, The State of Freedom, pp. 1–52.

31

For French’s discussion of the work of the Executive Committees of Regimental Associations see French, Military Identities, pp. 80–1.

32

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its historic levels of military enterprise mattered, as did its formal ties to a number of Scottish regiments that had increased during the Great War.33 It was thus a fertile ground for associational activity. By the mid-1920s, eleven Scottish infantry regiments and one yeomanry regiment fielded branches in the city: Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, Black Watch, Cameronians, Gordon Highlanders, HLI, King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB), Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (QOCH), RSF, Royal Scots Regiment (RSR), Scots Guards, Royal Scots Greys, and Seaforth Highlanders. Support units – the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), Royal Engineers (RE) and Royal Artillery (RA) – also formed branches of their Regimental Associations within the city in that decade. A Scottish branch of the Royal Tank Corps Comrades Club was founded in Glasgow in 1932.34 Additionally, we can add the associations of Territorial units. The 6th and 7th HLI both founded associational clusters in their drill halls, which were open to ex-service members; the 9th HLI boasted its own club. Indeed, club premises were eventually won and paid for by most formal branches of Regimental Associations in two decades. By the 1930s, military clubs represented 15 per cent of all licensed clubs in the city.35 An investigation of the totality of military association, nation-wide, would enable us to draw other conclusions about the social or cultural factors behind associational existence. It would also be an invaluable contribution to our historical understanding of the British veterans’ movement. Historians have drawn critical interpretations about the political character of this movement because of its low associational capacity, which is terrible when compared to continental equivalents. It may be that the significant leftist and internationalist elements of the veterans’ movement, which dominate our understanding, lack context.36 When considered on aggregate terms, military association membership certainly complicates these assertions. Glasgow’s associations, for instance, far surpassed membership of the British Legion (Scotland) when considered together. Indeed, their popularity may explain why this organisation generated especially low membership rates (an estimated 2 per cent

For an excellent analysis of Scottish recruitment, which details much of Glasgow’s history in the voluntary phase, see Derek Rutherford Young, ‘Voluntary Recruitment in Scotland, 1914–1916’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001).

33

The Royal Tank Corps Journal, February 1932, p. 274.

34

Chief Constable’s Annual Report (1938), Glasgow City Archives (GCA), SR22/40.

35

E.g. David Swift and Oliver Wilkinson (eds), Veterans of the First World War: Ex-Servicemen and Ex-Servicewomen in Post-War Britain and Ireland (Routledge, 2019); Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman (eds), The Great War and Veterans Internationalism (Basingstoke, 2013).

36

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of veterans), although it is difficult to generate comparable figures.37 Regimental journals and newspaper reports give some idea of the significance of membership, as well as its ebb and flow. In 1926 the HLI Association noted club membership at over 500, the majority of whom would have been veteran members.38 The Seaforths returned over 360 members at the end of 1926.39 This had dipped to 270 by the end of 1932, but rose to 307 by the end of the decade.40 The RE branch, established in the latter part of the 1920s, recorded a rise from c.150 in 1927 to 247 members in 1928.41 The QOCH Association (Glasgow branch) recorded 866 association members in their journal from 1920 to 1939.42 In 1927, the Scots Guards Association celebrated 852 members joining since the foundation of the branch in 1910.43 Some branches were smaller than others: the KOSB, which annually published its figures in its journal, maintained a membership of just under 150 throughout the latter part of the 1920s.44 In addition, another set of associations grew up around the experience of service battalions during the Great War. The 15th HLI, which had been raised from the city’s Tramways department, had associated by the mid-1920s, their society based in the Tramways depots.45 Its members’ roll had reached 401 by the start of 1926; it was over 600 by 1933.46 The 16th and 17th HLI battalions, which had been drawn from the city’s Boys Brigade and the Chamber of Commerce, also established Niall Barr, ‘“The Most Happy and Cordial Relations continue to exist”: The Scottish Ex-Service Movement in the Inter-War Years’, War & Society, 29 (2010), 47–70. Niall Barr relied on affiliation fees to estimate membership: this is impossible to do regarding such a fragmented system with no centralised bureaucracy. See Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics and Society, 1921–1939 (London, 2005), p. 58.

37

HLIC, July 1926, p. 128. It is likely that the majority of these would have been veteran members, rather than the members of the depot based in Maryhill barracks, Glasgow.

38

See Cabar Faidh, May 1926, Appendix. List of Members (Glasgow Branch).

39

Cabar Faidh, December 1938, p. 35.

40

The Sapper, December 1928. Association News, Glasgow Branch.

41

Membership rolls of Glasgow branch published in 79th News 1920–39. These figures did not include men whose career with the colours had recently finished. These became a relatively rich source of manpower in 1929 after Major H. C. Methuen inaugurated the ‘Serving Members Scheme’, which linked new reservists with branch representatives. See 79th News, July 1929, p. 29; January 1934, p. 65.

42

GCA, Bruce Murray Series Press Cuttings Book, Vol. 20, p. 64. Glasgow Herald, 12 December 1927.

43

The Borderers Chronicle, 20 September 1926, p. 37; 30 September 1929, p. 117.

44

HLIC, April 1926, p. 80.

45

Thomas Chalmers, An Epic of Glasgow: History of the Fifteenth Battalion (Glasgow, 1934), p. 89.

46

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associations.47 About 150 members of the 17th HLI Association sat down to dinner in 1924, which is suggestive of a higher total membership.48 Some met only annually. Twelve wounded members of the 5th QOCH’s Loos contingent founded an annual reunion from 1916, whilst recuperating in the city, which was observed every year of the interwar decades.49 In 1930, the 6th QOCH followed suit with the establishment of the 6th QOCH Reunion Club. Their membership roll, although containing 364 names, listed 269 men who were engaged in reunion life: half of these had attended at least one out of two gatherings from 1931 to 1939.50 Eighty members of the 1/5th Seaforths first met in Glasgow in 1937.51 The 10th Black Watch, although not a home-grown unit, met every year in the city from 1935: in 1938 they attracted 170 former members.52 If this was a full account of military associational activity, and veteran membership, we would include the South African War Veterans Association and Old Contemptibles, both national level organisations which encouraged local branches in a similar vein to Regimental Associations. Branches of both appeared in Glasgow’s environs in the 1930s, as did branches of the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) League, the Military Medallists, and War Honours Association. These shared obvious social and cultural roots with military communities and groups, if not infrastructural ties. In fact, there were probably upwards of thirty-two different military-style associations in the city operating over the interwar decades, which are obscured by their fragmented nature. The 404 Highland RE and 9th (Service) battalion Cameronians were advertising for former members in the Daily Record in December 1934, for instance; their histories remain to be traced. The lifespan for other branches could be short: the branch of the London Scottish was founded by the mid-1920s but had to be revived in 1936.53 Certainly, the British military extended further into society than the Army League. Although officially separate, there was a great deal of crossover between these groups and Glasgow’s military or regimental infrastructure. This was especially true in the case of service battalions. Some had strong social links. The 6th QOCH The association was running an annual golf competition, as well as a reunion gathering, in 1938. President’s Advisory Committee Meeting, 11 November 1938, Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Minutes 12/1/37-19/12/38, GCA, TD1670/1/31.

47

Glasgow Herald, 24 November 1924, p. 9.

48

79th News, January 1931, p. 97.

49

6th QOCH Reunion Club Membership Roll, Glasgow University Library Special Collections, MS Gen 1376/14/13.

50

Cabar Faidh, June 1937, p. 314.

51

Bulletin, 25 November 1935, p. 12; Red Hackle, January 1939, p. 125.

52

London Scottish Regimental Gazette, December 1936, p. 292.

53

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Reunion Club, for instance, had formed because of the meeting of its members at the associational branch dinners of 1928–29, although membership for the former remained independent. Cultural bonds did matter, however. Reports of associational activity of these former wartime units can be found throughout regimental journals. They were equally important, if not more so, as exemplars of regimental esprit de corps and military purpose as their official branch brethren. Moreover, they interrelated on the ground and, as the next section demonstrates, made an important contribution to the ideas of military identity in Britain. This is not to say their collective success was universally applauded. Many branch committees contained members who had overseen mobilisation during the war and could estimate numbers of potential recruits. For these men, who saw the regimental veteran population as a de facto pool of membership, any success was likely to be inadequate and their rhetoric mirrored the frustrations of army commanders in this respect. The Chairman of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders Association Glasgow branch, for instance, which was one of the more successful branches in the city, recalled the high numbers of recruitment for the city in 1914–18 during the annual dinner of 1923: he ‘felt the branch ought to be very much larger than it was’.54 The social composition of these various components of military community cannot be easily analysed within the confines of this chapter. When we consider the various organisational and associational strands together, we find a particularly wide social base. Recruitment for Regulars continued to draw from localised experiences of industrial turmoil, reflecting the economic vagaries of the shipbuilding and coal trades. However, small shopkeepers and artisans from the lower middle classes were making their presence felt in an age when the department store and chain stores were dominating the high street.55 Local economic activity, and employment hierarchies, were also crucial for Territorial membership, which meant that unit constituency changed slightly between infantry units, and significantly between infantry and support units. The latter were often more skilled.56 Where membership evidence has offered the opportunity for research, it seems that associations were drawn from a far wider social base, albeit one that did not recreate the Great War’s armies in micro. Their core was lower middle-class, but there was a tangible working-class and upper middle-class representation, too. It was enough to realise the interclass notion of comradeship, which all their founders aspired to. Social life was determined, however, as all other aspects of military existence, by hierarchy and leadership. Commanding officers of the depot or Territorial units, NCOs, Permanent Staff of the Regulars and Territorials – these figures were 79th News, Jan. 1924, p. 79.

54

See O’Keeffe, ‘Localities’, pp. 96–7.

55

Ibid., pp. 98–112.

56

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all critical in executing the social life of battalions and training cadres, as well as co-ordinating the social whirl of the sergeants’ and warrant officers’ mess. Branch level committees steered the social course of the branch, organising programmes and entertainments, which they often participated in. It is incredibly difficult to generalise about branch committee constituency, particularly until the release of the 1921 census – their cultures were as varied as the specific units from whence they came.57 However, there are discernible patterns. Most replicated military organisation: they were disproportionately officers or NCOs. Some officers were drawn from the upper-class army castes; others were professionals who had served during the war. The NCOs were largely drawn from the pre-war Regulars – men who had risen from the social dregs through promotion because of their commitment to the regiment and army life; men whose civilian social status was uncertain, but who nonetheless had climbed the social ladder because of their army career.58 As committee members were elected each year, this says as much about the expectations of the rank and file, regarding leadership, as the assumptions of the men themselves. As the social engagement of military associational life was considerable, it was these men, not the colonels or commanding officers of the Executive Committees, who were critical in determining how the military appeared within society.

Social Realities Glasgow, in the words of novelist George Blake, was ‘overflowing with goodness’ in the interwar years, despite its infamous social problems.59 Any soldier stepping out the barracks gates found more on his doorstop than the Soldiers Home and an HLIthemed pub. Maryhill Road was like other working-class high streets, with its fish and chips, and Italian ice-cream parlours, but it was blessed with two ‘mega cinemas’, billiards halls, as well as a good transport network. A few stops on the tram, he could be ‘Dancin’ Daft’, along with the rest of Glasgow, at the Western Dance Hall.60 A few stops more, he was mingling on the fast-paced pavements of Union or Sauchiehall Streets, where Viennese-style cafés sent wafts of sugary goodness out of their open doors. New chains of tea shops, too – Coopers & Co, Lockhart Brothers, Perischini’s and Miss Buicks – all after the spectacular profits accrued by the legendary Mrs Just as no two units were the same in terms of their officer–man relations. Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches: Officer Man Relations, Morale and Discipline in the British Army in the Era of the First World War (Basingstoke, 2000), p. xxii.

57

For a more detailed discussion of branch committee membership, see O’Keeffe, ‘Localities’, pp. 123–32.

58

George Blake, The Shipbuilders (Edinburgh, 2004), p. 141.

59

T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A Modern History (London, 2012), p. 361.

