Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

In sharp social contrast to the militia were the volunteers. They were raised in times of great national emergency, like the Jacobite invasions of 1715 and 1745, and the threat posed by revolutionary France saw the first great wave of volunteering. Volunteer units were often middle class, their ranks filled with men who would have bought themselves out of militia service, giving the cartoonist James Gillray the unmissable opportunity of pouring meaty-bottomed tradesmen into tight breeches. Units were sometimes raised by the efforts of great families, in just the way that Bevil Grenville would have understood. Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland, had been (as Lord Percy) a professional soldier: a captain in the 85th Foot at seventeen, he fought at Minden and in North America. Percy left the army as a lieutenant general, and inherited his dukedom in 1786. Responsible, as lord lieutenant of Northumberland, for his county’s militia, he also raised the Percy Tenantry Volunteers from his own extensive estates. When he died in 1817 it was reported that the entire force was ‘paid and in every respect maintained in arms at the sole expense of this patriotic nobleman’. Infantry companies and cavalry troops were recruited from specific villages: the 1st and 2nd Barrisford Companies came from the parishes of Simonburn, Stamfordham and Kirkwhelpington, and the Guzance and Thirston Company from Felton Parish. The Percy Tenantry Volunteers numbered around 1,500 men, supported by the two three-pounder guns of its Volunteer Horse Artillery, based at Alnwick, the duke’s seat.

The Percy Volunteers mirrored the area’s social fabric, with bigger tenant farmers officering the local companies, farmworkers shouldering their muskets, and the duke’s directing hand on the reins. Volunteer units raised in London were tiny by comparison, and rejoiced in names like the Temple Association, the Hackney Volunteers, the Guildhall Light Infantry, and the Bread Street Ward Volunteers. Often the city’s hierarchy led the way, with the same prominent citizens that summoned public meetings to raise volunteers emerging as the new unit’s officers. Volunteer officers were often elected by the unit as a whole, and democracy did not always obey the dictates of local hierarchy. It was also noticeable that volunteers, most of whom had to buy their own uniforms, tended to favour cutting-edge light infantry fashion (with no shortage of frogging), sometimes selecting blue precisely because regular infantry wore red, and so there was no chance of a heroic cheesemonger in the Poplar and Blackwall Volunteers being mistaken for a private in the umpteenth Foot. There were different terms of service: the Frampton Volunteers in Gloucestershire were prepared to deal with the French up to eight miles from their home village, but for the Hitchin Association in Hertfordshire just three miles was the limit.

The government did its best to bring the volunteers under central control and the 1804 Volunteer Act did at least ensure that all were paid for twenty-one days a year.

If a man’s zeal for his country’s defence was gratified by turning out as a smart light infantryman, how much more satisfying it was to emerge as a cavalryman with clinking spurs, and sword-scabbard trailing across the cobbles? The problem, even in a horse-using society, lay in the provision of suitable mounts. The Provisional Cavalry Act of 1796, an offshoot of the militia concept, required all those in possession of more than ten riding or carriage horses to furnish, when required, one mounted man, fully armed and equipped. Far more significant, though, was the raising, from 1794, of troops of ‘Gentlemen and Yeomanry.’ These local troops, officered by landowners, tended to be attracted by cavalry uniforms of the showier sort, light by name if not by nature, and one reason why the 1796 pattern light cavalry sword, with its D-shaped guard and broad, heavily curved blade, remains relatively common is the fact that so many of them were used by the yeomanry.

Fig 1 (#litres_trial_promo): The Yeomanry Cavalry on manoeuvres by W. B. Giles.

Yeomen were countrymen of respectable standing, tenant farmers or smaller freeholders. The Spectator made much of its character Sir Roger de Coverley, that genial baronet so preoccupied with hunters, hares, and partridges. But no less important in the hierarchy of the shires was his neighbour,

A yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man. He is just within the Game-Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant … He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges. In short, he is a very sensible man – shoots flying – and has been several times foreman of the petty-jury.

