Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Survivors found the circumstances of the capture extremely galling, and after the war there was a civil action when Gordon sued a Dundee newspaper for repeating a story that he had ordered the men to lay down their arms: he demanded £5,000 and received £500, which was nevertheless a substantial sum. Whatever the truth of the decision to surrender, command arrangements had certainly not made for a quick decision at a moment when time was of the essence. Nor did brevet rank make Major General Hubert Hamilton’s task any easier at Le Cateau. His 3rd Division was bearing the brunt of the battle, but when Brigadier General McCracken of 7th Infantry Brigade was wounded, Hamilton had to send for the Army List to determine that, although both Lieutenant Colonel Bird of the Royal Irish and Lascelles of the Worcesters were substantive lieutenant colonels, and the latter had gained substantive rank first, Bird had an earlier lieutenant colonel’s brevet that gave him command of the brigade.

Brevet rank lapsed in 1952 but reappeared (though only for major to lieutenant colonel) two years later, to increase the field of selection for promotion to colonel, and ‘earmark outstanding officers and give them incentive’.

It was finally abolished in 1967, although it lingered on into the twenty-first century in the Territorial Army, for specific use in the case of a territorial second-in-command of a unit normally commanded by a regular officer.

Even if no brevet rank was involved, an officer could be granted temporary or local rank, both of limited duration and the latter more fragile than the first. Local rank began by having a specific geographical limitation, like the ‘for America only’ caveat that made James Wolfe a major general in 1759. When Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief, formed his command into three brigades, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Pigot (in Boston in 1775) was promoted locally to brigadier general. He was to command his own 38th Foot, together with the 5th and 52nd. It was Pigot’s brigade that led the decisive break into the Patriots’ redoubt on Breed’s Hill (the key point in the battle known as Bunker Hill), and Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the American Department, announced in the Gazette that ‘the Success of the Day must in great Measure be attributed to his firmness and Gallantry.’ It brought him not only one of the first available regimental colonelcies, but promotion to local major general. He succeeded to his brother’s baronetcy in 1777, and shortly afterwards seniority brought him the substantive step of major general. Sir Robert was promoted lieutenant general in 1782, three years after his return to England. He did not serve again, but devoted himself to the improvement of his estate at Patshull, work begun by his elder brother, who had consulted Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

Temporary rank was linked to a specific appointment, but, unlike local rank which was generally unpaid, brought its holder the appropriate pay. The London Gazette solemnly deprived Winston Churchill of the temporary lieutenant colonelcy he had been granted in early 1916 to command 6/Royal Scots Fusiliers, and when he returned to politics that summer he reverted to major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. The rules could be very hard. Colonel Charles MacGregor was promoted to temporary major-general to serve as quartermaster-general in India in 1881, bypassing the appointment of brigadier. Although he held the post for four years, and was knighted in the process, he gave it up before seniority had yet made him a major general and so crashed back to colonel, and although he made a dignified protest, the system would not budge. Already mortally ill, he set off home. A Gazette of 18 February 1887 duly promoted him to major general, with seniority backdated to 22 January, but he had died at Cairo on 5 February and never knew of it.

The two world wars saw a huge expansion of local and temporary rank with the Second World War seeing the creation of a ‘war substantive’ rank which was precisely what its name suggests. The youngest British brigadier general in the First World War was Roland Boys Bradford, killed outside Bourlon Wood in 1917 at the age of 24, still only a substantive captain. The youngest major general of the war was the notoriously testy Keppel Bethell, described by one of his staff officers as ‘the most insubordinate man I have ever met’. He gained the temporary rank in March 1918 but never rose above substantive captain during the whole war, becoming temporary major in 1915, brevet major in 1916, and brevet lieutenant colonel in 1917. At that time promotion to full colonel came after four years as a lieutenant colonel and Bethell duly became a colonel in 1921, though it took him till 1930, six years before he retired, to get his second star back.

In 1944 Michael Carver took over 4th Armoured Brigade in Normandy, becoming, at the age of thirty, the youngest British brigade commander of the war. He had been commissioned into the Royal Tank Corps in 1935 and took command of 1st Royal Tank Regiment in 1942: his driver remembered him as a ‘young, serious and very professional soldier, devoid of messes and batmen’.

