Soldiers

Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Richard Holmes

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

I. Politics and Position

1: Chuck Him Out, the Brute

2: King’s Army

3: Parliament’s Army

4: Brass and Tapes

5: To Observe and Obey

6: Weekend Warriors

II. Gallant Gentlemen and Officers

7: A National Army: 1660–1914

8: Temporary Gentlemen: 1914–45

9: Sandhurst: Serve to Lead

10: Church Militant

III. Recruiting a National Army

11: Soldier Boys

12: The King’s Shilling

13: Pressed into Service

14: All Pals Together

15: Foreign Friends

16: Women Soldiers

IV. Tribes And Totems

17: The Regimental Line

18: Imponderable Entities

19: The Regiments Depart

20: Tribal Markings

21: Full of Strange Oaths, and Bearded Like the Pard

22: Tunes of Glory

V. Habits and Habitat

23: The Rambling Soldier

24: Barrack-Room Blues

25: Bullies and Beast-Masters

26: Oh! What a Time Those Officers Have

27: The Sergeants’ Mess Dinner is Worth Putting Down

28: Campaigners Straight and Gay

29: Officers’ Wives Get Puddings and Pies

Afterword

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Searchable Terms

Other Books by Richard Holmes

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

RICHARD HOLMES WAS a professional in several fields. As an author he never failed to fulfil a contract, so it is ironic and tragic for his many readers that an untimely death prevented him from completing the final touches of this his last book. However, we are lucky that he left it in such good shape that only the odd addition has had to be made. This was typical of the man whose sense of duty meant that he always did what he promised. The trouble was that he frequently promised too much.

I was an unlikely friend to Richard Holmes, he an academic and I with not an A level to my name. It was a chance remark and a question that led us to be companions astride our horses, first in France and then in other parts of the world. Our love of the horse and history forged a friendship which coped with late nights, hangovers, and a good deal of snoring. To spend weeks on end in the company of this extraordinarily well-informed man was to me a great joy. On those days the modern world was far away, and only occasionally did outside communication interrupt our imagining of another age and another battle. Reading the pages of this book, I felt increasingly that he was beside me at the camp fire, enjoying a mug of local liquor, telling one more anecdote, one more yarn. On those trips we were a happy band; Richard’s repartee and amusing turn of phrase were an important part of the expedition even when things went wrong – ‘we have a bijou problemette’. Where there was Richard, there were also smiles and laughter.

Richard played many roles in his life but soldiering was at the heart of it. From those early days when he joined the Territorial Army and when he studied the Franco-Prussian War at university, he had a fascination for the history of warfare – but then so do many others. He was unusual in that his power of recall was quite extraordinary in its breadth and detail. While on a tour of a World War One battlefield, he stayed at a French nobleman’s house. After the introductions, he remarked in his particular style of French, that it was a pleasure to meet the descendants of a family who had fought against the English at Crécy. The family were astonished at his knowledge of French history, and could not do enough for him and his companions. His other notable quality was the way he made his subject so interesting to the reader or listener. One of his obituarists described how he captured the imagination of a group of sceptical soldiers to whom history was unimportant. It was this skill that made him such a brilliant teacher, and there are many of us who reacquired an appetite for military history through his involvement with the army’s Staff College. He had the trick of making that interest and knowledge relevant to today’s operational theories. There were 1,300 people at his memorial service; well over a hundred were senior officers who had sat at his feet at some stage or other. He became the professional head of the Territorial Army at a critical moment, and his passionate defence of that organisation – which played such a large part in his life – marked him out as a fine and selfless leader. The army and the country have much to be grateful to him for.

Richard was at his best on the very ground where a battle was won or lost. He had a good eye for ground and was able to describe in a matter-of-fact way what had occurred at a particular spot. He always related his account to the various hills, valleys, and ridges in front of us, so that you could almost smell and hear the action. His stories of the personalities involved and their unusual habits brought that element of humanity to the story, quite often causing a great deal of mirth. Written notes tended to be just a few headings; it was invariably the way he answered questions that held the crowd.

The soldier, with all his qualities good and bad, was a passion for Richard. He was deeply moved following his two visits to his regiment in Iraq where they had a particularly testing time. Dusty Warriors is his homage to the soldier of today and to the regiment which adopted him – a Territorial – as their Colonel; he was rightly proud of this unusual accolade. This book shows his devotion to the profession of arms at a very personal level. He much regretted that during his life he had not undergone that test of courage, and Dusty Warriors was, in a strange way, his penance.