The Game Act of 1670 had prevented anyone with less than £100 a year in lands or tenements from killing game, and authorised the seizure of ‘guns, bows, greyhounds, setting-dogs and lurchers’ that might be used in the process. It was a measure of substantial social control, and was not significantly altered till 1831. In a system that was always more pliable than it seemed, a second-generation yeoman might indeed make the transition to gentleman, or, if harvests failed, thud down into the ranks of the agricultural labourers. A yeoman had more of a stake in the country than most, and one cannot understand the quintessentially British phenomenon of yeomanry without remembering this.

Few volunteer units survived the Napoleonic wars, for there was no longer a need for them. But the yeomanry trotted on, because now the nation was in the grip of widespread unrest, with Chartists and Luddites in the towns and the Captain Swing rioters in the countryside all presenting a threat to the established order of JP, squire, and vicar: one of Swing’s threatening letters put ‘Parson Justasses’ amongst the ‘Blackguard Enemies of the People.’ There was no doubt whose side the yeomen were on, and in the absence of a proper police force, they were frequently called out in aid of the civil power. On 16 August 1819 a huge crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to hear the radical speaker Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. The local magistrates had decided to arrest Hunt and other leaders. Although the military commander on the spot, Lieutenant Colonel Guy L’Estrange, had some infantry, two guns, six troops of the regular 15th Hussars and six of the Cheshire Yeomanry wisely deployed, the magistrates sent a troop of Manchester and Salford Yeomanry towards the speakers’ platform.

The Manchester and Salford was not a wartime-raised unit, but had been formed in 1817 as a response to local unrest. Their commanding officer, Major Thomas Trafford, was a Roman Catholic landowner, and his second in command, Captain Hugh Birley, a mill-owner. Although we risk confusing history with current politics if we call the troopers ‘younger members of the Tory party in arms’, most were well-to-do tradesmen with an animus against radicals. Trafford apparently told Birley to take a detachment to make the arrests. Some of the crowd maintained that the troopers were drunk, but Birley argued that the yeomanry horses were not used to working together and were frightened by jeers, yells, and the fluttering of banners. After the arrests were made there was a shout of ‘Have at the flags’, and some of the yeomen slashed at the crowd as they kicked their horses forward to get at the banners. The magistrates ordered L’Estrange to disperse the crowd and rescue the yeomanry, so he sent in the 15th Hussars. Although the regular troopers had been ordered to use the flats of their swords, more damage was done by sword-swipes and horses crashing into people who were themselves trying to escape. The affair, dubbed ‘The Peterloo Massacre’ in parody of Waterloo, polarised opinion then and now. Perhaps a dozen people were killed and many more injured, though estimates of 700 casualties beggar belief. The magistrates and yeomanry were supported by the government. Trafford was later made a baronet, while Birley went on to partnership with one Charles Macintosh – who had invented a process for waterproofing cloth. Had things been a little different, we might slip gratefully into a Birley on a rainy day.

Although many yeomanry units disappeared in the 1830s and 1840s, individual troops were consolidated into county regiments, and it was to take the TA reorganisation of 1964–5 to remove most of these, with their shoulder-chains and bright forage caps, from the Army List. Some regiments were the hunting field in arms. The future Field Marshal Sir John French recalled that when he was adjutant of the Northumberland Hussars:

They were commanded by the Earl of Ravensworth, than whom no better sportsman ever lived. The officers were all good sportsmen and fine horsemen, and to those who can look back fifty years such names as Cookson, Straker, Henderson and Hunter will carry the conviction of the truth of what I say. Two of them were prominent masters of hounds, but my most intimate friend was Charley Hunter, a born leader of cavalry, whose skill in handling £50 screws over five-barred gates I shall never forget.