Carver later made no secret of the fact that ‘my attitude to politics and inherited privilege was … left of centre.’

One of his first acts was ‘to rid myself of the encumbrance of my second-in-command, who served no useful purpose’.

He then decided that the commanding officer of his brigade’s motor battalion, 2/King’s Royal Rifle Corps had ‘lost his grip’, and decided to replace him.

Rightly sensing trouble, he asked another senior officer from the same regiment to visit the battalion to double-check, and then duly sacked the commanding officer. When Carver proposed to lead an attack with the Royal Scots Greys, his divisional commander objected ‘Couldn’t you send a less well-known regiment?’ Undaunted, he moved on to unseat another commanding officer, Sandy Cameron of 3rd County of London Yeomanry, an experienced warrior with bars to both his DSO and MC. ‘He greatly resented the decision,’ admitted Carver, ‘but 20 years later wrote me a charming letter admitting that I had been right.’

Carver was fortunate in gaining a temporary lieutenant-colonelcy after the war, to work for ‘a dull, characterless gunner … a dead loss’.

He did not get command of a brigade again until 1960, sixteen years after commanding one in battle. But he was more fortunate than Peter Young, just four days younger, who led a Commando brigade in Burma in early 1945. Young did not become a lieutenant colonel again till 1953, when he went off to command a regiment in the Arab Legion. He left the army in 1959, still a lieutenant colonel, granted the honorary rank of brigadier on his retirement to run the military history department at Sandhurst, where he became this author’s first boss.

The army still grants temporary and local rank. The former is often awarded to an officer beginning an appointment in the course of which he will get promoted in the normal way of things, but there are times when temporary rank may reflect a wholly exceptional circumstance. In December 2007 Colonel Richard Iron was made a temporary brigadier to serve alongside the Iraqi army, helping develop its counter-insurgency plan for Basra. The British army’s run-down in Basra was primarily dictated by the political requirement to minimise casualties. Iron became a unrepentantly controversial figure. He was close to senior Iraqi officers who felt that they had received insufficient help, and he later suggested that the British had deviated from the principles of counter-insurgency that they, of all people, should have understood. He reverted to colonel on his return in 2008, and the following spring was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office, which has a proprietary interest in this award. Local rank usually reflects a short term expedient. For instance, when 4th Armoured Brigade was preparing to deploy for the first Gulf War, its established ‘Transition To War’ posts were immediately filled by the grant of local rank.

CHAPTER 6

WEEKEND WARRIORS

THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN the (full-time) regular army and (part-time) volunteer and auxiliary forces has been long, for there was a militia long before there were regulars. This has been a complex (and often unedifying) association, with militia units being ‘embodied’ for occasional full-time service in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Territorial Army being merged, lock, stock, and barrel into ‘a single integrated national army’ in 1940. Two of the most irritating acronyms in my own time were STABs (‘Stupid TA Bastards’) and ARABs (‘Arrogant Regular Army Bastards’). The Reserve Forces Act 1996 made it much easier than before to mobilise reservists in situations short of major war, and 13,510 were called up between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 1 June 2007. They served in a wide variety of posts, from deputy brigade commanders to private soldiers, sometimes absorbed within regular units, and sometimes serving in composite TA companies.

There were more triumphs than disasters. 1/Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment took a slice of Territorials with it to Al Amarah in 2004. Charlie Curry, a regular captain, describes the integration of a multiple (half-platoon) of Scots Territorials into his company:

We had ownership of them from the start of their mobilisation and they were trained centrally by the battle group prior to deployment. We had teething problems as we whittled down those not physically or mentally tough enough for the job in hand … What remained was a very well motivated multiple commanded by Sgt Steve Cornhill and supported by Cpl Steve Marsh and LCpl Sven Wentzel. These regs would assist in the integration of the multiple on ops, and eventually step back to allow the TA ranks to take the leash. It is worthy of note that other TA soldiers wound up in company HQ and in other multiples within the company. One such individual was Cpl ‘H’ Hogarth who went into the company signals detachment and manned the ops room throughout the tour … he was a fantastic operator, could effectively run the ops room alone, and could fix anything he turned his hand to – a top lad.