Soldiers is a typical Holmes product, full of detail usefully comparing modern soldiering with the echoes of the past. His technique of bringing perspective to the events of today through the prism of history is always leavened by that inimitable wit for which he was renowned. Having been a private soldier in the yeomanry at an early age he acquired an inner knowledge of how the dynamics of the barrack room worked; this always made him instinctively sympathetic to the plight of the ‘Tom’. His trilogy, Redcoat, Sahib, and Tommy are masterpieces of the social history of the British Army but Soldiers adds spice to the mix. Although many will be aware of the ‘lives and loyalties’ of the British army, few of us are able to describe them in such an amusing and readable way.

As I write this, I am about to embark on another ride in the Borders; we are calling it the Reivers’ Ride and the choice of country and period were Richard’s. He was once more to be our companion and resident historian, as we fundraise for his favourite charity ABF, The Soldiers’ Charity, a charity for which he raised well over a quarter of a million pounds underlining, perhaps, this book’s theme: that all soldiers deserve our sympathy, praise, and ultimately a ‘hand up’. In the weeks before his death, it was this expedition which provided some sort of goal. He will be much in our thoughts as we relive the English victory at Flodden or Cromwell’s annihilation of the Scots at Dunbar. Jessie and Corinna, his daughters, will be with us for part of the ride, making it all the more poignant. I, for one, will miss those tales – perhaps even excerpts from this book – which would have been so much better heard than read, but the time lords will have to work their magic before I can enjoy that old familiar voice.

Evelyn Webb-Carter

INTRODUCTION

IT IS USELESS to deny it. I have loved Tommy Atkins, once a widely used term for the common soldier, since I first met him. And love is the right word, for my affection goes beyond all illusions. I know that he is capable of breaking any law imposed by God or man, and whenever I allow myself to feel easy with him, he smacks my comfortable preconceptions hard in the mouth: it is his nature to do so. Antony Beevor, cavalry officer turned best-selling historian, thought that ‘the British soldier’s unpredictable alternation between the odd bout of mindless violence when drunk, and spontaneous kindness when sober, is one of his most perplexing traits.’¹ Another former officer described trying to find some soldiers who were late for duty one Sunday afternoon. He was tipped off that they had been seen entering the house of a local civilian:

The door was answered by a small, rather timid man who invited us in. ‘We’re looking for some soldiers’, my colleague explained, giving their names. ‘Oh yes, they’re here,’ the man told us, ‘upstairs, screwing my wife.’ A few moments later, nine rather shame-faced soldiers appeared with the fattest and ugliest woman I have ever seen. She was quite clearly drunk and farted noisily as she came into the room … Later I asked one of the boys what he could conceivably have found attractive in the woman. ‘The more gopping the slag is, Sir,’ he replied, ‘the better she is at it.’²

The same author identified the moment he decided to resign his commission:

At 2 a.m. the Duty Officer’s phone rang and I lifted it, half asleep, ‘Guardroom Sir, we’ve got a tech stores man down here – he says he’s beaten up his wife.’ I got there in a few minutes to find a very drunk man who had apparently ended an argument with his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. He had got drunk, he told me, because he was fed up with the job and ‘Anyway, that kid’s not mine.’ Neither the wife nor unborn child was seriously injured; but that night I decided to leave the Army.³

Some men look back on their time in uniform with huge satisfaction. One First World War veteran, Sergeant Adolphus ‘Dolph’ Jupe of the Hampshire Regiment, thought that:

I suppose that in our life we give our hearts unrestrainedly to very few things. I had given mine to the battalion and bore its three stripes on my arm with greater pride than I have ever experienced since. We had worn a proud uniform for over five years and with many others I was disconsolate at its putting off. For the sufferings, the sacrifice and the heroism of a million men of our generation whose bones lay at rest across the sea, had raised the prestige of our race to a height never before achieved, and even upon us, however faintly, was reflected the glory of their achievements.⁴

But another, Bombardier Ronald Skirth, like Jupe a wartime soldier, declared that:

My abhorrence of war equated with a detestation of the war-machine – the Army of which I was a member … it personified everything I despised. I was a cog in that machine, vastly more powerful than myself, so I was compelled to live a hypocrite’s existence⁵ … By the time the war ended, my prejudices had become so unreasoning and so deeply embedded that I resolved never to accept any honours, promotions, benefits or even monetary advantages from an Authority I both detested and despised.⁶

Author Colin MacInnes, who served in the Intelligence Corps in a later war, hated the whole thought of killing or being killed, but disliked military service itself almost as much:

Three-quarters of military discipline is mindless, obsolete and wastefully self-frustrating – apart, of course, from being highly irritating. No one can serve in any army for years without being to some extent an inbred malingerer and scrounger, irredeemably slothful.