Others had even more blue blood in their veins. The troops of Gloucestershire Gentlemen and Yeomanry were combined into a regiment in 1834, with the Marquess of Worcester (soon to be the 7th Duke of Beaufort) as its commanding officer. The regiment became the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars in 1841 and, with its roots deep in Beaufort Hunt country, marched past to ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’. When the Yeomanry celebrated its bicentenary in 1994, the 11th Duke was regimental colonel. The Oxfordshire Yeomanry was officially disbanded in 1828 but it remained in being, thanks to being privately financed by the Duke of Marlborough. It was restored to the Army List two years later, becoming the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, or Queer Objects on Horseback, with striking facings of (rather trying) Mantua purple. The regiment was closely linked to the dukes of Marlborough and their seat at Blenheim Palace, which provided a striking backdrop for annual camps: the 6th Duke took command of the regiment in 1845 and the 9th Duke in 1910. Amongst its officers on the eve of the First World War was Major Winston Churchill, who was honorary colonel until his death in 1965. He had given a detachment of the regiment a prominent position at his funeral, but its protocol offended the Foot Guards brigade major who pointed out, with some asperity, that this was not how state funerals were done. Major Tim May, the detachment’s commander, was characteristically unabashed: ‘In the Oxfordshire Yeomanry we always do state funerals this way.’

This was just how jolly yeo-boys were meant to behave, with a faintly cavalier disregard for the formal side of military life and a generous pinch of self-parody. A Yeomanry brigadier detailed one of his colonels to send a subaltern on a wearing and doubtless nugatory mission. ‘I shall send Charles’, decided the colonel. ‘Charles? Charles?’ replied the brigadier. ‘D’you think he’ll go?’ Cartoons in officers’ messes caught yeomen the way they liked to think of themselves. A portly farmer-turned-trooper in the Suffolk Hussars scrambles up a bosky bank, with his sergeant, mounted, in the lane behind him, anxious for a report:

No sergeant – no – I don’t see no enemy – not to speak of I don’t – But I do see as John Martin’s roots is terrible backward – wonderful backward they is – to be sure!

‘Beg pardon, Major,’ observes a trooper, drawn up in rank and file, with an easy gesture towards his passing squadron leader. ‘You’ll excuse my mention on it, but you’ve got something on your noose.’ The first part-time major general since the 1940s was the 6th Duke of Westminster. He had joined the yeomanry as a trooper in 1970, was commissioned in 1973, and went on to command the Queen’s Own Yeomanry. He reckoned that ‘military zeal is at its best when tempered by a fine sense of humour’: a wholly yeomanry view.

Fig 2 (#litres_trial_promo): Yeomanry reconnaissance at its best: ‘The eyes and ears of the Army’ by W. B. Giles.

The Yeomanry underwent a resurgence when the French invasion scares of the 1850s saw redbrick forts put up on Portsdown Hill to prevent an invading army – which might have landed at sleepy Bosham or harmless Chichester – from descending on Portsmouth dockyard. Far more characteristic of the age were the revived volunteers, about as unlike the yeomanry as it was possible to be. They were prevailingly middle class. Some units elected their own officers. They favoured uniforms of ‘French grey’, and were delighted to be forbidden the gold lace worn by regulars since this reduced the chances of being mistaken for ‘the dregs of society’. They seized on innovation: Hans Busk, one of the most prominent leaders of the rifle volunteer movement, set up a model rifle club at Cambridge in 1837. Long before the Boer War gave fresh emphasis to marksmanship in the regular army, volunteers were spending their weekends on the ranges at Bisley in Surrey. The National Rifle Association was founded in 1859 ‘for the encouragement of Volunteer Rifle Corps, and the promotion of rifle-shooting throughout Great Britain.’ It moved to Bisley in 1890 when high velocity rifles made the ranges in suburban Wimbledon unsafe. Volunteers eagerly combined their martial zeal with the bicycle, another great passion of the late nineteenth century, to produce cyclist battalions. There was a Railway Volunteer Staff Corps in 1865 and a Volunteer Medical Staff Corps twenty years later. Cartoonists sniped away (‘Wipe the blood off your sword, general?’) but the volunteers, in their worthy, whiskery way, somehow went to the heart of Victorian England. They were visible to the community in the way that regulars were not. They appeared unfussy and meritocratic, and embraced the innovation that regulars, with all their noise and pipeclay, seemed to shun. But their officers were not necessarily gentlemen. There was a saying of the 1860s that a greengrocer with a volunteer commission was not an officer but a greengrocer pleased. When aspiring Jewish families wanted to confirm their own rising status they joined the yeomanry. The Rothschilds bought Waddesdon Manor in 1874, and patronised the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, soon nicknamed ‘The Flying Foreskins’.