A regular Royal Armoured Corps NCO in the same battle group was also impressed by the Territorials he served alongside. ‘At the beginning I thought that because they were part-timers I would be better than them,’ he wrote, ‘but they soon changed my mind. I would honestly work in any environment with them again, and I made some really good mates.’

The regular army could not have fought either world war without a massive influx of non-regulars, with the TA, with all its strengths and weaknesses, taking the strain before the ponderous engine of conscription could cut in. In terms of Britain’s long-term relationship with her defenders, locally recruited auxiliary forces have always been more visible than regulars, who are either away campaigning or mewed up in barracks that have become increasingly forbidding. For most of the army’s history, there were more auxiliaries than regulars actually stationed in Britain. In 1935 Lieutenant Colonel J. K. Dunlop wrote that

In these days, most of the Regular battalions are concentrated in one or other of our great military training areas – Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, or Catterick. The Militia is no longer in existence, and there are large areas of the land without any visible sign of the existence of the British Army were it not for the local Territorial Army unit.

Things are different today only in that the TA’s geographical ‘footprint’ of training centres is about one-tenth the size of that in 1935.

Service in the fyrd, the Old English word for army, was one of the ‘common burdens’ shouldered by free men of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, who were obliged ‘to build fortifications, repair bridges and undertake military service’.

I can scarcely think of the fyrd save in terms of that dark October day in 1066 when Duke William beat Harold Godwinson on Senlac Hill to seize the crown of England. But it remained a useful asset even to the victorious Normans. Levies from the northern shires stood steady around the great bloc of dismounted knights (all hefting sword and spear beneath the consecrated banners from the minsters of York, Beverley, and Ripon that gave the fight its name) to break the wild rush of King David’s Scotsmen at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. An obligation for military service was incorporated in the Assize of Arms of 1181 and the Statute of Winchester of 1285, and embodied into the first militia acts in 1558. In the absence of a standing army, the process of selecting men for military service ‘kept the more established householders at home and sent abroad those socially less desirable persons whom deputy [lord] lieutenants and [village] constables wished to be rid of’.

The practice of calling up the most easily spared sat uneasily alongside the theory that the country was best defended by free men with a stake in its welfare. Sir Francis Bacon had argued that sturdy yeomen made the best soldiers: tenants, cottagers, and labourers were too servile; vagrants and vagabonds unstable and unfit. The Trained Bands, formed in 1572 in an effort to modernise the militia, were essentially county militia regiments, controlled by the lord lieutenants (who entrusted the heavy lifting to their deputies). They were composed of freeholders, householders and their sons, taught how to use pike and musket by a small number of professional soldiers – the rough equivalents of Permanent Staff Instructors in today’s TA. The quality of the trained bands was mixed, partly because the more affluent strove to avoid personal service but sent servants or hired substitutes to represent them. In 1642 the London Trained Bands numbered 8,000 men in six regiments, named the Red, Blue, Green, White, Orange, and Yellow. They were certainly better than most, partly because of the role they played in providing guards and contingents for the ceremonies of mercantile London. There was an intimate connection between status in the city and rank in the Trained Bands: all the colonels were aldermen. They also gained much benefit from the existence of the city’s voluntary military associations, like the ‘Martial Yard’, ‘The Gentlemen of the Private and Loving Company of Cripplegate’, and ‘The Society of the Artillery Garden’.

Many of the enthusiasts belonging to these clubs would have read the drill-books of the period, perhaps taking note of Robert Ward’s warning in his 1639 Animadversions of Warre that drinking was ‘the great fault of the English nation’ and particularly of English martial culture. Ward was profoundly mistrustful of the Trained Bands, and his observations prefigure the exasperated comments of many regular soldiers who have tried to train part-timers. Their training periods were

Matters of disport and things of no moment … after a little careless hurrying over their postures, with which the companies are nothing bettered, they make them charge their muskets, and so prepare to give their captain a brave volley of shot at his entrance into his inn: where after having solaced themselves for a while after this brave service every man repairs home, and that which is not so well-taught then is easily forgotten before the next training.