Conversely, several of the National Servicemen interviewed by Trevor Royle for his book The Best Years of their Lives thought that military service had changed them for the better. ‘I sometimes wonder how different I’d have been without the discipline of National Service,’ asked one. I mean, what did a Teddy Boy graduate to? ‘Most if us did feel proud to be part of an army which had only recently won the war’, admitted another. ‘I feel sorry that modern youth cannot experience such feelings.’⁷

Tommy Atkins certainly has a capacity for extraordinary gentleness. Guardsman Gerald Kersh was abed in a Second World War Nissen hut when the rest of his squad of potential officers returned, heavy-footed, from the cinema:

Everybody clumped in … I breathed regularly, and kept my nose under the blankets. Then I heard a Potential Officer of a Rifle Brigade Sergeant say: ‘Take it easy. Have a little consideration. Man asleep here.’

Something clicked above my head. Looking out of the narrow slit of one partly-raised eyelid, I saw the Rifle Brigade Sergeant take my greatcoat off its hook, open it, shake it gently and approach me. He covered me with it, and then everybody went to bed.

It was not that I was ill, it was not that I was fragile and in need of protection. I was asleep.⁸

He has a harsh edge too. The capture of Goose Green in the Falklands by 2 Para in 1982 was a remarkable feat of low-level dogged courage, and earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones. Ken Lukowiak, who fought there as a private, admitted that one of his comrades carried a couple of pairs of dental pliers ‘to acquire gold’, and a handful of his comrades looking at a pretty girl’s photograph were soon speculating about her propensity for vigorous anal intercourse.⁹ The gallant victors neither expected nor received kid-glove handling, as Lukowiak, chided by Colour Sergeant Frank Pye for obeying an order to clear up after the battle, assures us:

‘What the fuck are you doing, you stupid cunt?’ said Frank.

‘If I told you I was sweeping the floor, Colour, would you believe me?’

‘Don’t get fucking gobby with me, you crow, or I’ll fucking drop you.’

‘Sorry, Colour.’¹⁰

Nor are officers always chivalrous gentlemen, as Lieutenant Colonel Edward Windus observed in 1761 when telling his colonel why he had thrown Lieutenant Meredyth out of the regiment:

When sober, he cannot keep away from a billiard table, or when drunk, out of a bawdy house, where he is very apt to draw his sword upon friends or foes, though he seldom meets any of the former there, or anywhere else. In short, he has made himself despised by the people of Cork, and this place; as much as he was disagreeable to his brother officers.¹¹

Like a rich and time-worn tapestry, Atkins shuns easy analysis. There is an appetite for alcohol, sex, and casual violence. This is then interwoven seamlessly into a personality indelibly coloured by self-sacrifice, comradeship, generosity, humour, a tenderness for other men that owes little to sexuality, and the fiercest of pride in the primary group. A thick braid of decency is folded around the darker strands of self-indulgence, even though it can never quite conceal them. Whatever the controversies of the occupation of Iraq, Steve Brooks, who served there as an officer with the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, firmly believed that he was doing the right thing:

I have found that soldiers are simple people and in general are apolitical – not amoral. As such I deployed to Ulster to stop children having to walk to school between picket lines under a hail of missiles, to Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing of a population, and to Iraq to secure democracy for a people who deserved the right to it. By looking at the basic scars of Saddam’s regime I knew that we were doing right by the common man.¹²

Yet the judge advocate in the trial of officers and soldiers court-martialled for alleged involvement in the death in army custody of an Iraqi civilian, Baha Mousa, maintained that evidence within the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had been impossible to secure because of ‘a more or less obvious closing of the ranks’. After his release from prison, former corporal Donald Payne, who had pleaded guilty to the inhumane treatment of Mousa, maintained that he had seen several of his comrades ‘forcefully kick and/or punch the detainees,’ and added that ‘he had previously covered up the extent of abuse by British troops out of misguided loyalty.’¹³ Part of the difference between the behaviour of two groups of soldiers, in Iraq at different times and places, is circumstantial. It owes a good deal to local mood, regimental and small-group culture, and the tone set by commanders, senior and junior alike. In a deep and abiding sense there is less real difference than we might hope for. Atkins retains the chameleon-like ability to be both hero and villain.