The Boer War unleashed a surge of patriotic enthusiasm, and saw volunteers and yeomanry as part of what Kipling eulogised in The Absent Minded Beggar where ‘Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl/Son of a Lambeth publican – it’s all the same to-day.’ The process of getting part-timers embodied, trained and sent to South Africa was wasteful and inefficient. It was quipped that the ‘IY’ (Imperial Yeomanry) hat-badge stood for ‘I Yield’, and it was clear that the whole busy ant-heap of yeomanry, militia, and volunteers needed kicking over.

As part of the main post-war reforms that took their name from the Liberal Secretary of State for War, R. B. Haldane, the auxiliary forces were reorganised root and branch, and so the Territorial Force, with an establishment of just under 315,000, came into being on 1 April 1908. One of Haldane’s strokes of genius was to entrust the TF’s administration to County Associations chaired by lord lieutenants. The force’s 1909 yearbook lists county chairman like a digest of Debretts: Chester: the Duke of Westminster; Derby: the Duke of Devonshire; Essex: the Earl of Warwick; Hampshire: the Marquess of Winchester; Middlesex: the Duke of Bedford; Oxford: the Earl of Jersey; and Warwick: the Marquess of Hertford. There were 115 peers in the association by November 1909.

Many lord lieutenants were also militia colonels, and had been inclined to oppose the reorganisation, but the king made it clear that he backed Haldane. The powerful National Service League feared that if the TF actually worked, the case for conscription would be weakened, and therefore condemned the scheme as inadequate. Some regulars grumbled about the sheer impossibility of part-timers grasping the mysteries of gunnery, and the new TF embodied all the social complexities of the auxiliary forces that composed it. At one extreme the yeomanry was richly decorated with peers and Tory MPs. Brigadier General the Earl of Longford died commanding 2nd Mounted Brigade on Gallipoli in August 1915. They had advanced across a dry salt lake, marching steadily in open order under accurate shrapnel fire. ‘Don’t bother ducking,’ he told his officers. ‘The men don’t like it and it doesn’t do any good.’ Not far away that day Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Milbanke, 9th Baronet, with a VC from the Boer War and now commanding the Sherwood Rangers, announced that the regiment was to attack a redoubt: ‘I don’t know where it is, and don’t think anyone else does either, but in any case we are to go ahead and attack any Turks we meet.’ He did, and was duly killed.

At the other extreme, when young Alan Harding, a Post Office clerk, sought a Territorial commission he knew better than to approach one of the ‘class battalions’ of the London regiment, like the London Rifle Brigade or Queen Victoria’s Rifles. These were subscription clubs for all ranks, but Harding slipped instead into 11/London, the Finsbury Rifles, fondly known, from the location of its headquarters at the top of Penton Street and the beery ways of its members, as the Pentonville Pissers. After a good war, Harding transferred to the regular Somerset Light Infantry, and was knighted in 1942, using the name John which his regular brothers in arms had preferred to Alan Francis. This had not, though, stopped subordinates from maintaining that his initials stood for ‘All Fucking Hurry’. After mobilisation in 1914, middle-class units considered that both 1/8th Royal Scots and 1/8th Scottish Rifles were ‘slum battalions,’ and the gentleman troopers of the Westminster Dragoons found their journey to Egypt aboard the same troopship as 1/9th Manchesters made an ordeal by, horrid to relate, the Mancunians’ predilection for spitting and swearing.