60

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Cranston’s – promised tea and moderate-priced lunch in salubrious surroundings, even if these were aimed at Glasgow’s office workers and lady shoppers;61 and the magnates of urban pleasure were finding grander and more ingenious ways of combining many thrills under one roof: Green’s Playhouse opened in 1927 on the corner of Renfield Street and Renfield Lane: tea rooms, cinema, and a spectacular ballroom decked out in faux Empire style.62 The army could never compete with Glasgow’s urban delights and there is little evidence it tried, at least not for the purposes of recruitment. Dancing was never going to be top on the list of the reasons one took the King’s shilling. Even for the Territorials, an organisation that had always sold itself on its leisure credentials, the benefits of socialising featured only intermittently in recruiting planning. True, reconstitution saw a burst of social activity in the early 1920s. The War Office even advised associations to create a nascent TF organisation through socialising and supplied the funds to make drill halls more attractive for that purpose – an offer Glasgow’s Territorial Army Association (TAA) took up.63 The dinners and ‘reunions’ of local units, so popular in Glasgow in November 1919, had as much to do with the fact that formal attestation was possible after 1 November as marking the Armistice.64 When the TAA began its major recruitment drive of February 1920, the leisure ethos of the Territorial Army was evident in the number of dances and concerts on offer, which were advertised throughout the city.65 Commanding officers of TA units knew all too well the benefits of socialising in stimulating interest in this early reconstitution period. In October 1920, the commanding officer of the 5th HLI instigated a fortnightly dance programme, hoping that the dance would be the ‘best attraction for all’.66 All other TA units in Glasgow did the same thing, with the 9th HLI procuring its own club premises, which offered a ‘varied programme of dances, whist drives, lectures and musical evenings’ in the autumn of 1920.67 However, this was never an organisation-driven response or regular solution to the issue of manpower. After 1921, it would be another thirteen years before the TAA would award cash to commanding officers eager to institute socials for recruitment purposes. In the winter of 1934, the commanding officer Perilla Kinchin, Tea and Taste: The Glasgow Tea Rooms, 1875–1975 (Oxford, 1991), ch. 4.

61

Irene Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 276.

62

Meeting of the General Purposes Committee 27/5/1919, Letter from the War Office dated 24/5/1919, ‘Reconstitution of the Territorial Force’, Records of Glasgow Territorial Army Association (TAA), National Archives of Scotland (NAS), MD10/12.

63

Ibid.

64

Recruiting Committee meeting, 21 March 1921, NAS, MD10/21.

65

HLIC, October 1920, p. 98; HLIC, January 1921, p. 20.

66

HLIC, October 1920, p. 100.

67

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of the 7th Cameronians won a special grant of £50 to stimulate recruiting through a series of social programmes. Similar awards would be issued to the 6th and 7th HLI.68 Yet, a year later, the TAA’s recruitment strategy centred on a simple financial incentive for men who bought in their ‘pals’, charged from the battalion’s recruiting allowance. There were special prizes up to £2 for those bringing in the most.69 Yet, despite this, all of Glasgow’s Territorial units, as well as its Regular communities, embarked on a considerable social life, which was largely paid for out of operational or special budgets, raised from within specific units: whist drives, concerts, picnics, dinners and dances, which became such an established part of military routine for permanent staff, recruits and volunteers, it inspired some particularly tongue-in-cheek reflection in military discourse, as this description of the 9th HLI’s whist drive and dance demonstrates: For two hours after the assembly at 20.00 hours whist is indulged in and keen rivalry is strictly maintained as at the end of each ‘hand’ a general ‘places change’ movement takes place on the blast of the RSM’s whistle. About 2200 hours the party proceed to the upstairs dining room and are regaled with sufficient sustenance to face the strenuous dancing programme ahead.70

No doubt, much of the considerable attention levied at socialising expressed a simple operational truth, which David French expressed so well: ‘regimental life in peacetime was dull’.71 This was especially true for those who oversaw military routine. ‘There is surely no task more brain racking’, wrote the depot scribe in the Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, ‘than to write notes on a period so uncompromisingly devoid of incident as the past quarter.’72 Such remarks give some insight into the pressure to perform for a regimental audience – an uncomfortable fact that faced most of the officers and senior NCOs selected to deliver on unit news for their journals in the 1920s and 1930s. This was a particular problem during the winter period, after the excitement of camp (for the Territorials) and the cessation of training. In January 1922, the chosen scribe for the depot complained that the last quarter was ‘rather uneventful’; there was seemingly no ‘red letter day’ or any occurrence which really demanded much ‘copy’.73 In 1924, the compiler for the 7th HLI justified the

General Purposes Committee meeting, 27 February 1934, NAS, MD10/35.

68

General Purposes Committee meeting, 8 December 1936, NAS, MD10/37.

69

HLIC, January 1923, p. 35.

70

French, Churchill’s Army, p. 51.

71

HLIC, January 1925, p. 22.

72

HLIC, January 1922, p. 22.

73

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lack of news written for the battalion on the basis that the ‘termination of annual training made the notes for the ensuing chronicle unfortunately scarce’.74 As these remarks suggest, the peaks and troughs in operational routine in the 1920s and early mid-1930s presented gaps in army life that were tangible and hard to fill, at all levels of command. The committee work invested in organising dinners and dances provided a much-needed focus for Permanent Staff Instructors and senior NCOs. It tended to be these men who were largely responsible for social programmes, as well as the events themselves. From 1923 to 1929, RSM Fry ‘godfathered’ fancy dress dances, weekly whist drives and fortnightly concerts for recruits at the depot, as well as being integral to the social whirl of the sergeants’ and warrant officers’ mess.75 Company Sergeant Major Willie M’Leod, of the 7th HLI was ‘the perfect organiser’ of all mess events and the social programmes of the battalion at large, including the entertainments for battalion children – ‘no function’, read his obituary, ‘was complete without him’.76 There were several important and practical reasons for investment of time, energy and money in social activity. Its routine could bridge the transitional periods in the life of any unit, and help paper over small disruptions when, for instance, poor weather cancelled training. Particularly for the depot’s staff, whose young recruits were acclimatising to the restrictions of military life and the receipt of regular cash, socialising presented another disciplinary tool. The depot’s weekly dances for recruits in 1928, for instance, were instigated partly to help ameliorate the sense of confinement and reduce the focus on pay day: there are many attractions for the young fellow outside the barracks and, as argentiferous Friday comes but once a week, the fruits of this important day do not permit of nightly visits to the pictures, with or without a fishy finish to the evening’s entertainments.77

If socialising functionally assisted leadership in the interwar years, it provided the perfect peacetime means to articulate its moral qualities. This impulse shaped both how socialising was undertaken, as well as its reportage. Social functions within Glasgow’s military expressed the care of senior officers and NCOs for their men through the effort and energy expended on the organisation. This explains not only why these events were often so grandiose, but the character of their reportage within regimental journals. Reports formulaically detail wall decorations, elaborate stage settings, or other accoutrements, even down to the detail of tableware. The greater the transformation of military space, the more remarkable the feat: there is HLIC, January 1924, p. 33.

74

HLIC, January 1929, p. 20.

75

HLIC, July 1928, p. 154

76

HLIC, July 1928, p. 141.

77

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always some reference to the fact that the men ‘did not know the place when they arrived for the evening’s entertainment’.78A typical version of this narrative can be seen in Glasgow’s RCOS notes in their journal The Wire of February 1937, in which both the warrant officers’ and sergeants ‘night in town’ and RCOS ‘Regimental Gathering’ are the main story. The carnival-like atmosphere of Jardine Street’s drill hall, the fact that the ‘entire arrangements were complete in every detail’, testified to the ‘able direction’ of its organisers – Colonel J. W. Robertson and Major Niven.79 These reports always resolve themselves with a comment of some sort that ‘every one of the 450 ranks who attended was satisfied’.80 Outside of wartime or operational contexts, there were fewer means to signify the moral qualities of leadership that, as Gary Sheffield has argued, oiled military hierarchy.81 Of course, for Glasgow’s associational branches, the social life was the life of the branch. With ample leisure pursuits in Glasgow to compete with theirs, branches had to offer a range of activities to succeed in the wider urban scene: annual picnics, charabanc outings, dinners and dances punctuated a ritual year, with weekly or fortnightly concerts, whist drives, and billiards matches to sustain the life of the branch. The proliferation of branches in Glasgow inspired some friendly competition, even though, technically, no branch would necessarily compete for the same membership. A good knees up demonstrated that the association had a lively membership record and spirit: the 79th News, for instance, urged its readers to turn out in full force for the annual dinner as ‘last year’s dinner seemed to make a great “splash” in Glasgow and the “great ‘do’ that the Camerons had on Setterday” was the talk of many veterans’ resorts during the next week’.82 A properly organised social programme testified also to the credibility of the committee. The Hon. Sec. of the 6th QOCH Reunion Club even wrote a letter to the Editor of the Daily Record in 1929 to defend their credentials: they secured speakers for their ‘dos’ six months beforehand, monitored attendance, ordered catering, and spent a not-inconsiderable amount on the printing of programmes and menu cards.83 The recognition of the public value of socialising here is inherent. Social life not only demonstrated the popularity of military associations, but also publicised their ethos – a public means to bring ‘to light the noble work being done’ through associational life.84 In this sense, the annual ‘do’ (variously named ‘Regimental Gath The Wire, January 1930, p. 30

78

The Wire, February 1937, p. 83.

79

The Wire, January 1939, p. 30.

80

Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches.

81

79th News, January 1929, p. 258.

82

Daily Record, 9 May 1929, p. 12.

83

Tiger & Sphinx, January 1930, p. 108.

84

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ering’, ‘Reunion’ or ‘Annual Dinner’) was a crucial image-making opportunity for all associational branches. Glasgow’s associations spared nothing in the organisation of their annual gatherings, which were generally celebrated in the city’s more salubrious hospitality establishments.85 These had become important sites of middle-class expression and civic belonging in the interwar years, particularly because the dynamic and glamorous gatherings of work places, Unionist associations, and local cultural life were so eagerly consumed by the pictorial press.86 Restaurants and hotels were no longer the special realm of masculine enterprise they once had been, but they were still important sites to express modern manliness within a middle-class spectrum.87 In Glasgow’s lively social winter season, the military presence was hard to avoid. Some Regimental Associations expressed more vaunted class ambitions. The Scots Guards, for instance, habitually frequented the upper middle-class Grosvenor for their ‘dos’. However, most associations pitched within middlebrow climes – spaces where the ubiquitous interwar ‘lounge suit’ – the hallmark of post-Reform Act masculinity88 – would be welcome. Military units were no different from their associational brethren, even if they tended to keep to their militarised spaces. A great deal of effort was spent in emulating Glasgow’s social environments to express the same ‘healthy and virile’ character of the unit through leisure and hospitality culture.89 Some units, like the Scots Guards Association, posited critical class affiliations (they chose the ‘Grosvenor’ for their gatherings), but more often this was specific to rank. The Officers Ball of the 5/8th Cameronians, for instance, purloined the bar manager and assistant from the Central Hotel and set up an American bar in the drill hall, alongside a pavilion, garden and picket fence.90 The unit had always considered itself a ‘cut above’, although it never had the social cachet of its predecessor (the 5th Scottish Rifles) and was also struggling to recruit its officers. More generally, however, Territorials and Regulars, like the branch level associations, emulated a less exalted but still Eleanor K. O’Keeffe, ‘Civic Veterans. The Public Culture of Military Associations in Interwar Glasgow’, Urban History, 40:2 (2017), 293–316.

85

Nick Hayes and Michael Bromley, ‘Campaigner, Watchdog, or Municipal Lackey? Reflections on the Inter-War Provincial Press, Loyal Identity and Civic Welfarism’, Media History, 8 (2002), 197–212; I. G. C. Hutchison, ‘Scottish Unionism between the Wars’, in Unionist Scotland, 1800–1997, ed. C. M. M. Macdonald (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 81.

86

Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism and Civic-ness: The Hospitality Sector and a Public Culture for Glasgow’s Middle Classes, 1919–1939’, unpublished paper in progress.

87

Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 108–13.

88

The Wire, May 1937, p. 233.

89

The Covenanter, March 1929, p. 101.