Rudyard Kipling, the first writer to get to grips with the British private soldier, could be penetratingly honest about the man’s complexity. His own research was carried out in the 1880s with the help of soldiers of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the East Surreys at Mian Mir – the great military cantonment outside Lahore. This allowed him to glimpse a world rarely seen by middle-class outsiders:

The red-coats, the pipe-clayed belts and the pill-box hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of the oats and horse-piss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mishandled, the crowded troop-ships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse.¹⁴

Alongside his heroes, like Captain Crook O’Neil of the ‘Black Tyrone’, stand tragic figures like Private Simmons, mercilessly bullied by Private Losson, who eventually shoots his tormentor and duly hangs for it. In the poem ‘Cells’, the narrator, locked up yet again for being drunk and resisting the guard, regrets that ‘my wife she cries on the barrack-gate, my kid in the barrack-yard’ but knows that ‘as soon as I’m in with a mate and gin, I know I’ll do it again.’¹⁵

It was a portrait drawn from life, as we can see from Horace Wyndham’s description of a commanding officer’s orders – the meting out of summary jurisdiction – in an infantry battalion at Aldershot in the 1890s:

At first sight, one would scarcely imagine that the pasty-faced, feeble-looking youth in the centre had, a few hours ago, required the united efforts of four of the regimental police to carry him, striking, blaspheming and madly drunk, from the canteen to the guard-room … The burly scoundrel at the end of the row is now to answer as he may for making a savage assault on a non-commissioned officer. He has ‘ex-Whitechapel rough’ writ large all over his evil countenance, and although he knows perfectly well that trial by court-martial will be his fate, he does not appear to be in the least concerned thereby.¹⁶

William Roberston was the only man in British military history to rise through the ranks from private to field-marshal. When he arrived to join the 16th Lancers in 1877, the orderly officer warned him that he was entering a world where private property no longer existed: ‘Give your watch to the sergeant-major of your troop, my lad … for it is unsafe to leave it lying about, and there is nowhere you can carry it with safety.’ His barrack room was peopled with folk

addicted to rough behaviour, heavy drinking, and hard swearing … treated like machines – of an inferior kind – and having little expectation of finding decent employment on the expiration of their twenty-one years’ engagement, they lived only for the present … These rugged veterans exacted full deference from the recruit, who was assigned the worst bed in the room, given the smallest amount of food and the least palatable, and had to ‘lend’ them articles of kit which they had lost or sold.¹⁷

This deference was enforced with the aid of unofficial punishment. In 1836 a private of 1st Foot Guards told the Royal Commission on Military Punishments that his battalion had company courts-martial, in which soldiers judged their own kind. Offences like ‘thieving from his comrades or … or dirty tricks’ could result in a man being sling-belted, held down trouserless across a bench and lashed with the leather sling of a musket. It was a disgraceful punishment, and a man thus treated was thereafter ‘never thought anything of’.¹⁸

When Roberston joined the army, every military offence, no matter how trivial, was regarded as a crime, for which the offender was flung in the unit’s guard-room until he could be dealt with by his commanding officer. The guard-room

in the case of the cavalry barracks at Aldershot, was about fifteen feet square, indifferently ventilated, and with the most primitive arrangements for sanitation. No means of lighting it after dark were either provided or permitted. Running along one of its sides was a sloping wooden stage, measuring about six feet from top to bottom, which served as a bed for all the occupants, sometimes a dozen or more in number … no blankets (except in very cold weather) or mattresses were allowed, except for prisoners who had been interned for more than seven days. Until then their only covering, besides their ordinary clothes – which were never taken off – consisted of their cloaks, and they had to endure as best they could the sore hips and shoulders caused by lying on the hard boards.¹⁹

Life in military prisons was infinitely worse. Flogging remained despite having been abolished in the army generally in 1881. By 1895 the cato’-nine-tails was rarely used, and had been replaced by the birch, which was applied across the bare buttocks so sharply that most victims cried out with pain. In 1895 Private Jones of the 16th Lancers, found guilty of idleness at the crank and reporting sick without cause, received eighteen strokes, and the eighteen-year-old Private Dansie of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was awarded eighteen strokes in Dublin Military Prison for repeated idleness. At Gosport, assaulting a warder brought Private Murphy of the West Riding twenty-five strokes.

Not all violence has been formal. From the very beginning, the process of converting civilian into soldier was entrusted to NCOs who used fists or sticks to help things along. In 1738 an ex-soldier maintained that his comrades had to

stand to be beat like dogs; which, indeed, is generally the case if a man does not speak or look contrary to some officer’s humours. I have known men beat with canes and horse-whips till the blood run from their heads into their shoes, only for speaking in their own defence, and very often laid in irons in some dungeon afterwards … These frequent liberties taken by certain officers, in extending their authorities to use unsufferable severities, is the reason of the best men’s avoiding the army, and good recruits being so difficult to get.²⁰

It could mean death for a man to strike back. When guard was being mounted in the English enclave of Tangier in July 1677, one drummer was late with his stroke. Captain Carr promptly hit him, and the drummer went for his sword, almost as a reflex. He was sentenced to hang, but the garrison commander, well aware that he had few enough soldiers as it was, commuted the sentence so that the drummer had to stand at the foot of the gallows with a rope round his neck until the crime was expiated.²¹