In 1642 the London Trained Bands were commanded by Sergeant Major General Philip Skippon, newly returned from the Dutch service, who led them out to Turnham Green that autumn to take part in ‘the Valmy of the English Civil War’ when they helped face off the victorious royalists and save London. ‘Come my honest brave boys,’ called Skippon, ‘pray heartily and fight heartily, and God will bless us.’ He soon went off to command the infantry in the Earl of Essex’s Parliamentarian army, but the Trained Bands remained a valuable part of Parliament’s order of battle thereafter, though they were never wholly comfortable far from their wards and warrens, with mournful cries of ‘Home, home’ letting commanders know that they had been campaigning too long.

The Cornish Trained Bands, too, were formidable soldiers, though hugely reluctant to serve in foreign parts, that is, east of the Tamar. However, they formed the nucleus of those remarkable ‘voluntary regiments’ under Sir Bevil Grenville, Sir Nicholas Slanning, Colonel William Godolphin, Colonel John Trevannion, and Lord Mohun that were to form the mainstay of the king’s army in the west. ‘These were the very best foot I ever saw,’ acknowledged the royalist cavalry officer, Captain Richard Atkyns, ‘for marching and fighting … but could not well brook our horse (especially when we were drawn up on corn) but would let fly at us.’ There is more than an echo of Xenophon’s wry suggestion to his Greek infantry (peasant farmers and thus horse-haters to a man) that they should pay no attention to Persian cavalry, for nobody he knew of had been killed by a horse-bite.

The King’s western colonels were men whose local power underlines the intimate connection between social standing and the ability to raise troops. This stretched far back into a feudal past and was still important in 1914, when the Earl of Derby raised four battalions of Liverpool Pals, presenting their soldiers with a solid silver cap-badge of the Derby crest. Grenville died atop Lansdown Hill outside Bath in June 1643. ‘When I came to the top of the hill,’ remembered Captain Atkyns, ‘I saw Sir Bevil Grenville’s stand of pikes, which certainly preserved our army from a total rout, with the loss of his most precious life.’

At his master’s side that day, in war as in peace, was the gigantic retainer Anthony Payne. Sir Bevil’s eldest son John was a 15-year-old ensign in the regiment, and when his father slid from the saddle Payne swung the lad up into it, and gave him the dead colonel’s sword. The Cornishmen, in their fury and grief, surged forward to regain the lost ground. Trevannion was killed when Prince Rupert stormed Bristol shortly afterwards and Slanning, mortally wounded in the same assault, lived long enough to quip that ‘he had always despised bullets, having been so well used to them.’ The death of the four men was a great loss: ‘Gone the four wheels of Charles’s wain,’ exulted a Roundhead poet, ‘Grenville, Godolphin, Slanning, Trevannion slain.’ Lest we get too misty-eyed about loyal country-folk and gallant gentlemen, we must remember that social obligation was laced with economic survival. Grenville had already written to his wife, away in their windy house at Stowe in north Cornwall, to tell her that no tenant could stay at home and expect to keep a roof over his head: they were to turn out in his blue and silver livery or pay the price.

There was an older obligation, for service in the posse comitatus, the armed power of a county, raised and commanded by its sheriff. It was an expedient resorted to by the royalists early on in the Civil War, though with mixed success. An officer commented that one of its gatherings was ‘more like a great fair than a posse’, but Sir Ralph Hopton secured 3,000 sturdy Cornishmen by summoning the county’s posse to Moilesbarrow Down outside Truro in October 1642. Like so much else, the notion crossed the Atlantic, and the ranchers and citizens who ride off with the sheriff to constitute the posse in so many westerns are behaving in a way their English ancestors would have understood.

After the Civil War the militia was retained by Parliament, both because it was seen as a defender of Protestant liberties against arbitrary royal government and because so many members of parliament were themselves militia officers.

The Militia Act of 1662 charged property-owners with the provision of men, arms and horses in relation to the value of their property, and was the basis for the militia’s organisation for the next century. But by 1685 it was being argued by the government’s supporters that the militia had performed badly against the Duke of Monmouth. Some, largely, uncritical historians have tended to follow this view, but recent research suggests that accounts of the militia’s incompetence are overdrawn. The argument that its failings justified a significant increase in the regular army says as much about James II’s wish to increase the size of the army for his own purposes, not least the cowing of domestic opposition, as it does about the value of the militia. The countervailing argument, that a regular army would encourage governments to embark upon expensive and risky foreign war, whereas the militia (offering what the 1980s might have termed ‘non-provocative defence’) did not, chimed harmoniously with the mood of the late seventeenth century, and there were to be lasting echoes of it, in both Britain and the United States.