On the formation of the Territorial Force all officers had their commissions signed by the monarch. When serving alongside regulars they took precedence ‘as the junior of their degree’, and were subject to military law at all times, principles which have not changed since.

Mobilised Territorials served alongside regulars in all the main theatres of the First World War. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Territorial Army was formally absorbed into the regular army. In both world wars, though, the regular army kept a firm grip on senior appointments. In February 1916 the House of Commons was told that only 18 Territorials had risen above lieutenant colonel at the front and three at home. In January the following year Lord Derby, secretary of state for war, announced that four Territorials had commanded divisions, and 52 brigades. He later admitted that these figures included officers in temporary command in the absence of the regular incumbent, and only ten Territorials were currently commanding brigades.

Assertions were made that it was wholly proper for regulars to have a controlling interest in senior command. But this is undermined by the fact that both the Australian and Canadian contingents on the Western Front, by wide agreement some of finest Allied troops, were eventually commanded by lieutenant generals John Monash and Arthur Currie, who were respectively a businessman and an engineer by profession. Both had ‘amateur’ major generals amongst their subordinates. William Holmes, killed commanding 4th Australian Division in 1918, had never been a regular, though he had joined the New South Wales Militia as a boy bugler and won a DSO in the Boer War. David Watson, a journalist by profession, commanded 4th Canadian Division for the whole of its existence. Andrew McNaughton, a university lecturer in engineering, commanded the Canadian corps heavy artillery and went on to command the Canadian 2nd Army in a later war. Archibald Macdonnell had been a regular officer for just a year before going off to be a Mountie, and led 1st Canadian Division to some of its greatest successes. The British were occasionally prepared to make generals out of civilian specialists, commissioning Sir Eric Geddes, general manager of the North Eastern Railway, as major general in 1916. But not once did they give a reservist permanent command of a division. In view of the success of the Canadians and Australians, who produced real talent (and not a little rancour and incompetence too) from a far smaller recruitment pool, we can see that there was indeed a khaki ceiling with which non-regulars collided.

In September 1939 the Territorial Army was abolished as a separate entity, and its conditions of service were changed so that ‘all wartime promotion would be temporary, with no opportunity for substantive advancement and reversion to the pre-war rank at the war’s end’.

Eventually concessions in the form of timed promotions (which could take an officer to lieutenant colonel after twenty-two years’ service) were introduced in May 1945. A few months earlier former TA officers included one substantive major general, Claude Liardet, who had commanded 56th London Division before the war but did not lead it in action; one temporary lieutenant general; seven major generals; and 36 brigadiers. Of the 160 major generals commanding field force divisions between 1940 and 1945 only three were Territorials. Moreover, a sharp cull of TA commanding officers had seen 253 removed in the war’s first thirteen months, as opposed to 72 regulars.

There was, in part, good reason for this. The TA was endemically short of officers, despite their selection criteria being lower than for regulars. The lack of soldiers at weekend training and annual camp made it hard for a Territorial officer to feel the full weight of command, and Territorial commanding officers were not obliged to attend the Senior Officers School. There was a wide spread between ‘class corps’ like the London Scottish and the Honourable Artillery Company, that naturally attracted well-educated recruits, and the majority of units that relied heavily on urban working-class soldiers. These working-class soldiers needed the pay and found the two-week annual camp (often at the seaside) a blessed relief from the daily grind, but it was hard to produce NCOs from amongst this group. Many of the TA’s problems stemmed from systemic underfunding. As David French points out in his majestic Raising Churchill’s Army, ‘the Territorials became victims of governments determined to reduce estimates, and a War Office that preferred to see the cuts fall upon the part-time Territorials rather than the regulars.’