Until relatively recently some soldiers would rather accept an illegal whack than undergo due process that would leave its mark on their official record. Young Spike Mays, who joined 1st Royal Dragoons as a band-boy in 1924, found that a moment’s inattention earned him ‘a cut across the backside’ from the bandmaster’s stick.²² When Lieutenant Peter Young transferred from his infantry battalion to a newly raised Commando unit in 1940, his NCOs assured him that soldiers far preferred this sort of discipline. Beevor described the army at what he thought was

the tail end of an illegal, though quietly ignored, system of justice as old as the army itself. In many regiments, a sergeant would offer the miscreant a choice: either ‘accept my punishment’ – usually a thump administered behind the vehicle sheds – ‘or the company commander’s’ – which almost certainly meant a fine. ‘I’ll take yours, sarge,’ was the usual resigned reply.²³

He would certainly have drawn the line at striking the blow himself, but in May 1780 the thoughtful Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the Black Watch, confided to his diary ‘I knocked down Norman McKay on the parade not so much for being drunk as swearing he was not, and though he deserved it I am sorry for it, for we should never punish a soldier in a passion.’²⁴ Peebles was neither a thug nor a martinet. When he returned home in February 1782 he made a moving farewell address to the men of his company, stressing the ‘satisfaction and pleasure’ of having been their commander, and commending them for ‘that good name you are so justly possessed of whether in quarters or the field.’ He remembered that he ‘could hardly make an end of this little speech, my voice faltered, and my knees shook under me.’ Evidently ‘the poor fellows were affected too.’ He promptly ordered them ‘five gallons of rum to make a drink of grog in the evening,’ effectively giving them nearly half a pint of rum a head, a gift no doubt destructive of the very sobriety he had urged upon them.²⁵

Continuity and change lie at the very heart of my story. Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, has argued that different forms of military organisation were ‘ultimately rooted in political, social and economic structures … each of them was also partly the product of the technology then in use.’²⁶ The British army that came into being with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 has evolved in myriad ways since then, with these political, social, economic and technological pressures all playing their part in the process. I have no doubt that the Duke of Marlborough, who oversaw the army’s transition from a scarlet puddle of ‘guards and garrisons’ in the late 1600s to the world-class force that helped dash the dynastic ambitions of Louis XIV, would recognise, in the tired heroes of Helmand, the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago. They wear loose camouflage fatigues, not red coats with bright facings; their professional knowledge would leave Marlborough’s men dazzled, and their rationality and scepticism would mark them off from an age coloured by belief and deference.

And yet their social organisation is so recognisably similar that we may doubt whether, in the British context, technology has really shaped structures quite as much as it has elsewhere. The major combat arms, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, have retained forms and terminologies that the men who fought at Blenheim – or Waterloo or the Somme, for that matter – would readily grasp. Lieutenant colonels, leading their regiments into action, have lost nothing of their pivotal importance in the hierarchy, and the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe of the Welsh Guards, killed in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, underlines the risks they still run. Regiments, with their elders and distinctive markings – as characteristic of the army as an ancient Briton’s woad, the cicatrices of an African warrior or a junker’s duelling scars – are still an enduring feature of the army, usually much misunderstood and endemically under threat, but thudding on like the beat of a distant drum.

Formal and informal structures continue to intermesh. Most modern soldiers would recognise the close and comradely world prescribed in the 1800 Regulations for the Rifle Corps, which stipulated that every corporal, private and bugler should select a comrade from a rank differing from his own. Comrades were to berth, drill and go on duties together, and comrades could not be changed without the permission of the captain.²⁷

Although the technology would doubtless baffle a Wellingtonian footsoldier, Colour Sergeant ‘Stick’ Broome’s description of extracting the wounded Private Johnson Beharry from a Warrior armoured vehicle in Iraq shows the same bonds of comradeship that have helped hold men together for three centuries:

We hit the ground, and we came under contact from small arms immediately. Woody and Erv went left, myself and Cooper started to pull Beharry out of his seat. This was the first chance I had to see the badly lacerated face of Bee … I pulled him out with the help of big Erv and Jim Cooper and put him into my Warrior with his head in my lap.²⁸

There is much in common between a rifleman like William Green of Lutterworth, whose ‘disposition to ramble’ took him into the army, and Dorset shepherd Benjamin Harris, carried away by the understated glory of a green jacket, and the likes of Lance Corporal Wood and Private Ervin. A modern recruiter would squirm at the Duke of Wellington’s assessment of the army of his own age:

A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class – no matter whether your son or my son – all must march; but our friends – I may say it in this room – are the very scum of the earth. People talk about enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.²⁹

It remains true that the majority of infantry soldiers are recruited, as they always have been, from boys whose civilian futures do not seem bright. The modern army’s growing tendency to cream off the cleverest of its recruits for its technical corps has accentuated the process. In 1942 the army’s adjutant general, responsible for its manpower policies, admitted that the infantry ‘received in effect the rejects from the other arms of the service’.³⁰ It is still easiest to recruit at times of economic depression. Just as Wellington could scarcely have beaten the French without the aid of men who had chosen to serve rather than starve, so the army of the early twenty-first century has been saved from a manning crisis by the shortage of jobs elsewhere.