90

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clearly ‘middlebrow’ social life for their rankers. It was a public affiliation with order and community – a performance that, in turn, received recognition in the pictorial pages, the compendium of local life that was the ‘civic press’.91 Military ‘middlebrow-ness’, however, existed at the core of their regular social life. There was one thing common to every military group and branch programme that was also fundamental to Glasgow’s urban, and civic, scene: the whist drive. This communal card game, where players paid entry to compete for advertised prizes, had become popular nation-wide amongst the upper echelons of the working classes and the ‘small shop-keeping artisan’, as J. B. Priestley observed in his English Journey.92 Despite its somewhat controversial character as a legal form of gambling, the practice soon became linked (in Glasgow and elsewhere) with the civic good and an important vehicle for the expression of civic community.93 Its defenders in Glasgow stressed the benefits for young men, particularly, in keeping them busy and off the streets. But the civic purpose and community benefits were paramount – it was ‘an industry that was making headway for good social purposes in the city’.94 The corporation’s famed Tramways department ran whist drives, for instance, to benefit a number of charitable endeavours.95 Even when there seemed little obvious charitable focus, whist drives became more about community relations and ‘joining in’ with the wider civic realm. These forms of social life affiliated military associations and organisation within the wider civic community, which had particular benefits during decades when that stock was reasonably high in terms of legitimacy. Glasgow’s municipal and civic communities increasingly turned to commercial spaces to confer legitimacy, as the corporation purse tightened in the late 1920s and with the rise of Labour in the 1930s. Municipal figures no longer had such patronage to dispense, through politics and parsimony, but they kept charge of their diaries and operated a considerable degree of independence in this respect. To some degree, this helped military groups weather some of the political changes of the interwar decades, in terms of municipal politics, especially because socialising allowed military groups of all kinds to amass support from different sources (politics, corporation, Church of Scotland, business/ industry) on flexible terms.96 There were always important public figures to espouse Ian Jackson, The Provincial Press and the Community (Manchester, 1971).

91 92

J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London, 1994), p. 114.

93

Nick Hayes and Barry Doyle, ‘Eggs, Rags and Whist Drives: Popular Munificence and the Development of Medical Voluntarism between the Wars’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 712–40.

94

The Scotsman, 26 February 1926.

95

The Scotsman, 9 June 1926.

96

See O’Keeffe, ‘Civic Veterans’, pp. 307–10.

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the value of military life or validate military purpose with an arresting top-table turn of regimental legend. Middlebrow-ness and regimental identity thus went hand in hand. There are obvious examples where social life was centred on the manufacturing of regimental identity and culture: Colonel Vandeleur of the Cameronians Association, for instance, chose the annual regimental dinner to unveil a ceremonial sword, a relic of their first colonel, and a banner of the regiment from the famous battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Brig.97 The colonels of the HLI and the RSF established dinner clubs for officers in Glasgow, to realise a truly regimental officership over Territorial/Regular divisions: lists of names appeared in regimental journals, with absences noted.98 Branch level associations also celebrated their regimental anniversaries: the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, for instance, marked ‘Balaclava day’ as their annual dinner. After 1918, of course, the Great War added another set of regimental achievements to be celebrated, albeit ones that increasingly stressed values apposite to industrial warfare.99 Military communities, after all, fashioned their legends through ritualised socials, as well as published histories. Regimental identity is obviously paramount in the Royal Tank Corps ‘Cambrai’ dinner or the ‘Loos Reunion’ of the 5th Cameronians Association, let alone the saturation of ephemera from these events in regimental symbolism or the lengthy iterations of regimental enterprise in top-table speeches. In 1920, for instance, the 79th News published a speech of the former commander of the 7th QOCH and an account of the regiment at the Battle of Loos. It ran several pages long.100 Military socialising, however, did not follow regimental fault lines exactly. Glasgow’s multifaceted military culture generated a ‘pan-infantry’ identity, if not a general military one. Associational branches invited representatives from other organisations to their ‘dos’, toasting warmly ‘Our Kindred Associations’, and it was not uncommon to see a representative from one of the command or recruitment offices in the city. Major Ian Grant, for instance, who was stationed in the Lowland staff office under Major-General Sir Henry Thullier, was, according to the Glasgow Herald, ‘well known’ in Glasgow’s military social life by the time he left to command the 1st QOCH in 1931.101 Grant may have used socialising to network through the units under his care. Others obviously valued the opportunity to integrate within The Covenanter, March 1922, pp. 67–70.

97

E.g. ‘The Gathering at Glasgow’, Journal of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, October 1928, 1(4), p. 14.

98

Helen McCartney, ‘Interpreting Unit Histories: Gallipoli and After’, in Gallipoli: Making History, ed. Jenny Macleod (London, 2004), pp. 125–6.

99

79th News, January 1920, pp. 158–9.

100

79th News, June 1931, p. 192; Glasgow Herald, 6 May 1931.

101

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a new environment after changing postings. Major J. S. Keith, who was stationed in Glasgow as Recruiting Officer for the Lowland area, joined the annual dinner of the KOSB branch at the club in 1932: he had served in the regiment in the war.102 The depot was subject to comings and goings of former members of the regiment, as well as visitors on furlough in Glasgow or secondment to one of its command offices. Socialising thus oiled the military machine in various ways, in the process integrating and interrelating various different military communities, although it was certainly less common for specialist and support units to mix with infantry. The vision of universal military comradeship obviously inspired its participants. Occasionally, the word ‘Movement’ would arise in speeches, a reflection of the faith in military brethren and community that these events inspired, rather than programmatic reality. However, the description did capture something of the platform and cultural reach that social life offered to military groups. This was certainly true when it came to the memory of the Great War. The specifics of regimental operational history were a prominent feature of public culture throughout the 1920s, beyond the immediate post-war victory culture.103 What distinguished most military perspectives from other iterations of ‘cultural memory’ was that the former tended to focus on operational events and vaunted values specific to military enterprise, whereas literature increasingly foregrounded the subjective and experiential nature of war service.104 We tend to focus on the canonical works of the latter, but forget there were a considerable number of other ways, aside from the major publications, for interwar audiences to engage with the former. For that purpose, press reports of social events, which tended to record the substance of speeches, if not verbatim record, were crucial. Simple operational truths of the war were conveyed more simply than through the lumpen volumes of Edmonds’ Great War history series, which embodied the operational view of the war. Speechmakers could also be far more responsive to changing cultural realities than those authors.105 To give one example: the speeches of the 52nd Lowland Division Dining Club annual dinner of 1928, at the ultra-exclusive Central Station Hotel, were summarised, if not recorded, in the conservative Glasgow Herald. They were obviously intended for a wider audience than the congregation of GOC Scottish Command, Divisional Command, and Territorial officership, all of whom knew well the stories Borderers Chronicle, November 1932, pp. 194–7.

102

Paul Fussell famously argued that the war experience rendered operational perspectives inadequate, but these obviously endured. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), pp. 8–9.

103

Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London, 1992), pp. 459–60.

104

Andrew Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories 1915– 1948 (London, 2003).

105

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they told. This celebration of the ‘historic advance on Jerusalem’ and the ‘great achievement’ in crossing the Auja (the ‘finest river crossing in the history of the war’) coincided with the publication of the first official history volume that covered operations in Egypt in Palestine. However, the speech described episodes in that campaign that were not covered until the next volume in the series.106 Coverage thus offered new information about a campaign that was obviously experiencing a ‘moment’, but also an alternative, operational perspective on an event that was increasingly being interpreted through the lens of individual experience, centred on the Western Front, and critical of the generals.107 Reiterated and rehashed in the pages of the interwar press, both national and local, they arguably reached a wider readership than Edmonds’ volumes. Similar viewpoints could be found in any British newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s.108 Military personnel, retired or serving, penned feature articles, wrote book reviews on the latest ‘war books’, and customarily argued the toss in letters to the Editor – not all of them were well known writers and pundits, like Sir Ian Hamilton. Their views were navigated by interwar readers, although the cultural influence of military people and personnel remains curiously absent from histories of the interwar period, as much as with the nineteenth century. Military social life, however, gave these arguments more reach, even if the folks rendering them increasingly found themselves embattled. The Chair of the QOCH 1934 dinner, for instance, was unable to resist a wholesale attack on Lloyd George, a year after the publication of his first volumes of memoirs (and a year of constant serialisation in the press): ‘All the rubbish written today about the war by certain people is deplorable … In the opine of certain politicians those who obtained high rank were fools. This was not the case.’ A defence of Haig swiftly followed.109 Doing the rounds of regimental dinners, this time at the Black Watch Association’s London ‘do’, the Duke of Atholl was still condemning Lloyd George’s treatment of Haig a year later.110 Pundits did not confine their discussions to the treatment of the war, although this was obviously an important area of military integrity in the interwar years. Social events, which received attention from local and national press, offered the Cyril Falls and Sir George MacMunn, Military Operations. Egypt and Palestine (London, 1928–30).

106

Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 2.

107

For discussion of the links between military groups and civic press see Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘The Great War and “Military Memory”: War and Remembrance in the Civic Public Sphere’, Journalism Studies, 17:4 (2016), 432–47.

108

Glasgow Herald, 19 November 1934, p. 7.

109

‘Duke of Atholl’s Tilt at Mr Lloyd George’, Perthshire Advertiser, 23 January 1935, p. 7.

110

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means to talk about all sorts of subjects, from recruitment to modernisation. They were places to celebrate and congratulate, to poke fun or aim criticism at other social or governmental groups, even the wider public, for hindering military progress or advancing military perspectives. The tone of speeches could thus vary, from admonishment to admiration, and, whilst each speaker was obviously careful to tread within acceptable ground, they were forthright. Whatever the timbre of each piece, however, military communities projected powerfully and confidently their broader place in the social world. As estimates of recruitment figures slid down the scale at the end of the 1920s, this assertion of the de facto existence of military community and life was a powerful counterpoint to discussions of disarmament or pacifism, which notionally challenged military purpose.

Conclusion Socialising in the interwar years tells us several important things about military function in peacetime, as well as military identity in the voluntary system. Regimental distinctiveness mattered, but as much as any other professional or associational delineator in urban and civic life: it was an important, but not the most important feature of the military’s social appearance. The cultural representations produced through military socialising expressed a feeling of equivalence, of being quite ‘like’ others: work places, associations, or ‘friendly societies’111 as one regimental associational chairman put it. Importantly, military groups of various stamps did not only create ‘cultures in common’ with the aristocrats, upper middle, or working classes.112 They interfaced with a largely ‘middlebrow’ civic culture, which purported to unify the many layers of Glasgow’s hierarchy under key conservative values. For military communities, this public culture resonated with important ideas and values, such as universal class comradeship, duty and esprit de corps. There were limited radical possibilities in Red Glasgow’s hotels and restaurants. Arguably, in the interwar years, in the aftermath of an experience of mass mobilisation, there would always be more social and cultural points where civilians and soldiers could meet. This chapter suggests, therefore, a missing legacy of the Great War experience, deeply embedded within unit life and culture, and its effect remains to be considered. Certainly, viewed from the perspective of the interwar jolly, the British army had less of a cultural leap to make when manufacturing its next ‘citizen army’.

The Tiger & Sphinx, November 1926, p. 170.

111

Joyce, The State of Freedom, p. 9; J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1990).

112

12 The Military Culture and Traditions of an Unmilitary People Ia n F. W. Becket t

O

n 7 June 1950 Field Marshal Earl Wavell was buried at Winchester College. Archie Wavell was an unusual soldier. He delivered the Lees Knowles lectures at Cambridge in 1939 and might well have retired from the army and become Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford that same year but for the outbreak of war. He is certainly the only British field marshal to have published a poetry anthology, Other Men’s Flowers, which came out in 1944 while he was Viceroy of India. That anthology contains a wartime poem by an author better known for detective stories featuring that quintessential Englishman, Lord Peter Wimsey. It transpires from the novels that Lord Peter reached the rank of major in the Rifle Brigade and served with the intelligence staff on the Western Front before suffering a breakdown from shell shock in 1918, which the Dowager Duchess of Denver characterised as a ‘jam’. Lord Peter had the occasional relapse in which he was nursed by his faithful valet and former batman, Bunter. The author, of course, was Dorothy L. Sayers and the poem, dating from the summer of 1940, is ‘The English War’. A celebration of times when ‘only England stands’, it begins, ‘Praise God, now, for an English War, the grey tide and the sullen coast, the menace of the urgent hour, the single island, like a tower, ringed with an angry host.’1 It is reminiscent of that most cosmopolitan and outward looking of British soldiers, Edward Spears, a liaison officer with the French in both world wars, writing in his diary in June 1940, ‘a lifetime steeped in French feeling, sentiment and affection was falling from me. England alone counted now.’2 There is within Sayers’ verse and much else written in a similar vein at the time, especially concerning the establishment of the Local Defence Volunteers, later the Home Guard, a notion of English and British historical continuity, a kind of

A. P. Wavell, Other Men’s Flowers (London, 1944), pp. 132–3.

1

Brian Bond, France and Belgium, 1939–40 (London, 1975), pp. 183–4.