Experienced Territorial officers, some of whom had commanded with success during the last phases of the First World War, complained that the regular army, having denied them the opportunity to train and recruit, now blamed them for it. In April 1941, one of the few surviving TA commanding officers in 48th Division discerned ‘a very definite set against Territorial officers’. The Territorial acting commander of 26th Armoured Brigade writing in May 1944, doubted if he would even manage to command his own regiment when his current appointment ended. ‘I have the ever-present spectre of some suitable Lt Col arriving from way back,’ he wrote, ‘either a loathsome little tick from the Tank Corps or else an equally horrible cast-off from some cavalry regiment – we’ve had plenty of experience of them in this war.’

The TA was reconstituted in 1946, and the successive reductions, in 1956, 1961, and 1966 matched wider reductions in defence expenditure and the army’s increasing preoccupation with the defence of Germany. The reductions announced in 1965, however, brought about a more radical downsizing, to some 50,000, and even did away with the name, replacing it with the untidy Territorial and Army Volunteer Reserve, or T&AVR. Territorials had at least abbreviated to ‘Terriers’, and a suggestion that ‘Tavvers’ might replace it drew little applause. The disagreeable title was eventually discarded after a Conservative victory in 1971 saw the gradual increase of the TA to reflect the perceived importance of home defence against Soviet special forces. From 1981 the TA reached its post-war apogee, providing the bulk of a division to reinforce 1st (British) Corps in Germany, and reaching almost 89 per cent of its establishment of 86,000. With the collapse of Communism, however, numbers shrank once again, first with the 1990 Options for Change review under the Conservatives, and then again with the Strategic Defence Review of 1998 under Labour, which brought the TA down to around 40,000.

The County Associations (a term harking back to Parliamentarian organisations in the Civil War) were Haldane’s device for ensuring that the TA would be administered and supplied by bodies that would at one and the same time protect it from the War Office, and take some of the load off commanding officers’ shoulders. They would also link the TA to the community and, so Haldane hoped, encourage military training more widely. Over the TA’s evolution these associations had come under the same pressure as the organisation they represented, in part because a smaller TA demanded less administrative support, and in part, too, because a regular army anxious to save money on the TA did not always welcome their interference. There were ninety-four associations in 1909, and sixty-six in 1965, with further reductions to produce the ten large regional groupings that exist today. The associations were successively renamed, becoming, from 2000, Reserve Forces and Cadet Associations. Although the RFCAs rightly emphasise their local knowledge, continuity and independence, they are now more firmly under the control of the army’s chain of command than ever before.

There can be no doubt that their influence has declined. In 1965 the Duke of Norfolk, chairman of the Council of Territorial Associations, led the opposition to the reduction, and although he commanded substantial support (the attempt to reverse the cuts was lost by a single vote in the Commons) he was no match for a Labour Government whose military advisers firmly believed that the reforms were essential. But in 1990 the cuts imposed by Options for Change would have been more severe had it not been for the personal intervention of George Younger, who had recently been secretary of state for defence and carried great weight within the ruling Conservative party and the army, in which he had served as both a regular and a Territorial. During the debate over the Strategic Defence Review I was assured by one of the TA’s supporters that ‘the lord lieutenants would never stand it’, but it was evident that the wrath of the lieutenancy did not alarm a Labour administration with a massive majority, and in any event there was a palpable tension between Harris Tweed and Hugo Boss, with the waning power of the old county connections eclipsed by the growing strength of the Whitehall apparat.

Moreover, the office of lord lieutenant itself had changed from the days of Elizabeth I, when its holders were concerned with enforcing the Act of Uniformity and commanding the county militia at a time of real threat. During Elizabeth’s reign all who held office for any length of time were peers or heirs to peerages, apart from three who had close relationships with the queen. Forty-six of the 103 lieutenancies were held by peers as late as 1956, all but one of whom (Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke in London) had inherited their titles, and a further sixteen baronets. Most were landowners, thirty-two had held the rank of lieutenant colonel or its equivalent, and amongst their military awards were twenty-three DSOs and eighteen MCs. In 2006 there were only eight hereditary peers and three baronets amongst the 99 lord lieutenants, and only six of the total had held senior military rank. The first female lord lieutenant had been appointed in 1975 when Lavinia Duchess of Norfolk took over from her husband, who had died in office: there were twenty-eight ladies amongst the 2006 sample. There was no longer a natural bias towards the land, and only eight rated their main concern as farming or estate management. Some lord lieutenants have run major public companies, and several of the ladies have had an impressive involvement in charities.