In Scotland the issue has become heavily politicised, with Scottish National Party backbencher Christine Grahame maintaining that many Scots recruits were in fact ‘economic conscripts … turning to the Army as a way out of poverty and deprivation, brought on by the failed policies of London Labour’.³¹ The predictable furore aroused by these remarks cannot alter the fact that Scotland’s economic plight was a spur to recruitment from the army’s very earliest years. As historian Stephen Wood wrote of the Scottish soldiers who signed on to fight in Marlborough’s wars: ‘Many would be enlisted while drunk or have the edges of their doubts blunted with alcohol; some would enlist as an alternative to gaol, or starvation, or domestic responsibilities.’³²

It is evident that economic compulsion was not restricted to Scotland. In 1859 Lieutenant General Sir George Weatherall, the adjutant general, told the Royal Commission on Recruiting ‘there are very few men who enlist for the love of being a soldier; it is a very rare exception … they are starving, or they have quarrelled with their friends, or there are cases of bastardy, and all sorts of things.’³³ In 1877 the sergeant major of the 77th Foot asked a Geordie recruit if he had served in the army before, only to be told ‘No. Aw were niver hard enough up, to list, afoor.’³⁴ Robert Edmondson, who signed on as a private in the late 1880s, suggested that up to 80 per cent of the army was drawn from the unemployed, adding ‘Empty pockets and hungry stomachs are the most eloquent and persuasive of recruiting sergeants.’³⁵ The First World War made comparatively little difference, and in 1926 The Times reported that 60 per cent of recruits from the London area were unemployed when they signed on. When Spike Mays arrived at Canterbury to begin his basic training, he was received with a cheery greeting from Mitch, a fellow recruit ‘Wotcher, mate. Ain’t ’arf ’ungry. Could scoff a scabby-’eaded ape.’³⁶

There were always some genuine enthusiasts. Joseph Gregg, who was to take part in the charge of the Light Brigade, wrote, ‘My father was a soldier at the time of the battle of Waterloo … As a boy, I always had a desire to see a battlefield, and made up my mind to enlist in a cavalry regiment.’³⁷ Herbert Wootton, who joined up on the eve of the First World War, agreed that he too

was very keen on becoming a soldier. I had two uncles, both regulars, who served through the South African war of 1899–1902. As a youngster I was thrilled with their stories. I became a keen reader of G. A. Henty’s books on war, and later read Rudyard Kipling’s books. I loved to be in the company of old soldiers.³⁸

Captain Doug Beattie’s assessment of his own predilection for a military career (he signed on as a 16-year-old in 1981) has many answering echoes:

I suppose soldiering was in my blood. My dad was a serviceman. My grandfathers had fought in World War Two, one with the Royal Artillery, the other with the Irish Fusiliers. I entered the world in England, a result of the posting system of the army that dad – then a colour sergeant in the Royal Ulster rifles – was subject to.³⁹

Wellington’s point about conscription is fundamental to understanding the British army. For most of its history it was recruited by voluntary enlistment, although economic necessity, judicial compulsion, and the gulling of drunken youths all blurred the definition of what a real volunteer might actually be. For example, an Englishman in eighteenth-century Atholl

observed a poor fellow running to the hills as if for his life, hotly pursued by half a dozen human blood hounds. Turning to his guide, the gentleman anxiously inquired the meaning of what he saw. ‘Och,’ replied the imperturbable Celt, ‘it’s only the Duke raising the royal Athole volunteers.’⁴⁰

In the British experience legal compulsion has been the exception not the rule. The first Military Service Act was passed in early 1916, as a response to losses in the first eighteen months of the First World War. This represented a sea-change in public policy. Conscription was in force from 1916 to 1919, and again in 1939–60; from 1948 this was in the guise of National Service. It was only during these years that the army was in any sense a genuinely national force, its members, serving and retired, strewn so liberally across society that there was no escaping them.