2

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enduring strategic culture over time.3 There is also at least an implication of a certain military tradition shaped by that historical continuity and strategic culture. The reality, of course, is that over time there have always been considerable ambiguities in responses to the existence of the standing army within and alongside English and British society. The Canadian historian, George Stanley, subtitled his 1954 study of Canada’s army and its relationship with society, The Military History of an Unmilitary People. Stanley’s phrase has much to recommend it in terms of the relationship between army and society in this country.4 In exploring this relationship, something should be said of the concepts of strategic culture and military tradition in the British context before moving to the relationship of army and society itself. By way of qualification, there was no specifically British state until 1707. Wales was incorporated into what might be characterised as the English military model in 1536 but Scotland maintained a separate military establishment until 1707, and Ireland had a separate military establishment from 1661 until 1801. In terms of local forces, the county lieutenancy established in England and Wales in the 1540s and 1550s was not extended to Scotland until 1794 or to Ireland until 1831. There are some excellent studies of specifically Scottish and Irish military traditions.5 There is no similar large-scale study for Wales although there is an edited collection of essays.6 Ivor Emmanuel, leading the defenders of Rorke’s Drift in a rendition of ‘Men of Harlech’ in the 1964 epic Zulu, does not quite answer for Welsh military tradition when the number of Welshmen among the 139 defenders appears to have been no more than twenty-seven (of whom sixteen were born in the then officially English county of Monmouthshire) and possibly as few as five; there were certainly thirteen Irishmen.7 It is also the case that society is not unchanging over time. Back in 1969 it was argued that, with increasing domestic stability and order between 1780 and 1850, the English ‘ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, Charles Graves, The Home Guard of Britain (London, 1943), pp. 114–20; Ministry of Information, The Home Guard of Britain (London, 1943), p. 7; Jack Werner, We Laughed at Boney! (or, We’ve Been Through It All Before) (London, 1943); John Radnor [Owen Llewellyn Owen], It All Happened Before: The Home Guard through the Centuries (London, 1945).

3

George Stanley, Canada’s Soldiers, 1604–1954: The Military History of an Unmilitary People (Toronto, 1954).

4

Edward M. Spiers, Jeremy Crang and Matthew Strickland (eds), A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012); Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996).

5

Matthew Cragoe and Chris Williams (eds), Wales and War: Society, Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cardiff, 2007).

6

Ian F. W. Beckett, Rorke’s Drift and Isandlwana (Oxford, 2019), p. 105.

7

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riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world, and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical’.8 It is doubtful if that could be claimed for contemporary society or, probably, not for society since the 1960s or 1970s. Any validity of a concept of an unmilitary people also needs to be viewed against the background that, throughout almost the entire period of existence of the standing army, England and then Britain was an imperial power, from the establishment of the garrison at Tangier in 1661 until at least the last quarter of the twentieth century. A recent popular title suggests a past British military presence in 171 out of 193 current United Nations members.9 Nor can it be said that England and Britain have stood outside the wider relationship of war to the creation of a sense of national identity. An English identity in the medieval period has been linked to the sense of being different from other nations during the Hundred Years War, the Anglo-Scots Wars, and the Anglo-Welsh Wars in the same way that an evolving British identity has been linked to the wars against France in the eighteenth century.10 The relationship generally of soldiering to identity is now well established, as is the concept of soldiering as a cultural activity including the construction of martial masculinity, although these are not the focus of this essay.11 England and Britain have also fitted into the wider western relationship of war to the development of the state. This is true of the debate over how far the concept of a military revolution can be seen in the Tudor and Stuart state in England,12 and for that matter, in the parallel pattern of Celtic warfare.13 It is equally true in terms of Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), p. 280.

8

Stuart Laycock, All The Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To (Stroud, 2013).

9

Andrea Ruddick, English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 2013); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992).

10

See, for example, Alan Forest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (eds), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Basingstoke, 2009); Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele and Jane Rendall (eds), Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1755–1830 (Basingstoke, 2010); and Catriona Kennedy and Matthew McCormack (eds), Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 2013).

11

See, for example, James Raymond, Henry VIII’s Military Revolution: The Armies of Sixteenth Century Britain and Europe (London, 2007); Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Mark Fissel, English Warfare, 1511–1642 (London, 2001); Paul Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke, 2003).

12

Gervase Phillips, The Anglo-Scots Wars, 1513–50: A Military History (Woodbridge, 1999); James Michael Hill, Celtic Warfare, 1595–1763 (Edinburgh, 1986); Padraig Lenihan, Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth Century Ireland (Leiden, 2001).

13

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the debate on the development of a fiscal-military state in Britain in the eighteenth century,14 or the characterisation of twentieth-century Britain as a warfare state, or a war welfare state.15 There is also the ongoing work that seeks to define the degree of military professionalism in the army’s officer corps from the influx of those with continental experience in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods onwards.16 Being simultaneously an island nation and an imperial power has undoubtedly impacted upon the issue of professionalism in that there has been the tension between preparation for the possibilities of continental and expeditionary warfare as opposed to the more frequent realities of small imperial wars. In this regard, for example, there is a high degree of similarity between the debates of the continental and imperial schools in the 1880s and between the doctrinaires of the British Army of the Rhine and the rest of the army in the 1980s and early 1990s.17 In any case, the army has always lacked an institutional memory. Arguably, it was not until the twentieth century that war fighting doctrine was really required and, even then, muddling through in a peculiarly British sense often sufficed. It has been argued that the citizen army of the Second World War had to be carefully nursed by professional officers, for the interests of the average British conscript extended only to ‘football, beer and crumpet’.18 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Lawrence Stone (ed.), The Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689– 1815 (London, 1994).

14

David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–70 (Cambridge, 2005); Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen and Peter Starke (eds), Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries (Oxford, 2018).

15

See, for example, Ian Roy, ‘The Profession of Arms’, in The Professions in Early Modern England, ed. Wilfrid Prest (London, 1987), pp. 181–219; Roger Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army, 1585–1702 (Oxford, 2006); Rory Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–94 (Cambridge, 2009); John S. Nolan, Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter, 1997); and Ira Gruber, Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).

16

Howard Bailes, ‘The Influence of Continental Examples and Colonial Warfare upon the Reform of the Late Victorian Army’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1980); Hew Strachan (ed.), Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the Twentieth Century (London, 2006); David French, Army, Empire and Cold War: The British Army and Military Policy, 1945–71 (Oxford, 2012); Jeremy J. G. Mackenzie and Brian Hold Reid (eds), The British Army and the Operational Level of War (London, 1998); Markus Mäder, In Pursuit of Conceptional Excellence: The Evolution of British Military Doctrine in the Post-Cold War Era, 1989–2002 (Bern, 2004); Oliver Daddow, ‘British Military Doctrine in the 1980s and 1990s’, Defence Studies, 3 (2003), 103–13.

17

David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany, 1919–45 (Oxford, 2000), p. 133.

18

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In many respects, the equivalent was true of earlier times, as suggested by the exploration of English national military characteristics in the eighteenth century.19 In truth, the military profession is not that different from others, at least in terms of considerations of careerism.20 All such debates, however, are perhaps more about the nature of the apparatus of the state and the conduct of war than the perception of the role of the soldier in society. Bearing in mind these lengthy if not fatal qualifications, the concepts of strategic culture and military tradition are problematic in themselves. It was commonplace among the pioneers of the study of civil-military relations to stress that armies reflected in very sharp focus the social structure, degree of technological progress and creative vigour of the societies they sought to defend. In short, armies were a mirror of their parent society.21 But the early proponents of civil-military relations theory struggled to explain why Britain did not fit their proffered models. The debate also moved on to the question of whether a national strategy was shaped by the nature of the political, social and economic order, with some theorists – primarily in political and social science – elevating strategic culture to a predictive tool in strategic analysis. In 1992, one distinguished American scholar found it necessary in his sweeping survey of Russian strategy and military power between 1600 and 1914 to explain that his was not a study of strategic culture for ‘historians have a duty to be wary of any technique that substitutes theoretical elegance for complex truth’.22 The application of new methodologies to military history has often been fruitful but there are still differences between the ‘new military history’ and other branches of contemporary historical scholarship. Deconstruction, as one military historian remarked in 1997, ‘means one thing to our cutting edge colleagues; to us, it just means something like carpet bombing’.23 Continuity in strategic culture may simply be a consequence of environment. In the case of Britain, it is hardly surprising that an island nation under fairly constant actual or perceived threat of invasion should be predisposed to capitalise upon Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (Abingdon, 1987), pp. 30–1.

19

Ian F. W. Beckett, A British Profession of Arms: The Politics of Command in the Late Victorian Army (Norman, OK, 2018), pp. 3–9.

20

Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (New York, 1957); Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York, 1960); Samuel Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (London, 1962); Amos Perlmutter, The Military and Politics in Modern Times: On Professionals, Praetorians and Revolutionary Soldiers (New Haven, 1977).

21

William Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York, 1992), p. xiii.

22

John A. Lynn, ‘The Embattled Future of Academic Military History’, Journal of Military History, 61 (1997), 777–89, p. 782.

23

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maritime strength and, over time, expend more resources on naval rather than military establishments. In that regard, Britain fits what has been characterised recently as a ‘seapower state’ much like Athens and Carthage in antiquity and the Venetian and Dutch republics in more modern times.24 During major conflicts as opposed to peacetime from 1793 onwards, however, expenditure on the army consistently exceeded that on the navy.25 Similarly geo-strategic circumstances in relation to the security of the Low Countries have determined continental commitments on the part of British troops in those same major conflicts. Nonetheless, an island, maritime and imperial mindset is fundamentally different from that of continental powers with open land frontiers. But strategic environment may change over time. Much British military if not naval thought in the 1840s and 1850s was predicated on the assumption, to use Palmerston’s graphic phrase of June 1845, that steam had bridged the English Channel.26 Equally, the spectre of hostile airpower loomed over British strategic calculations in the 1930s for would it not prove, in Baldwin’s memorable words in November 1932, that the bomber would always get through?27 Complex social and political factors may also change a perceived military culture over time. In contemplating his options in the Middle East in 1940, Wavell generally disparaged Italian military prowess, as have many historians since.28 Yet, familiar jokes about Italian military prowess need to be set alongside the record of the Roman army in antiquity and the fact that Italy was the cradle of the modern military revolution in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.29 A way of warfare is another means of characterising a strategic culture but it can be artificially manufactured for ideological reasons. Examples perhaps are the way in which the French Jacobins in the 1790s and Bolsheviks like Mikhail Frunze in the 1920s conceived that revolutionary armies should wage war in an appropriately revolutionary manner.30 A way of war can equally be manufactured by historians. Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (New Haven, 2018).

24

David French, The British Way in Warfare, 1688–2000 (London, 1990).

25

House of Commons Debate (henceforth HC Deb), 13 June 1845, vol. 81, cc 518–28.

26

Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (London, 1969), p. 735.

27

James Sadkovich, ‘Understanding Defeat: Reappraising Italy’s Role in World War II’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1989), 27–61.

28

John Gooch, ‘Italian Military Efficiency: A Debate’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 5 (1982), 257–65; Frederick Taylor, The Art of War in Italy, 1494–1516 (Cambridge, 1921); Michael Mallet and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars, 1494–1559 (Harlow, 2012).