The Militia Act of 1757 broke new ground by transferring the responsibility for the militia from individuals to the parish, that keystone of social organisation in so many other aspects, and successive legislation continued in a similar vein. Each county was allocated a quota of militiamen – 1,640 apiece for vulnerable Devonshire and sizeable Middlesex; 1,240 for the West Riding of Yorkshire and 240 each for Monmouthshire and Westmoreland, with just 120 for little Rutland. Lord lieutenants and their deputies were responsible for providing the officers and for overseeing the selection of the men. Able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were liable to serve; though peers of the realm, clergymen, articled clerks, apprentices, and parish constables were exempt. So too were poor men with three or more children born in wedlock, a number reduced to one in 1786. This last adjustment was a blessing for local authorities, for the parish was responsible for looking after the families of militiamen who had been called up. Service was for three years, and was determined by ballot, with potential militiamen being selected from nominal rolls drawn up by village constables.

Constables’ lists are an appetising slice through the layer-cake of time and place. The Northamptonshire lists for 1777 show that 20 per cent of men balloted were servants, 19 per cent were labourers, and 11 per cent farmers. The county’s traditional industries were well represented, with almost 10 per cent engaged in weaving and framework knitting, and 6 per cent in shoemaking. At the other end of the scale, the county had ten whip-makers and three woad-men, last of a dying breed, two of them in the parish of Weston Favell and one at Watford. Well-to-do farmers tend to have ‘Mr’ in front of their names, or ‘Esq’ or ‘gent’ after it. Although the constable of Edgcote duly logged four men as ‘Servants to William Henry Chauncy Esq’ he was far too well-mannered to list Mr Chauncy himself. While some constables sent in simple lists, the two constables of the large town of Daventry (assisted by the town’s thirdboroughs or under-constables) produced helpful annotations, telling us that Mr Bailey, surgeon, had been balloted six years since; the mason William Watts had eight children; and William Rogers the baker was infirm. The seventeen students at the nonconformist academy there were liable for balloting, although when they were eventually ordained they would be exempt, for the Act exonerated nonconformist ministers as well as clergymen of the established Church. The constable of Whilton was precise in noting the ‘poor men with three children’ who were guaranteed exemption, and warned that ‘Jos Emery, farmer and church-warden, [has] lost the thumb of his right hand’ – no mean disability, for the thumb was used to cock the musket. A balloted man’s obligation was simply to provide military service, and most who could afford it paid a substitute to serve on their behalf. Every parish was obliged to meet its quota. As they were penalised for failure, parish authorities who fell short sought volunteers and paid them a bounty.

Militiamen had a training obligation of twenty-eight days a year, and were billeted in public houses during this time. They were not always popular visitors, their presence striking a chord with that deep undercurrent of antimilitarism. In 1795 the testy Lord Delaval complained of the West Yorkshire Militia on his estate: ‘disturbance – noise – drums – poultry – intrusions – depredations – profligacy with servants – camp followers – interruptions – marauding – how to be protected – compensation – recompense.’

They were subject to the Articles of War when called up, and a range of punishments – from fines to the pillory or flogging – were available for men who failed to appear when ordered out. Militia regiments generally had between eight and twelve companies, with three sergeants and three corporals apiece. Militiamen could be promoted to these ranks, but the system relied on its small permanent staff, which included a regular sergeant major and a handful of regular sergeants. When the Worcestershire Militia formed in 1770 it was allocated Sergeant Major Henry Watkins of the 27th Foot, and two sergeants, Robert Harrison of the 3rd Dragoon Guards and Ezekiel Parks of the 58th Foot. The twenty-five other sergeants appointed were militiamen, and we have no way of assessing their previous experience. Sergeants did not have an easy life, as weapon-handling was never wholly safe. The Worcestershire Militia suffered a serious accident during its 1777 annual training. The men were drilling on Powick Ham when the cartridge pouches of three soldiers caught fire. Two men were ‘terribly scorched’ and three others ‘much injured’.