As a young Territorial private in the early 1960s I hitch-hiked in itchy battledress, getting lifts, without any real effort, from lorry-drivers who asked knowing questions about my ‘mob’; mothers whose boys had recently completed their National Service; and men whose conversation slid onto sangars and bocage, desert roses and PIATS – the well-burnished argot of folk who had done it, which I, most demonstrably, had not.⁴¹ It was a world full of men who understood the difference between a brigadier and a bombardier, a battalion and a brigade. They knew that you stepped off with the left foot and that although you assiduously called a warrant officer ‘sir’, you did yourself no favours by imagining that you might salute him.

In the early twenty-first century, as in the first decade of its existence, the army now constitutes a tiny proportion of the population; all the signs suggest that this proportion will decrease still further. About one in seventy of us has a close family member who has served or is still serving, and regular soldiers themselves account for just 0.087 per cent of the population. For good or ill, Britain is almost wholly demilitarised. Now, as the success of the charity Help for Heroes and the moving unofficial ceremonies that greet the bodies of those being repatriated in the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett demonstrate, there is a sympathy for servicemen and women that has little direct connection to the conflicts in either Iraq or Afghanistan. But as Horace Wyndham complained over a century ago, ‘Outside the pages of “popular fiction” the soldier as he really is, is scarcely heard of, and over his life hangs a veil of reserve that is but seldom lifted.’⁴²

Changes in the system of military honours and awards, instituted towards the end of John Major’s administration, mean that acts of bravery are now rewarded with medals whose significance is scarcely grasped by the population as a whole. Successive changes in the regimental system, however good the case in their favour, have replaced the names and badges so familiar to my father’s generation with terminology that the nation has not taken readily to its heart. Somehow 1 Mercian (Cheshire) does not have quite the ring of the Cheshire Regiment. Things that loom large in a soldier’s intimate life – like the length of a tour or operational duty; the duration of rest and recreation (‘R and R’) during it; and the quality of single accommodation and married quarters – are rarely discussed in the press. In contrast, there are frequent articles about the poor quality of equipment. Steve Brooks, writing of his time in Iraq, resented this:

I hate nothing more than civvies taking the piss about the latest article in the Mail or the Mirror about the army where the rifles don’t fire and radios don’t work. Yes, comms are shit, but we are the calibre of soldiers … to work hard for comms … like all aspects of soldiering we had to fight for comms to remain effective.⁴³

Not all the news is bad. The growing number of parades marking units’ return from overseas is welcome evidence that the army is beginning to emerge from beneath the cloak of invisibility that has shrouded it for so long. This cloak was woven in the long-running campaign in Northern Ireland. It is salutary to recall just how costly this was in terms of human life. In 1972, its worst year for casualties there, the army lost 102 officers and men killed in the province, and on 27 August 1979 two bombs at Warrenpoint left eighteen soldiers dead. There is a strong case for saying that the most serious damage that the IRA did to the army was not by killing its soldiers, but by attacking isolated uniformed soldiers outside the province which led the services to ban their members from wearing uniform in public, except on clearly specified occasions. I had grown up in a world full of uniforms, but by the time I attended Staff College in the 1980s things were very different. Most officers avoided the uniform ban by slipping on a civilian jacket over their military sweater, and downtown Camberley abounded with well-trimmed men in their early middle years. The subterfuge would have been unlikely to fool even the dimmest hit squad, but it was another step on the road to self-effacement. My first arrival as a staff officer at Headquarters Land Command at Wilton (wafted in by a gust of self-importance, for I had contrived to become a colonel) drew a polite rebuke from the MOD policeman on the gate. I had broken the rules by wearing uniform, and should take care to keep it covered up in future.

Reversing the uniform ban has not proved easy. In March 2008, shortly after the Government had commissioned a study that was to recommend that servicemen should be able to wear their uniforms as a matter of course, the station commander of Royal Air Force Wittering ordered that uniforms were not to be worn off-duty because of ‘persistent threats and abuse’ in nearby Peterborough.⁴⁴ In January that year, 200 soldiers had their aircraft diverted, because of bad weather, from RAF Brize Norton to Birmingham. They were told to change from uniform to plain clothes on the tarmac before passing through public areas because, as a ministry spokesman put it ‘For security reasons, the MOD wishes to reduce the military profile on flights carried out on its behalf at civilian airports.’ There have been numerous cases of discrimination against service personnel in uniform. In November 2006 an army officer was refused entry into Harrods on the grounds that he was in ‘combat dress’; in September 2008 a hotel refused a room to a wounded soldier, who was forced to spend the night in his car; and in late 2009 four soldiers attending the funeral of a comrade killed in action in Afghanistan were banned from a Maidenhead nightclub: ‘You can all come in,’ said the helpful doorman, ‘apart from the squaddies.’