29

John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Urbana, IL, 1984); Condoleezza Rice, ‘The Making of Soviet

30

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A specifically ‘western way of war’ leading to the inevitable military triumph of the West postulated initially in the 1980s by a historian of ancient Greek warfare has been widely discredited by reference to the significance of non-western military organisation and development over time.31 Equally, there is the familiar concept of the British ‘way of warfare’ articulated variously by Julian Corbett before the Great War and, especially, by Basil Liddell Hart in the 1930s.32 At best, Liddell Hart’s argument that historical British wartime practice rested on ‘economic pressure exercised through sea power’ applied only to the period between 1714 and 1763, although this does encompass four of Britain’s twelve great power wars between 1688 and 1945. Yet, the only one of those twelve major wars that Britain did not win was the one in which there were no continental allies, namely the American War of Independence (1775–83). Military tradition is also problematic and may be as much an invention as any other tradition. One need only look, for example, at the way in which West Germany’s Bundeswehr and East Germany’s Nationale Volksarmee manufactured entirely different military traditions from a common military past. The former searched for appropriate democratic traditions while the latter discovered equally revolutionary traditions, re-inventing that Nazi poster-boy, Frederick the Great, as a socialist hero and embracing the Convention of Tauroggen in 1812 as a role model of Russo-German cooperation.33 The tendency lingers still. The Bundeswehr military museum at Dresden is located in Stauffenbergallee, which was not the original street name. Rather similarly, Bendlerstraase in Berlin, where Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators gathered in army headquarters on 20 July 1944, is now Stauffenbergstrasse. But for a bogus British tradition, there is the county regimental tradition. This is not to deny the importance of a regiment’s identity but in most cases only nicknames and customs were transmitted from one creation to another as regiments were raised Strategy’, in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, 1986), pp. 648–76. Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York, 1989); Victor Davis Hanson, Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam (London, 2001); John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America (Boulder, CO, 2003); Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (Abingdon, 2013); John France, Perilous Glory: The Rise of Western Military Power (New Haven, 2011).

31

Sir Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London, 1911); Basil Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare (London, 1932).

32

Alaric Searle, Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament, 1949–1959 (Westport, CT, 2003); Anna Wolff-Powęska, ‘The German Democratic Republic’s Attitude towards the Nazi Past’, Przegląd Zachodni, 1 (2011), 73–102.

33

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and disbanded as needs dictated. While the Duke of York and the Adjutant-General, Sir Harry Calvert, fully realised the importance of regimental identity in the latter stages of the Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) – and it shines through Richard Cannon’s seventy volumes of regimental history between 1837 and 1853 – the county affiliations established in 1782 endured only briefly.34 County affiliation was re-established in Edward Cardwell’s localisation scheme in 1872, reaching its conclusion with Hugh Childers’ full territorialisation in 1881, but little logic was applied, with the supposed new county lineage often entirely bogus. Nor did it reflect recruiting realities, hence the apocryphal Pimlico and Whitechapel Highlanders.35 Arguably it was not until the Great War that county links were fully formed and, effectively, the county regiment all but disappeared between 1948 and 1958.36 The last three genuine English county regiments – the Green Howards (Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment) and the Cheshire Regiment dating back to the 1680s, and the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (West Riding) dating from 1881 – disappeared into new larger creations in 2007. Yet, military tradition can be seen more in terms of continuities evident over time. In this sense, an English and later British military tradition can be traced from the establishment of a regular standing army in peacetime although there is room for debate whether this should be taken as 1644, 1660 or 1689. Recently, it has been suggested that the first British army as opposed to the first standing army was that raised for the wars against France and Spain in 1624–25 since it involved both English and Scottish regiments.37 It can also be argued that an amateur military tradition long predated the standing army, certainly going back to the first English militia statutes of 1558 and, arguably, to the military obligations imposed upon the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms between the late seventh and early ninth centuries.38 The welcome appearance of further works on the militia, yeomanry and territorials in Britain and Ireland since this theory was

Kevin Linch, Britain and Wellington’s Army: Recruitment, Society and Tradition, 1807–15 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 79–81, 136–44; Kevin Linch, ‘Making New Soldiers: Legitimacy, Identity and Attitudes, c. 1740–1815’, in Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815, ed. Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (Liverpool, 2014), pp. 202–19.

34

Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 118–51.

35

David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People, c. 1870–2000 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 290–333.

36

Laurence Spring, The First British Army, 1624–28: The Army of the Duke of Buckingham (Solihull, 2016).

37

Ian F. W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 8–20.

38

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first advanced in 1991 has not fundamentally challenged it.39 An essentially English militia and volunteer model was also exported to the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a lasting legacy, not least in the United States, which has also been characterised as an unmilitary but exceedingly warlike society.40 The auxiliary forces of militia, yeomanry, volunteers and territorials do illuminate the paradoxes in the relationship between army and society in Britain since they were often far more visible to society than a small regular army deployed for the most part as an imperial constabulary. Thus, the auxiliaries reflect such issues within the relationship of army and society as anti-militarism, aid to the civil power, military identity, masculinity, and conscription, taking us back to the notion of an unmilitary people. Popular anti-militarism deriving from fears of the standing army punctuated late seventeenth-century debate, informed as it was by the relatively brief rule of the Major-Generals in 1655–56, the more recent spectre of Charles II’s ‘Blackheath Army’ in 1671, and the intended military despotism of James II. It might be noted, however, that the memory of the rule of the Major-Generals took on far greater significance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in the actual debates on the standing army between 1660 and 1690.41 Palmerston declared himself satisfied in 1836 that the militia’s existence as a constitutional check on the army could no longer be taken seriously.42 Arguably, however, old fears were aired in some quarters at the time of the publication of Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations in 1971, reflecting, too, the army’s much greater visibility on the streets of Ulster at a time of trade union militancy and economic crisis.43 Of course, the army’s role in aid of the civil power continued even past the mandatory provisions of the County and Borough Police Act in Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘The Amateur Military Tradition Revisited’, in Kennedy and McCormack, Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, pp. 219–35.

39

Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘Introduction’, in Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902, ed. Ian F. W. Beckett (London, 2012), pp. 1–22; Joyce Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, MA, 1994); John Carroll and Colin Baxter (eds), The American Military Tradition: From Colonial Times to the Present, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD, 2007).

40

Henry Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 1649–60 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 160–9; Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001).

41

Duncan Anderson, ‘The English Militia in the Mid Nineteenth Century: A Study of Its Military, Social and Political Significance’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1982), p. 31.

42

Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London, 1971).

43

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1856, legislation itself reflecting fears of post-Crimean War (1854–56) demobilisation. Between 1869 and 1908 troops were called out to assist the civil power on twenty-four separate occasions although only inflicting two deaths at Featherstone in September 1893.44 In fact, deaths at the hands of the army were comparatively rare even in the frequent disorders between 1815 and 1848.45 Five more individuals died at the hands of the army in 1911 but, excluding the five terrorists killed in the siege of the Iranian embassy in May 1980, the last individual killed by soldiers on the mainland was during the Liverpool police strike in August 1919.46 The army still has a role in aid to civil ministries during industrial disputes or other events, such as the floods in Keswick in 2015 and the fires on Saddleworth Moor in 2018.47 Beyond aid to the civil power, friction between army and society could often arise as in the case of billeting even after the Disbanding Act of 1679 reiterated the earlier requirement expressed in the Petition of Right of 1628 that it was illegal to billet troops on civilians without consent. Technically, only innkeepers bore the burden after 1679 but it was impossible to avoid billeting on householders until the construction of barracks increased markedly in the 1790s.48 Thereafter, it was only the relatively small number of garrison towns that were subjected regularly to the provocations of two widely differing communities living in close proximity other than during two world wars when billeting was again the norm, not least in 1914– 15.49 One of the more interesting research trends has been the added attention to military garrisons both in Britain and the empire with its wider explorations of complex interrelationships through matters of health, crime, local politics, cultural activities, and even environmental issues.50 Spiers, Late Victorian Army, pp. 209–16.

44

Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, p. 127.

45

David G. Chandler and Ian F. W. Beckett (eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford, 1994), p. xv.

46

Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strike Breaking since 1919 (London, 1983).

47

James Douet, British Barracks, 1600–1914: Their Architecture and Role in Society (London, 1998).

48

49

Peter Simkins, ‘Soldiers and Civilians: Billeting in Britain and France’, in A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War, ed. Ian F. W. Beckett and Keith Simpson (Manchester, 1985), pp. 165–93; Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16 (Manchester, 1988), pp. 231–55.

50

See, for example, Michael McConnell, Army and Empire: British Soldiers on the American Frontier, 1758–75 (Lincoln, NB, 2004); Christopher DeCorse and Zachary Beier (eds), British Forts and Their Communities: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives (Gainesville, FL, 2018); Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–54 (Montreal, 1981); Con Costello, A Most Delightful Station: The British Army on

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Ironically, while barrack building largely isolated soldiers from those dangers of political subversion that had been perceived in the 1790s, it also served to further distance army from society through the unrepresentative nature of the army’s social composition under a system of voluntary enlistment. Other than temporary legislation impressing debtors, vagrants and other marginalised members of society on occasions during the eighteenth century, there was no conscription for the regular army until 1916.51 It was applied to the militia from 1757 to 1831 in a manner which did much to deter politicians from its consideration until the particular manpower challenges of ‘total war’ dictated otherwise. Conscription was then applied again in 1939 and persisted in the form of national service until the last conscript left the army in May 1963. The dynamic of civil-military interaction was thus dramatically altered for just under a third of the twentieth century. Between 1914 and 1918 the army embraced 5.7 million men or 22.1 per cent of the male population of the United Kingdom, while participation in the armed forces in the Second World War as a whole, in which 4.6 million men served, embraced 19.4 per cent of the male population of military age (18–41) at peak in 1943.52 By way of comparison, it is conceivable that by 1809 during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between one in nine and one in ten of all able-bodied males in Britain and Ireland was serving in army, navy or militia. With the addition of the yeomanry, volunteer and local militia units raised for home defence the proportion rose to perhaps one in six of the able-bodied male population. This represented a higher proportion of men under arms than in either France or Austria and, with the exception of the militia and the navy, one raised largely by voluntary means.53 It can be argued, however, that the temporary existence of a mass citizen army had more generational impact on wartime

the Curragh of Kildare, Ireland, 1855–1922 (Cork, 1996); Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868 (Basingstoke, 2014); Graham Dominy, Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontiers: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison (Urbana, IL, 2016); Brigitte Mitchell, ‘Problems of a Garrison Town: Windsor, 1815–55 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2001); A. F. F. H. Robertson, ‘The Army in Colchester and Its Influence on the Social, Economic and Political Development of the Town, 1854–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1992). Arthur Gilbert, ‘Army Impressment during the War of Spanish Succession’, The Historian, 38 (1976), 689–708; Stephen Conway, ‘The Mobilisation of Manpower for Britain’s Mid-Eighteenth Century Wars’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 377–404.

51

Ian F. W. Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly, The British Army and the First World War (Cambridge, 2017), p. 96; Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 63–4.

52

Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (Basingstoke, 1979), p. 169.

53

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servicemen and national servicemen than upon either post-1960s generations or the army as an institution. In one sense, there was always conscription in peacetime through what the then Quartermaster General and future Field Marshal Lord Nicholson characterised in 1906 as the compulsion of destitution.54 Outside of the world wars, there has always been a close correlation between recruitment and unemployment with the result that the army’s rank and file has always been unrepresentative of society as a whole. In fact, unemployment was equally of account in many cases in 1914.55 Consequently, the army’s image within society has often been an unfavourable one. A stereotyped image of the soldier emanates from much popular cultural material, from John Dryden’s Cymon and Iphigenia through George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Sergeant, William Cowper’s The Task, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular song.56 Lord Hervey remarked to George II that there was nothing so odious to men of all ranks and classes in this country than troops: that people who had not sense enough to count up to twenty, or to articulate ten words together on other subjects had their lessons so well to heart that they could talk like Ciceros on this topic and never to an audience that did not chime in with their arguments.57

As is well known, the future Field Marshal Sir William Robertson was told by his mother when he enlisted as a private soldier in 1877 that she would rather bury him than see him in a red coat.58 Yet, times do change and for a variety of reasons, including the growth of the imperial idea, the common soldier as well as imperial heroes such as Henry Havelock, Charles Gordon, Garnet Wolseley, Frederick Roberts and Herbert Kitchener became increasingly seen as sympathetic figures in the late nineteenth century.59 Beckett, British Profession of Arms, p. 111.

54

Beckett et al., British Army and First World War, pp. 96–104.

55

Roy Palmer (ed.), The Rambling Soldier (Gloucester, 1985); Lewis Weinstock, Songs and Music of the Redcoats: A History of the War Music of the British Army, 1642–1902 (London, 1970).

56

Alan Guy, ‘The Army of the Georges, 1714–83’, in Chandler and Beckett, Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army, pp. 92–110, at p. 93.

57

Victor Bonham-Carter, Soldier True: The Life of Field Marshal Sir William Robertson (London, 1963), p. 5.