The lieutenancy makes an extraordinary contribution to public life, but its days of marshalling county opinion are long over.

About 12 per cent of the 2,700 active deputy lieutenants in the United Kingdom held senior military rank, a proportion justified by the need to advise non-military lord lieutenants on their responsibilities towards the reserve forces and cadets in their counties. As evidence of the wholesale shift away from traditional deputies, when most retired brigadiers soon added DL to their post-nominal initials, there is now a conscious attempt to make deputies socially inclusive, and to reflect the ethnic composition of the population.

In one sense it is hard to fault the remorseless progress towards what is often hailed as ‘One Army’. Territorial officers are now selected by the same process as their regular counterparts, and pass out from Sandhurst in a parade which culminates (just as it does for regulars) in marching up the steps of the Grand Entrance. Promotion across the whole rank-structure depends on passing the appropriate courses. The TA’s representation within the army has increased. When I became a brigadier in 1994 I was the only one in a large TA. Now there is a two-star Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets), a post held first by the Duke of Westminster in 2004, and there are TA brigadiers at Land Command, Headquarters Adjutant General and the army’s district headquarters.

In terms of overall training and efficiency, the TA I left in 2000 was unrecognisable from the organisation I joined as a private in 1964. Its expectation of use had also been transformed. Militia, yeomanry, and volunteers had been concerned with home defence. Haldane’s new Territorial Force was so called because it was territorial (designed to defend the national territory) rather than expeditionary. Those of its members who agreed to serve overseas proudly wore an Imperial Service badge on their right breast. In 1914, Territorials had to volunteer to be sent abroad, and by no means all did so. Although those who joined the TA in the inter-war years and after 1946 recognised that they might be called up for foreign service, there was a clear understanding that this would only happen in time of a major national emergency. Indeed, for most of my own time the mechanism for calling up the TA (‘Queen’s Order’) was so ponderous as to constitute a large on-off switch to be pressed only in time of the gravest crisis.

The process of making it easier to use Territorials in situations short of general war began with the ‘Ever Readies’. This small group of TA volunteers was set up in 1962 and they agreed to accept a higher liability in return for a bounty. Ever Readies were called up for service in Aden in 1965. There was some controversy: 14 of the 175 selected appealed against call-up, and men argued unsuccessfully that because they had been unable to take their brief leave entitlement in-theatre, they should have it added as paid leave at the end of their mobilised service. The three officers and 120 men who served with 1st Royal Sussex were well regarded by their battalion, and one of the officers, Lieutenant Mike Smith, won the first Military Cross awarded to a Territorial since the Second World War.

The Reserve Forces Act of 1996 did not simply create a small High Readiness reserve intended to produce specialists like interpreters and civil affairs experts, but it made the whole of the TA subject to call-out by the secretary of state, who could use it not only ‘when warlike operations are in preparation or progress,’ but for the protection of life or property and the alleviation of distress at home or abroad. Since then Territorials have been called up for service in the Balkans, the Falklands, Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Kingsman Michael Davison, a 22-year-old Liverpool builder, won the first Territorial Military Cross since Mike Smith a generation before by dragging a wounded officer to safety in Basra in 2003. The TA is now emphatically a reserve for use, and nobody joining it can be in any doubt of that.

There have been attendant casualties. The problem of ensuring that a reservist did not lose his civilian employment by being called up for full time service long pre-dates the TA. Liaison with employers was one of the tasks laid on County Associations, and since then first the National Employers’ Liaison Committee and then SaBRE (Supporting Britain’s Reserves and Employers) have striven to persuade employers that there are practical benefits to having reservists amongst their employees, for they acquire transferable skills like leadership and initiative. When the TA was first formed many employers were hugely supportive, granting their employees paid leave to attend annual camp. The Alliance Assurance Company and the Westminster Fire Office even insisted that their employees should be Territorials.