In time of major emergency the militia was embodied for full-time service. In April 1778, after France had allied itself to the fledgling United States, transforming what had been a family quarrel into a world war, several militia regiments were embodied. The Northamptonshire Militia, led by Henry Yelverton, Earl of Sussex, was ordered to a training camp at Warley Common, near Brentwood in Essex. They marched though its county town with ‘repeated huzzas, and (what is the glory of Britons!) with spirits animated to repulse the designs that may be formed by the enemies to their king and country’.

The regiment was moved around the southern counties over the next five years, with substitutes and newly balloted men tramping out to join it at Maidstone in 1782. It was disembodied in 1783, and carried out only part-time training till called up again for the French war in 1793. As the Napoleonic wars went on, militia obligations were successively strengthened. By 1815, what with supplementary and local militia and the hybrid ‘Army of Reserve’ of 1803, most adult males found themselves obliged to serve or pay. The issue of Scots militia was extraordinarily contentious, for the Government feared that it might be putting arms into the hands of its opponents: indeed, a major current of the Scottish Enlightenment was a desire to see a Scots militia as a bulwark against English oppression. The seminal 1757 Act did not apply in Scotland or Ireland, and it was not until 1797 that a Scots militia was raised. The last militia ballot took place in 1829, and when the militia was re-raised in 1852 because of the threat posed by Louis Napoleon’s France recruitment was voluntary.

Militia officers were commissioned by lord lieutenants, using parchment documents very similar to those given to regulars. There was a property qualification, though it was first modified by permitting ex-regular army or naval officers to serve without it, and then, when the militia was revived in 1852, substantially reduced. It was not until 1867 that it disappeared altogether, so that at last ‘the officers ceased to be necessarily connected with the county or with the landed interest.’

These qualifications had been very substantial. The 1793 Militia Act decreed that a regiment’s colonel had to have £2,000 a year or be heir to £3,000; a lieutenant colonel £1,200 a year or hopes of £1,800; and so on to an ensign who needed to have £20 a year or to be heir to £200 personal property a year. Both the colonel and lieutenant colonel of a county’s regiment had to have half their property in that county. There were sporadic anti-militia riots, notably in 1757 and 1796, largely amongst those who sought to avoid serving. It became evident that the system would only work by bringing ‘the county’ onside: the militia service would be encouraged by those familiar ties of social and economic obligation. A first attempt to raise a Worcestershire Militia failed in 1758, when the lord lieutenant, the Earl of Coventry, and several of his deputies met at the Talbot Inn, Sidbury, only to find that not enough gentlemen were willing to accept commissions. The attempt was postponed, but failed in successive years. By 1770, however, when the process was repeated at Hooper’s Coffee House in Worcester, the outcome was successful, because there were now enough gentlemen prepared to take a lead. The list of officers, headed by the new regiment’s colonel, Nicholas Lechmere, was sent to Lord Weymouth, Secretary of State for the southern department. Sending this to Weymouth emphasised that the militia was a civil and not a military matter. This new proposal was given ‘His Majesty’s Approbation’ in just a week. Lechmere was once captain in 3rd Foot Guards, owner of Lidford Park near Ludlow in Shropshire, and the only son of the high sheriff of Worcestershire, Edmund Lechmere MP. His father-in-law was a landowner in Powick, on the little River Teme just outside the city, and he himself went on to inherit his uncle’s large estates and, in 1774, to become MP for Worcester. His major, Holland Cooksey, of Braces Leigh, was an Oxford-educated barrister, a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant of the county.

A lieutenant colonel was appointed shortly afterwards. He was Robert Fettiplace, of Swinbrook Park, just east of Burford in Oxfordshire, happily not too far from the Worcestershire boundary. The son of Thomas Bushell, a substantial landowner of Cleeve Prior in the county, he had adopted the name Fettiplace on marrying Diana, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Fettiplace Baronet, the previous owner of Swinbrook. In 1775, when Lieutenant Colonel Fettiplace decided to soldier no more, he was replaced by Thomas Dowdeswell of Pull Court near Tewkesbury, eldest son of the Right Hon William Dowdeswell MP and his wife Bridget, youngest daughter of Sir William Codrington Baronet. Lieutenant Colonel Dowdeswell was married to a baronet’s daughter, was a JP and DL for his county, and had been a captain in 1st Foot Guards.