58

Ian F. W. Beckett, The Victorians at War (London, 2013), pp. 13–24; Berny Sebé, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester, 2013); Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘Manipulating the Modern Curse of Armies: Wolseley, the Press and the Ashanti War, 1873–74’, in Soldiers and Settlers in Africa,

59

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This, too, was reflected in music hall, art, popular literature, children’s toys, a wide variety of print media, and all manner of commemorative material.60 Street names also began to reflect overseas conflicts, from Crimean-inspired names such as Alma Street in Weston-super-Mare and Balaclava Road in Bristol to later creations such as Havelock Street (Indian Mutiny, 1857) in Aylesbury, Isandula Road (Zulu War, 1879) in Nottingham, Tel-el-Kebir Road (Egypt, 1882) in Sunderland, and Omdurman Street (Sudan, 1898) in Swindon. It is perhaps no surprise that it was the South African War (1899–1902) that saw the first large-scale memorialisation of the ordinary fallen soldier, with named individuals appearing on over 900 memorials as a matter of course.61 Having said that, there is a wealth of print and visual media connected to earlier wars such as the British Civil Wars (or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms), the Seven Years War (1756–63), and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.62 For all that the interwar years of the first half of the twentieth century are popularly associated with disillusionment and revulsion with war this is hardly borne out by popular culture, not least juvenile literature. Over seventy-five British war films were made between 1950 and 1959 while, following the success of War Picture

1850–1918, ed. Stephen Miller (Leiden, 2009), pp. 221–34; Stephen Badsey, ‘New Wars, New Press, New Country? The British Army, the Expansion of the Empire and the Mass Media, 1877–1918’, in Victorians at War: New Perspectives, ed. Ian F. W. Beckett (London, 2007), pp. 34–46; Heather Streets, ‘Military Influence in Late Victorian and Edwardian Popular Media: The Case of Frederick Roberts’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8 (2010), 231–56; Keith Surridge, ‘More Than a Great Poster: Lord Kitchener and the Image of the Military Hero’, Historical Research, 74 (2001), 298–313. Kenneth Brown, ‘Modelling for War: Toy Soldiers in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of Social History, 24 (1990), 237–54; John Mackenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950 (Manchester, 1992).

60

Sir James Gildea, For Remembrance and in honour of those who lost their lives in the South African War (London, 1911); Mark Connelly and Peter Donaldson, ‘South African War (1899–1902) Memorials in Britain: A Case Study of Memorialisation in London and Kent’, War and Society, 29 (2010), 20–46.

61

See, for example, David Flintham, ‘“His Majestie’s Scenographer”: The Military Art of Wenceslaus Hollar’, in Home and Away: The British Experience of War, 1618–1721, ed. Serena Jones (Solihull, 2018), pp. 150–88; Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool, 1997); Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010); John Bonehill and Geoff Quilley (eds), Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c. 1789–1815 (Aldershot, 2000); Alexandra Franklin and Mark Philp (eds), Napoleon and the Invasion of Britain (Oxford, 2003); Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot, 2006).

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Library in 1958, Commando started in 1961 and is still going strong.63 In many ways the general popular response to the Falklands War in 1982 was an echo of earlier imperial ventures, while the widespread view that the war in Iraq in 2003 was unjustified, as well as the subsequent engagement in Afghanistan, has led to a general sympathy for under-equipped and over-stretched armed forces as suggested by the support for the Military Covenant and for charities such as Help for Heroes. Better provision for veterans and dependants has been largely a feature of the twentieth century but it has always been a significant problem. A Select Committee on Mendicancy was convened in 1815 to investigate the number of veterans becoming beggars, and some veterans drifted into radical politics. The Royal Hospital Chelsea (1682) catered for only a small number of military ‘in-pensioners’ with the majority of pensioned veterans being ‘out-pensioners’.64 There were over 36,000 army out-pensioners by 1815 but only those who had served twenty years were entitled, and it was not guaranteed for all until 1859. Those with less service, their dependants, and widows and orphans had to rely upon private subscription funds established after particular campaigns such as the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House Relief Fund (1879), or charitable organisations such as the Royal Patriotic Fund (1854) and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association (1885). Initially radical veterans’ organisations emerged from the Great War but they were subsumed in the British Legion while grievances were largely met.65 Arguably, the interest generated by the centenary of the Great War has also contributed to a more positive image, but this does not make the army any more likely to be able to recruit up to even its modest establishment. A planned force of 82,000 regulars by 2020 is the smallest army Britain has had since the eighteenth century. Military history is popular with the public but the survey undertaken for the British Forces Broadcasting Service’s Remembrance Campaign in 2017 was sobering. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London, 2000); Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, 2004). An entertaining survey of the ‘pleasure culture of war’ in the 1960s can be found in Harry Pearson, Achtung Schweinehund! A Boy’s Own Story of Imaginary Combat (London, 2007).

63

64

G. L. Hudson, ‘Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England’, in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), pp. 117–44; Andrew Cormack, ‘“These Meritorious Objects of the Royal Bounty”: The Chelsea Out-Pensioners in the Early Eighteenth Century (privately published, 2017); Peter Reese, Homecoming Heroes: An Account of the Reassimilation of British Military Personnel into Civilian Life (London, 1992).

65

From a large literature, see Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–39 (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics and Society, 1921–39 (Westport, CT, 2004); Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: Soul of a Nation (Manchester 2011).

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The idea was to chronicle all those conflicts or military deployments in which British servicemen and women had been engaged since 1914, the number engaged and the number who had died. It concluded that 85 per cent of those asked were not aware of more than half of the conflicts in which the British armed forces had been involved since 1945; 37 per cent were unaware of any of the conflicts or deployments that currently involved the British armed forces; and nearly half of those aged 18 to 24 were not aware that the British armed forces had been involved in the Second World War.66 The army’s officer corps has also been unrepresentative of society as a whole, under the system of purchase that pertained for infantry and cavalry until 1871 and, thereafter, through the dependence upon the products of the English public schools. There was a broadening of social composition through temporary commissions in the world wars and this has continued as the army has increasingly commissioned graduates since the 1980s. The fact that so many in command positions shared the same background as the political and social establishment, of course, contributed to that certain degree of apolitical nature that so troubled the theorists of civil-military relations. But officers have played a political role albeit within the parameters of a stable political system, an evolving bureaucratic system of administration, and political and financial subordination through the checks and balances established after 1689 through such means as the Mutiny Act, the Army (Annual) Act, and the Army Act.67 It might be noted that the Mutiny Act alone defined the purpose for the army’s existence prior to 1868 in suggesting it was intended to maintain the balance of power in Europe.68 Thereafter, however, there was only the Stanhope Memorandum of 1888 and the Inskip/Hore-Belisha policy statement of 1937 as authoritative statements as to what the army’s role should be until the practice of modern defence policy statements and reviews.69 The regimental system has also contributed to general military passivity in political terms although tribal loyalties amid the continuing threat to regiments since the end of the Second World War prevented the army from speaking with a collective voice. Rather similarly, inter-service rivalries brought about a situation in which soldiers were engaged in politics within the machinery of defence but unlikely https://www.forces.net/remembrance/brits-dont-know-their-facts-about-forces-newreport-reveals (accessed 19 June 2019).

66

Sir Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford, 1997).

67

Sir Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of Two World Wars (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 34.

68

Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘The Stanhope Memorandum of 1888: A Re-interpretation’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984), 240–7; Brian Bond, ‘Leslie Hore-Belisha at the War Office’, in Politicians and Defence: Studies in the Formulation of British Defence Policy, 1845–1970, ed. Ian F. W. Beckett and John Gooch (Manchester, 1981), pp. 110–31.

69

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to find common cause with sailors and airmen competing for scarce resources.70 Overtly politically charged episodes have been few, arguably the most serious the Curragh Incident in March 1914, which effectively paralysed government policy when it was made apparent that large numbers of officers would not be prepared to coerce Ulster into accepting Irish home rule in the event of being ordered to do so.71 Financial reductions and servicemen’s remuneration have provided the most recent examples of public opposition on the part of the services’ professional heads with delegations to Downing Street in 1976, 1978 and 1980. The Chief of the General Staff, Sir John Chapple, exercised his right to go direct to the Prime Minister in 1991 but significantly over regimental amalgamations. Recent studies of ‘Blair’s Wars’,72 as well as the 2016 report of the Chilcot Inquiry on the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and other publications now emerging, paint an unedifying picture of highly dysfunctional political and military decision-making.73 But then, Henry Wilson’s judgement in December 1906 on the performance of the very first Chief of the General Staff, Neville Lyttelton, was that he had been ‘increasingly useless until he has reached an almost incredible degree of uselessness’.74 Arguably Chilcot’s findings are little different in substance from those of the Walcheren Inquiry (1809), the Elgin Commission (1902) or the Dardanelles (1916) and Mesopotamia Commissions (1917).75 Of those four inquiries, three actually took place in wartime. One could add other penetrating analyses such as the Stephen Commission on Warlike Stores in 1887, which memorably concluded

Strachan, Politics of the British Army, pp. 234–62.

70

Ian F. W. Beckett (ed.), The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (London, 1986).

71

Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Sir Hew Strachan (eds), British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Abingdon, 2013).

72

https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20171123124621/http://www.iraqinquiry. org.uk/media/247921/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry_executive-summary.pdf (access­ ed 19 June 2019).

73

Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘“Selection by Disparagement”: Lord Esher, the General Staff and the Politics of Command, 1904–14’, in The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation, 1890–1939, ed. David French and Brian Holden Reid (London, 2000), pp. 41–56, at p. 52.

74

Martin R. Howard, Walcheren, 1809: The Scandalous Destruction of a British Army (Barnsley, 2012); John Gooch, ‘Britain and the Boer War’, in The Aftermath of Defeat: Societies, Armed Forces, and the Challenge of Recovery, ed. George Andreopoulos and Harold Selesky (New Haven, 1994), pp. 40–58; Jenny Macleod, ‘General Sir Ian Hamilton and the Dardanelles Commission’, War in History, 8 (2001), 418–41; Andrew Syk, ‘The 1917 Mesopotamia Commission’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 154 (2009), 94–101.

75

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that a system of ‘extravagance controlled by stinginess is not likely to result either in economy or efficiency’.76 To draw this to a conclusion, the British army has often lacked an institutional memory as suggested by its lack of any real sense of military doctrine until the 1980s. Muddling through has been preferred irrespective of the degree of military professionalism at any particular period. Muddling through might equally characterise the army’s relationship to British society. The absence of the army from overt public consciousness has been evident in many periods since the seventeenth century. Certain events – usually military disasters – or major wars have naturally aroused public concern, interest and participation. Arguably the army as an institution changed most in the second half of the twentieth century when the basic building block of the regimental system was most under threat and society changed perhaps more than previously, so that the army had to embrace issues such as feminism and sexual identity.77 How far society’s attitudes to the army have really changed is a different matter for there are still continuities imposed by over 300 years of environment, culture and tradition. There has been popular militarism on occasions, notably in the late nineteenth century but it then existed only in mild solution.78 The army also has perhaps a higher profile at present than has been common in peacetime although perception of the circumstances in which the use of military force is justifiable has changed at the same time so that there is a disconnect. It can be argued, therefore, that the relationship between army and society in Britain is that of a military institution existing within the context of an unmilitary people.

Beckett, British Profession of Arms, p. 110.

76

Sir Hew Strachan (ed.), The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty First Century (London, 2000).

77

Sir Michael Howard, ‘Empire, Race and War’, History Today, 31 (1981), 4–11.