It was always much harder for small firms, who could be seriously inconvenienced by the disappearance of, say, one of two plasterers at a busy time. Shifts in employment patterns have not necessarily helped the TA. Large, British-owned firms tended to take a more supportive view than multinationals with concerns about the uses to which reservists might be put in a complex world. When jobs are hard to come by, employees are disinclined to risk them, and a pattern of TA service that is now very likely to involve occasional periods of mobilisation makes it harder for professionals like lawyers, doctors, or university teachers to harmonise military and civilian identities. The TA, like the militia before it, was able to profit from the fact that many of its officers enjoyed high status in their civilian capacities, and these have been precisely the individuals squeezed most tightly by changing circumstances. Conversely, many of those attracted by the periods of Full Time Reserve Service (essentially short-term, often extendable contracts) made available by the 1996 Act had reached a dead end in their civilian careers.

A 2007 study by the National Audit Office concluded that most reservists joined with the intention of serving on one mobilised tour, but that 16 per cent of those questioned intended to leave within a year, and just under half of this group had been called up. Most Territorials planning to leave blamed personal or family pressure, with a substantial minority attributing their decision to ‘lack of support’. There were difficulties where a reservist’s military pay fell short of his civilian salary, and in access to medical care after deployment. In particular, reservists were more likely than regulars to suffer from psychiatric problems on their return, not least because of their rapid transition from military life, with its supportive bonds of mateship, to the more humdrum world outside. These difficulties are exacerbated where there seems no clear mandate for the war, and by the practical problem of finding, within the immediate community, somebody who can begin to understand what it was really like in Al Amarah or Musa Qal’h.

The TA remains under-recruited (in 2006 it was 19 per cent down on its established strength of just under 40,000), and the shortfall is at its most severe in the Royal Army Medical Corps, upon which the army relies so heavily. There is a worrying shortage of officers, not least because the very individuals with the qualities needed to encourage folk on a rainy Friday night on Salisbury Plain are exactly those most likely to be most in demand in the pressure-cooker of stressful civilian jobs. In his epilogue to the book marking the TA’s hundredth anniversary, Brigadier Greg Smith, then Deputy Inspector General of the TA and shortly to become Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, argued that one of the TA’s most important tasks lay in ‘effectively providing the essential link between the army and society’.

It does so with increasing difficulty, and part of the price it has paid for increased military efficiency and tighter links with the regular army is to make it harder to retain its foothold in a society with other pressing concerns.

II

GALLANT GENTLEMEN AND OFFICERS

CHAPTER 7

A NATIONAL ARMY: 1660–1914

FOR MOST OF its life the regular army was a volunteer force, its members, officers and soldiers alike, having decided to embrace the profession of arms. The decision to join was rarely simple. A man could be led to enlist for many reasons: a fit of pique, a brush with the law, that extra pint of porter, the vision conjured up by an eloquent recruiting sergeant, or unrelenting hardship in an age of social insecurity. Nor was it necessarily easier for officers, who might find family tradition, patriotic obligation or (especially for Scots or Irish youngsters with many hungry siblings but few paternal acres) the lack of alternative gentlemanly employment scarcely less compelling. The army had existed for two and a half centuries before the exigencies of the First World War forced it to adopt conscription, though there had been times, notably during the Napoleonic wars, when the voluntary principle was stretched to its very limit.

The years between 1916–18 and 1939–60, when conscription was in force, do not fit into the broader pattern of Britain’s military development. Both world wars saw the transformation of a small, professional force into a massive national army, a process that helps account for early setbacks. It also explains the rise of a style of war-fighting in which the British army engaged ‘the enemy with the minimum of manpower in the front line and employ the maximum of machinery to generate the overwhelming firepower required to suppress enemy fire and so make possible movement across the battlefield.’