A similar pattern extends across Britain, with militia commissions congruent with social standing, and the entire apparatus of raising and administering the militia wholly characteristic of the way the country was run. There was also a very clear Westminster connection. Most regiments of English and Welsh militia were commanded by peers, and the best of them took their responsibilities very seriously. Colonel Lord Riversdale of the South Cork Militia built a barracks for his regiment, on his own land at Rathcormac, at his own expense. When the South Cork was disembodied after the Napoleonic wars and there was little chance of the men finding work, he allowed many of them to join the regular army, although this was officially discouraged. The regiment proved true to its nickname ‘The Long Corks’ when, at its disembodiment parade on St Patrick’s Day 1816, the mens’ average height was found to be 5ft 11in. The radical politician and journalist John Wilkes was a committed patriot, and had travelled home from university at Leiden in 1745 to join a loyal association training to defend the capital against the Jacobites. Two years later he became a substantial landowner by marrying an heiress, thus coming within the qualification for senior militia rank. Although he was frequently at odds with the government, and had a highly coloured private life, he was a serious-minded colonel of the Buckinghamshire Militia, though his practice of using his adjutant as second in his duels was an unwise merging of military and civil.

Captains and subalterns, with their smaller property qualifications, were more modest figures. The historian and MP Edward Gibbon served as a militia officer between 1759 and 1770, including a period of embodied service during the Seven Years War. He always thought that the Hampshire captain had taught the historian something of value. The novelist Jane Austen, living at Chawton on the main road from Guildford to the garrison town of Winchester, was familiar with militia regiments as they marched through, or were quartered in the surrounding villages. George Wickham, the closest Pride and Prejudice comes to a villain, was a militia officer, eventually posted off to the north to hide his disgrace. Jane’s brother Henry served as a captain in the Oxfordshire militia in 1793–1801, and he acted as regimental agent for several militias (the Devonshire, Nottinghamshire, and North Devonshire among them) before his bank failed in 1816 and he resorted to that perennial stand-by of the educated man down on his luck, and became a curate, following in his father’s footsteps. Militia officers, like their regular counterparts, were given to duelling, and the Worcester Militia’s first training session ended with two subalterns falling out at Stourbridge, ‘but fortunately without a fatal termination’.

In many respects the militia’s social composition resembled that of the regular army, with poor men officered by richer ones. In 1852 the Marquess of Salisbury observed of one applicant for a commission, that employment by the General Screw Steam Navigation Company was an ‘insuperable obstacle’ to military advancement. Property qualifications made it all but impossible for a man to work his way through the ranks to a commission, and so the militia was more socially excusive than the regular army, which always had a significant proportion of ranker officers. In the eighteenth century men were forbidden to shift from the militia into the regular army, for by doing so they left a gap, which the parish then had to fill. During the Napoleonic wars, when there was an ever-increasing appetite for men who could serve abroad, militiamen were offered bonuses to transfer, or sometimes treated so harshly during their embodied service that joining the regulars came almost as a relief:

The Militia would be drawn up in line and the officers or non-commissioned officers from the regiments requiring volunteers would give a glowing description of their several regiments, describing the victories they had gained and the honours they had acquired, and concluded by offering a bounty. If these inducements were not effective in getting men then coercive measures were adopted: heavy and long drills and field exercises were forced upon them: which became so oppressive that to escape them, the men would embrace the alternative and join the regulars.

Militia officers were offered free regular commissions if they could inveigle specified numbers of militiamen into signing on as regulars. George Simmons, from a family of impoverished gentry, managed to persuade a hundred men of the Royal South Lincolnshire Militia, of which he was assistant surgeon, to transfer into the regular army. He was rewarded with a regular commission in the crack 95th Rifles, and enjoyed a lively time in the Peninsula, ending up as a lieutenant colonel. By the end of the nineteenth century, when service in the militia was wholly voluntary, it had become a way for young men to test their aptitude for military service, and was ‘little more than a recruiting vehicle for the regular army, into whose ranks some 35 per cent of its members passed each year’.

After the abolition of the purchase of regular commissions in 1871 a young man could still obtain a militia commission, which did not require him to attend Sandhurst. Then, provided he could pass the examination, he could transfer to the regular army: two future field marshals, John French and Henry Wilson, gained their regular commissions this way.