78

Index ‘Absent-Minded Beggar’  185 Act of Parliament  150, 172, 173, 177, 199, 215, 261–2, 267 Addington, Henry  22, 23, 30 Additional Force Act (1804)  23 additional force  23, 27 Afghanistan  180, 215, 222, 266 Second Afghan War (1878–80)  222 Alexander, Field Marshal Sir Harold (1st Viscount Alexander of Tunis)  194 Allsopp, Henry, 1st Baron Hindlip  52 American Civil War (1861–65)  192 American War of Independence (1775–83)  150, 156–9, 193, 196, 198, 216, 259 Amiens, Peace of (1802)  37 ammunition 95–6 Anglo-Maratha Wars (1775–1818)  115, 158 Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–99)  158–9, 161 Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–49)  214, 218 Armed Neutrality (1800)  24 Armitage, Arthur C.  51 Army of Bengal  152, 160, 164 Army of Reserve  27 Army of Reserve Act (1803)  23 Auchmuty, Brigadier-General Sir Samuel  105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118 Auchinleck, Field Marshal Sir Claude 194–5 Audienza, High Court of  116 Awadh 214–16 Badajoz (Spain), 1812 siege  103, 104, 109, 112 Baden-Powell, Robert  171 Baldwin, Stanley  258 barracks  32–3, 172, 181–2, 186, 188, 191, 233–4, 242, 245, 262–3

Barrack Room Ballads, The  171, 182–4 Barlow, Sir George Hilaro  164 Barry, Tom  203 battery  98, 99 Belfast  196, 197, 198–9, 200, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209 Beresford, Major-General William Carr  104, 110, 116 Bengal  150, 154, 159, 214–6, 217, 225 Bingham, Lieutenant-Colonel George  118, 119 Blakeney, Edward  90, 93, 94 Blakeney, William  85 Blatchford, Robert  182 n.25 Bombay  164, 214, 217, 224 Boycotts  189, 191 Boyd, Robert  90, 93, 94 Boy Scouts  171 Brackenbury, Captain C. B.  173 bread contract  92, 95 British Army  20, 21, 23, 26, 33, 34–7, 38, 39, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 75, 77 aid to the civil power  6, 11, 192–3, 198, 201–5, 261–2 conflict with the British East India Company armies  151, 152 156–7, 161, 166–7 historiography of  2–3, 10, 14 in politics  9–13, 151, 162–4, 198–9, 202, 206, 209, 231–2, 238, 248, 251, 257, 262, 266–8 in India  152, 157, 161–2, 213–4, 216, 218, 220–1, 225, 230 racial discrimination in  10 recruitment  4–7, 12, 14, 58, 60, 61–4, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 81, 172–7, 193, 200–2, 204, 207–9, 231, 234–7, 241, 243, 252, 264

Inde x    271 regimental identity  13–16, 151, 160, 163, 190, 195–6, 232, 244, 247–9, 250–1, 259, 260–1 see also British Army and British Indian Army corps, formations and regiments reputation  21, 23, 31, 32, 34–7, 38 service outside British Isles  7–8 British Army and British Indian Army corps, formations, and regiments: 3 Para (3rd Battalion)  10 3rd Light Cavalry  226 13th Battalion Imperial Yeomanry  55 36th (Ulster) Division  193, 194, 199–200 52nd Lowland Division  235 107th (Belfast) Brigade  199 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders  11, 238, 249 Auxiliary Territorial Service  202 Black Watch  238, 240, 251 Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)  233–8, 240, 244, 247, 249 Cheshire Regiment  260 Cheshire Yeomanry  54 Connaught Rangers  207 De Meuron Regiment  5 Donegal Royal Garrison Artillery  206 Duke of Wellington’s Regiment  260 East Surrey Regiment  218 Essex Yeomanry  55 Gordon Highlanders  238 Green Howards  260 Highland Light Infantry 233–4, 236–9, 240, 243–5, 249 Inniskilling Dragoons  196 Manchester and Salford Yeomanry  44 North Irish Horse  200 Northumberland Hussars  48 Pals Battalions  58, 59, 63, 65, 66–74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 Accrington Pals  68 Bermondsey Battalion  73–4 Birmingham Pals  70–1, 78, 79 Bradford Pals  71–2, 78 Bristol’s Own  72–3, 80 Hull Pals  72

Liverpool Pals  67–9, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 81 Manchester Pals/Manchester City Battalion  68, 69–70, 73, 78, 80 Newcastle Commercials  73 Stockbroker Battalion  67 Queen’s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry 235 Queen’s Own Royal Staffordshire Yeomanry 51 Royal Army Medical Corps  235 Royal Army Service Corps  235, 238 Royal Army Veterinary Corps  235 Royal Artillery  200, 238 Royal Dublin Fusiliers  207 Royal East Kent Mounted Rifles  49, 53 Royal Engineers  200, 237–8 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers  196, 207 Royal Irish Dragoons  203 Royal Irish Fusiliers  207 Royal Munster Fusiliers  206 Royal Irish Rangers (Volunteer)  202 Royal Irish Regiment  207 Royal Irish Rifles  199, 200, 207 n.45 Royal Scots Fusiliers  233 Royal Scots Greys  238 Royal Scots Regiment  238 Royal West Kent Yeomanry  48, 55 Scots Guards  238–9, 247 Seaforth Highlanders  238–9, 240 service battalions (1914–18)  64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 81 Staffordshire Yeomanry  46, 49 Sussex Yeomanry 53, 55 Ulster Defence Regiment  202–3 Ulster Signal Regiment (Volunteers) 202 West India Regiments  5 British Army of the Rhine (BAOR)  256 British Civil Wars (1640–60)  265 British East India Company  214–16, 217, 220, 221, 228 Army 11 in British politics  149–151, 155–60 composition of its army  149, 152–4, 207

272    I n de x consolidation of its army with British Army  149–51, 152, 156, 161–2, 166–7, 214, 216–7 European officers (commissioned)  152–6, 166, 225 attitudes toward  152–3, 154–6, 161, 166–7 involvement in politics  154–61 legislative reform efforts on  150–1 war of expansion in India  154, 158–9 British Expeditionary Force (BEF)  59, 64 British government  6, 15, 151, 197, 199, 201, 251, 268 Britishness  19–20, 25, 26, 30, 31–2, 33, 35 British Parliament  118, 149, 150, 155, 160, 162–3 British society  6–7, 9–13, 25–6, 28–30, 32, 43–5, 50–2, 58–9, 62–5, 67–9, 70–4, 77, 81, 152, 154–6, 160, 164–5, 170, 174, 179, 185, 190, 209, 223, 232, 235, 237, 240, 269 Broad Arrow, The 188 Brooke, Field Marshal Alan Francis (First Viscount Alanbrooke)  194 Brooke, Basil Stanlake (Viscount Brookeborough) 201 Browne, Colonel Gore  113 Buccleuch, Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of  24 Buckinghamshire Hussars, Royal  51 Buenos Aires (Argentina)  104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116 Burdett, Sir Francis  23 Burke, Edmund  150, 154–7, 159, 165 Butler, Lady Elizabeth  195 Butler, Lieutenant General Sir William  195 Byng, Admiral  85, 86, 89, 101, 102 Calamata, Constantin  96 ‘Call to Arms’  61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 71, 72 Calvert, Harry  260 Cambridge, Duke of, (Prince George William Frederick Charles)  228 Canada 254 Cape Mola (Menorca)  96, 97 Cardwell-Childers Reforms  60, 171–7, 179, 188, 189, 190, 225, 260 Cardwell, Edward  171, 172, 173, 174

Carson, Sir Edward  198–200 Cartwright, Major John  30 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount  23, 27, 30, 37, 38, 118 Catholicism  12, 88, 153, 162, 198, 201–3, 205, 208–9 Chapple, Sir John  268 Charles I, King  153 Charles II, King  261 charity  123, 125–6, 137–43 Chartism 47 Chelsea, Royal Hospital  266 Chief of the General Staff  268 Chilcot Enquiry (2016)  268 Childers, Hugh  171–2, 173, 176, 260 China  166, 215, 219–20 Churchill, John (1st Duke of Marlborough) 163 cigarettes  9, 120–7, 129–30, 135–7, 139–44 citizen soldier  19, 20, 21, 29, 32, 36 citizenship  19, 21, 28, 29–30, 36–8 Ciudad Rodrigo (Spain), 1812 siege  103, 104, 108–9, 118 Ciutadella (Menorca)  96, 98, 100 civilians  124–30, 133–44 civilian volunteers  185–6 civil-military relations  1, 10–16, 125–8, 130, 133–5, 138–43, 154–6, 165–7, 173, 179, 182, 186–8, 190–1, 232, 252, 257, 261–3, 267 Clive, Major General Robert (1st Baron Clive)  154–5, 158 comforts funds  123, 125–45 commerce  24, 25, 26, 31, 38–9 Commissary General  87, 91, 92, 94 conscription  1, 4, 7, 15, 26–7, 31, 34, 39, 172, 173, 174, 194, 205, 256, 261, 263–4 Corbett, Julian  259 Corbyn, Jeremy  10 Cork 207 Cornwallis, Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess  22, 36, 161–2 Costello, Elvis  1 cricket  169, 223–4 crime  170, 187, 188 Crimean War (1854–56)  187, 206, 262, 265 Cripps, Frederick Heyworth  51

Inde x    273 Cromwell, Oliver  1, 162, 261 Cubitt, George, 1st Baron Ashcombe  52 Cunninghame, William  85, 86, 89, 90, 94, 96–7, 100 Curragh Incident (1914)  268 Dalton, Emmet  203 Dardanelles Commission (1916)  268 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA)  132 Delhi 216 Derry (Londonderry)  192, 204 desertion  175, 200 Dibdin, Charles  32 Dill, Field Marshal John Greer  194 Director General of Voluntary Organisations (DGVO)  128–9, 131, 137, 145 Dundas, Henry, 1st Viscount Melville  26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 42, 43, 149, 151 Easter Rising (1916)  192 Egerton, Wilbraham, 1st Earl Egerton  52 Egyptian Campaign (1882)  180, 188, 190, 265 Empress Club  125 English East India Company see the British East India Company Enniskillen  192, 196, 198–9, 204 Elgin Commission (1902)  268 England  152–3, 180, 183–5, 187, 189, 192, 195, 198, 205, 207, 220, 253–5, 257, 260–1 enlistment  172–174, 175, 178, 179, 183, 190, 192, 194, 196, 199–200, 202–4, 206–9 equality of rank, 156–61, 167 Falklands War (1982)  8, 266 Fairbairn, Andrew  51 Farquhar, George  173, 175 fencibles  41, 197, 205 Fenian movement  203, 206 Fiennes, Frederick, 16th Baron Saye and Sele 50–1 First World War (1914–18)  2, 8–10, 58, 59, 60, 120, 123, 127, 139, 144–5, 190, 193, 194, 199–200, 203–4, 209, 213, 236, 238–9, 241, 249, 250, 252–3, 262, 267

Fornelles  96, 100 Fortescue, Sir John  3, 39 fortifications  96–100, 105 Foster, Jonas  51 Four Regiments Crisis (1787–88)  156–61 Fox, Charles James  30 France  20, 23, 31–2 Fredrick the Great  259 French Revolutionary Wars  19, 21–2, 192–3, 207, 260, 263, 265 Fullarton, William (Colonel, Madras Army), 159 garrisons, massacre of  107–9 Gawilghur, 1803 siege  108 gentry  194, 195, 205 Germany  173, 259 George II, King  264 George III, King  152 George, David Lloyd (1st Earl LloydGeorge of Dwyfor)  251 Gladstone, William  171, 177 Glasgow military infrastructure, historic development   233–5 localisation 236–7 Volunteers 234 Regimental Associations  237–40 leisure scene  242 post-war recruitment  243 Glorious Revolution (1688)  162, 261 Gordon, Major-General Charles  264 Great Game, The  180–1 Greenwood, James  177 Grenville, William Grenville, 1st Baron  27 Haig, Field Marshal Douglas, (1st Earl Haig) 251 Haldane Reforms  60 Hastings, Warren  150, 155–8, 160, 165 Havelock, Major General Sir Henry  264, 265 Hawkesbury, Lord see Jenkinson, Robert, Lord Hawkesbury later 2nd Earl of Liverpool

274    I n de x Hearsey, Captain Andrew Wilson  152, 156, 159 Hervey, Lord  264 Hickie, Major General W. B.  195 Himley (Staffordshire)  46 home front  126, 138–41 Home Guard  201, 209, 253 Hope, Alexander  31 Hore-Belisha, Leslie  267 Huidobro, Pascal Ruiz  105, 106, 108, 111 hunting  54–6, 223, 225–6 Imperialism 170–1, 180, 182, 184–5, 186 India  108, 112, 214, 218–9, 224, 225, 226 perceptions of warfare in, 159, 164–5, 167 see also British East India Company, British Army (in India) Indian Army  213, 215–6, 222, 225–6, 227, 229–30 Officer Corps, see Indian Staff Corps private soldiers, see Sepoys Indian Civil Service  219, 221, 226 Indian Uprising (1857–58)  166, 215–6, 217, 228, 265 Indian Staff Corps  216–9, 218–220, 222, 223, 225, 228 Ingram, Henry, 7th Viscount of Irvine  92, 94 Inskip, Thomas  267 Ireland Home Rule  194, 198–9, 200, 204, 209 rebellion (1798)  192, 198, 203, 205, 206 Irish National Volunteers  199, 209 Irish Parliamentary Party  203–5 Irish Republican Army  203 Irish War of Independence  192, 201, 208 Isandlwana, Battle of, (1879)  265 Jack Tar  184 James II, King  162, 261 Jenkinson, Robert, Lord Hawkesbury later 2nd Earl of Liverpool  118 Jennings, Captain Peter  112, 113, 114 Joicey, James, 1st Baron Joicey  52 Kane, Richard  85, 89

Kitchener, Horatio Herbert (Earl Kitchener of Khartoum)  7, 193, 194, 264 Kitchener’s Army  58, 59, 61–4, 65, 67, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81 First Hundred Thousand (K1)  64–6 K2, K3  69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81 Kitchener Blue  74–80, 81 Kitson, General Sir Frank  261 Kipling, Rudyard  63, 170, 182–4, 185, 218 Landsheit, Sergeant Norbert  114 Lawrence, Sergeant William  107, 108, 109, 111, 115 laws of war  105–6, 108–9, 110 Lawson, Andrew  51 Lennox, Charles, 4th Duke of Richmond 44 Levy en Masse Act (1803)  23, 26, 31, 33 Levy-Lawson, Sir Edward  51 Liddell Hart, Basil  259 Local Militia Act (1808)  23, 38 Localisation  172, 173, 190, London  152, 156, 189, 220, 237, 240, 251 Londonderry (Derry)  192, 204 Loyalist (Ulster)  193, 198–200, 202, 204 Lyttelton, Neville  268 Lucknow 216 Madras  214, 217, 153–4, 159, 164, 214, 216–7 Madras Army  158 Presidency 158 magazines 94 Mahon (Menorca)  85, 95–100 Maldonado 114 marriage 226–7 martial law  31, 34, 36 masculinity  24–5, 28, 38 ‘McDermott’s War Song’  184 medals 240 memoirs, military  175, 186, 187–8, 190 Mesopotamia Commission (1917)  268 Meysey-Thompson, Henry, 1st Baron Knaresborough 52 militarism  170, 182, 269 military spirit  20–1, 24, 25–6, 28, 32, 37–8 military welfare  123–5, 128, 138, 140–2

Inde x    275 Militia  4, 20, 23, 27, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 194, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 205–6, 209, 260–3 1757 Act  29, 31, 38 1852 Act  38 militarism 11 Ministry of Defence  10 mobilisation  124, 126, 139 Money, Sir Leo Chiozza  131 Moonshine 176 Montevideo 1807 siege  103–19 Calvido of  113, 114, 115 Montgomery, Bernard Law (1st Viscount Montgomery of El Alamein)  194 morale  121, 139, 144 music hall  179, 182, 183–4, 185, 186, 265 mutiny  164, 208–9, 216, 267 mutual aid  138–42 ‘Nabobs’  155–6, 159–60, 162, 166 Napier, Major-General Sir Charles James 47 Napoleon III  38 Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815)  2, 5, 8, 19–20, 103, 187, 192, 207, 260, 263, 265 National Service  28, 39, 194, 202, 263–4 New Model Army  1 Nicholson, Field Marshal William (1st Baron Nicholson)  264 Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO)  177, 187, 188, 241–2, 244–5 O’Connell, Daniel  198 Orange Order  193, 198 Ordnance Office  87, 90, 92–5 Over-seas League  120, 122 Packenham, Thomas 5th Earl of Longford 55 Palestine Campaign (1917)  251 Palmerston, Lord  258, 261 Parliamentary Recruiting Committee  62, 66 Parsons, Lieutenant General Sir Lawrence 204 patriotism  170, 174, 186

patronage  153–4, 165, 221, 224 n.39, 227–9, 248 penal laws  192, 196 Peninsular War (1808–1814)  103, 104, 108, 109, 112, 118, 119 petitions  157–61, 262 philanthropy  123, 127, 138, 186, 191, 266 Phipps, General Edmund  118 Pitt, William  6, 30, 33, 40, 149–50, 152, 160, 166 Plassey, battle of (1757)  154, 158 plunder  106, 114, 115, 116 policing  46, 47 polo 224–5 Popham, Commodore Sir Home  104 Portman, Humphrey  93 Portsmouth  180, 189 Powell, Captain Harry  113 prisoners of war  104, 108, 116 Prussian Army  173 Protestant  12, 88, 192, 193, 194, 196–203, 230 public health  124 purchase system  172, 220, 225, 267 Queen Anne’s Fort (Menorca)  96, 97 Queen’s Service, The  177, 187–8 Queen’s University Belfast  200 rations  122, 127, 129, 131, 144 recruitment  4–7, 12, 14, 58, 60, 61–4, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 81, 172–7, 193, 200–2, 204, 207–9, 231, 234–7, 241, 243, 252, 264 Recruiting Service, the  173–6 Red Cross Society  120, 125–6 Redmond, John  194, 204–5 Republican (Irish)  192, 193, 203 Reserves, The  172, 177 resilience 126 Reynolds, W. (cartoonist)  176, 179 Richards, J. W. (cartoonist)  169 Richardson, Lieutenant General Sir George 199 Richelieu, General see Vignerot du Plessis, Armand de, duc de Richelieu

276    I n de x Ridley, Matthew White, 1st Viscount Ridley 52 Rifle Volunteers  41, 49, 52, 53, 56, 200, 202 River Plate, 1806–7 campaign  103–19 Roberts, Field Marshal Sir Frederick (1st Earl Roberts)  228–9, 264 Roche, Captain Philip  106 Rorke’s Drift, Battle of (1879)  254 Rose, Field Marshall Sir Hugh (1st Baron Strathnairn) 227–8 Royal Artillery  189, 200, 222, 227, 233–4, 237–8 Royal Irish Constabulary  199 Royal Military College Sandhurst  218, 221, 223 Royal Navy  19, 20, 21–2, 38, 163, 180, 184, 218, 258 blockade 22 reputation  20, 21–2 Royal United Services Institute  173 Russia  180–1, 184, 229, 257 sack, of stormed towns  112–9 San Sebastian (Spain), 1813 siege  103, 104, 109, 112, 115, 116 Sassoon, Siegfried  53, 55 Sayer, Dorothy L.  253 Scotland  26, 54, 192, 220, 236, 238, 248, 254 Scott, Henry, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch  42 Scott, John  (major, Bengal Army)  160 Second World War (1939–45)  3, 201, 208, 231, 256, 262–4, 267 Sedley, Joseph (Vanity Fair) see Thackeray, William Makepeace Sepoys  149, 159, 214–6, 222 Seringapatam, 1799 siege  108 Seven Wars War (1756–63)  8, 86–7, 89–90, 150, 158, 159, 196, 265 Short Service  172, 176–7, 179, 182, 190 Short Service Soldier, The  177–9 siege warfare  8, 103–19 Smith, Philip Eustace  51 smoking culture of  120–8, 138–9 in popular culture  124, 126, 130, 138, 139, 144

medical perceptions of  121, 125, 128, 137, 144 soldiers  34–6, 170, 187, 188, 213, 264 perceptions of   171, 175, 177, 183, 186, 190 prejudice against   11, 172, 179, 182, 187–9, 190 support for  179, 180, 186 ‘Soldiers of the Queen’  184, 185 Soldiers Three  182, 184 South African War (1899–1902)  185, 186, 190, 203, 206, 240, 265 Southern Star, The  117 Spain  9, 104, 162, 193, 260 Spanish garrisons, soldiers  107–11 Spears, Edward  253 Spencer-Churchill, George, 6th Duke of Marlborough 50 sports  53–5, 186–7 Stanley, Edward, 17th Earl Derby  67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 80 Stanhope, James  96 Stanhope Memorandum (1888)  267 Stephen Commission (1887)  268–9 Stewart, Field Marshal Sir Donald  222, 228 strategic culture  254, 257–8 Stirling, Rear-Admiral Charles  115 storming of breaches  107–9, 112 St Phillips (Menorca) fort  88, 90, 93, 95–100 town 98 stratocracy 162 Stuart, Leslie  184, 185 St Vincent, John Jervis, 1st Earl  22 Sudan Campaign (1884–5 and 1896–9)  180, 188, 190, 265 Sullivan, Arthur  185 Supplementary Militia (1796)  23 surrender, of besieged towns  105–6, 108 Surtees, Robert 54 Tangier garrison  7, 255 Tarragona, 1811 siege  108 tax duties  129–30, 131, 133, 135–6, 143, 144 Taylor, Herbert H.  51

Inde x    277 Temple, Richard Temple-Nugent-Grenville, Earl 28 Terms of Service (in the regular army)  35, 172, 190 Territorial Army  200, 202 Territorial Associations  60, 64, 70 Territorial Force  60, 68, 75, 194, 200 Terry, Edward  152–3 Thackeray, William Makepeace  166 Thiepval, battle of (1916)  193 tin soldiers  170 Tipu Sultan  161 Tirah Campaign (1897)  222 tobacco advertising  122, 126, 127, 138–43 consumption  121–7, 129, 133–5, 144 trade  122, 127, 129–36, 143 Todd, ‘Thomas’  110, 116 Tommy Atkins  12, 170, 180–1, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187–8, 190 Training Act (1806)  23 Treasury  87, 91, 92, 94, 95 trench warfare  122, 126–7, 141 Trimble, William Copeland  198–9 Tunis 93 Tyneside 73 Troubles (Northern Ireland)  1, 201–2

Volunteers Irish, 1775–92  196–8 1793–1815  23, 30, 33–4, 35, 36–7, 38 1850s 38

Ulster Covenant (1912)  199 Ulster Defence Association  193 Ulster Home Guard  201, 209 Ulster Special Constabulary  201 Ulster Tower  193 Ulster Volunteer Force  198–200, 202, 204 uniforms  71, 74–80, 81, 172, 179, 183, 187, 188–91 see also Kitchener Blue United Irishmen  192, 198, 203 United Nations  255 Unionist Clubs  198

Watson-Armstrong, William  51 Walcheren Enquiry (1809)  268 Wales  205, 254–5 Wallace, Edgar  63, 65 Walters, Lieutenant Samuel  117 War Charities Act (1916)  131, 137, 140–1, 144 war culture  143 War Office, The  171–2, 174–5, 176, 177, 179, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191, 199, 204–5, 243 Ward, Sir Edward  128 War of Austrian Succession (1740–48)  154 War of Spanish Succession (1701–14)  85 Wavell, Field Marshal Sir Archibald (1st Earl Wavell)  253, 258 Wellesley, Arthur (First Duke of Wellington)  112, 118, 163, 195 White, Field Marshal Sir George  228 Whitelocke, Lieutenant-General John  104, 113, 114 Wilkie, Captain Fletcher  110, 111, 115, 117 ‘Wild Geese’  192 William III, King  196 Williamite Wars (1688–91)  192, 199 Wilson, Field Marshal Sir Henry (1st Baronet) 268 Windham, William  27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35–6, 37 Winter, Jay 58, 62, 63, 69, 81 Wolseley, Field Marshal Garnet Joseph (1st Viscount Wolseley)  187, 194, 223–4, 264 Wyndham, George, 3rd Earl of Egremont 44 Wyndham, Horace  176, 187–8

Vassall, Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer  107, 114, 115 Viceroy of India  155, 229, 253 Vignerot du Plessis, Armand de, duc de Richelieu  88, 89 voluntary action  123–6, 128, 138–44

Yates, J. B. (cartoonist)  175, 176 Yeomanry  2, 6–7, 10, 23, 38, 193, 198, 235, 238, 260–3 benefits of service  43, 52–3 provision of escorts  48–9 establishment 40–2

278    I n de x and fox hunting  54–6 officer corps, social composition  44–5, 50–2 other ranks, social composition of  43–4, 50 as a police force  46, 47

regiments as social hubs  48, 49, 53 role  42–3, 45–6 sporting opportunities  53–5 York, Frederick, Duke of   27, 34, 260 Zulu War (1879)  180, 188, 254, 265