My regard for the soldier stems from a lifetime’s study as a military historian and almost as long a reserve infantry officer. For more than forty years I have read about soldiers, taught them at Sandhurst and Staff College, listened to them grumble or exult, watched them ply their trade in the Balkans and Iraq, visited them in hospital at Selly Oak and seen them arrive in flag-draped coffins at Royal Air Force Lyneham. It should already be very clear that this portrait will show Tommy Atkins warts and all. At one extreme there are those who prefer their pictures to have blemishes air-brushed out. Many years ago, a military reviewer was pained that the psychologist Norman Dixon (a former Royal Engineer officer, wounded and decorated for his work in bomb disposal) should ‘write so cynically about his former profession’ in his important book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. One of the few adverse reviews of my own book Firing Line appeared in the British Army Review. The converse is also true, for there are perhaps as many who focus on an image of unrelieved savagery, or who see the army as a boss-class tool for turning nice boys into layabouts and killers.

This is not a chronological history of the army and its achievements. There have been many published in my working lifetime, with Correlli Barnett’s Britain and Her Army (1970) wearing its judgements well even where recent scholarship has advanced our detailed knowledge. Allan Mallinson’s The Making of the British Army (2009) is the most recent easily accessible account. This book is instead a social history of the soldier. Its organisation is thematic rather than chronological, and its preoccupation not with big battles or frontier scrimmages, but with the myriad routine observances of military life. It is the story of a man as ancient as a redcoat in Charles II’s Tangier garrison and as modern as the gate-guard on Camp Bastion. It also concerns the women who followed him, anxiously watched his progress from afar or, more recently, soldiered with him. Given the immense change in Britain over the past three centuries, it would be inconceivable for the soldier not to have changed too. What surprises me, as I get ready to endure the fug of our first barrack room, is not how much he has changed: but how little.

I

POLITICS AND POSITION

CHAPTER 1
CHUCK HIM OUT, THE BRUTE

WRITING JUST AFTER the First World War, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson maintained that ‘the army is not popular in the sense that the navy is. The latter usually enjoys full public support, the army seldom does except in war, and consequently it labours under considerable disadvantages in order to prepare for war, and from this it has followed that our wars have so often been a case of muddling through.’¹

To the high Victorians, the British soldier was Tommy Atkins. The nickname probably originated in an 1815 War Office publication showing how the Soldier’s Pocket Book should be filled out, giving ‘Private Thomas Atkins, No 6 Troop, 6th Dragoons’ as its exemplar. By 1837 Atkins was a sergeant, and could sign his name rather than scrawl a mark. We are sometimes told that the name was chosen by the Duke of Wellington. He remembered the pivot man of the grenadier company of his regiment, the 33rd Foot, dying in Flanders in 1793 with the stoic words ‘Never mind, Sir, it’s all in the day’s work.’ However, Wellington did not become commander-in-chief of the army till 1827, so it is very unlikely that he would have been consulted. In 1883 the Illustrated London News showed ‘Pte Tommy Atkins returning from Indian Service’, and in 1892 Rudyard Kipling dedicated his Barrack Room Ballads to ‘T.A.’ The collection included ‘Tommy’, Kipling’s visceral condemnation of society’s predilection for ‘makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep’, which concluded:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’

But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a blooming fool – you bet that Tommy sees!²

Ambivalence about the redcoat long predated Kipling. To the Georgians he was Mr Lobster, a nickname stemming from a 1740 dialogue between ‘Thomas Lobster, soldier, and Jack Tar, sailor’, in the political news-sheet The Craftsman, a periodical so offensive to Prime Minister Robert Walpole that he had its publisher arrested every six months as a matter of course. The conversation redounded little to Mr Lobster’s advantage, for while he was weighed down by firm discipline and a heavy pack, plied his murderous trade at close quarters and was commanded by popinjays who had bought their commissions, his apple-cheeked interlocutor cruised the rolling main, defending Britain’s maritime prosperity, and returned to a grateful nation enriched by prize money. Nearly a century later Portsmouth’s ladies of the night made their own preferences clear:

Sailors they get all the money

Soldiers they get nought but brass.

I do love a jolly sailor

Soldiers you may kiss my arse.

Part of the reason for the nation’s long-standing suspicion of her soldiers can be traced to the circumstances prior to the regular army’s formation in 1661. Britain had just emerged from a long civil war, and had had quite enough of soldiers, whether they had fought for king or Parliament. Moreover, in 1655–7 Oliver Cromwell had instituted direct military government in England and Wales, through major generals presiding over twelve regions, answerable to the lord protector himself. Although the proximate cause of the experiment was a series of royalist plots, Cromwell believed that the nation’s morals needed urgent reform. The major generals, their troops of cavalry funded by a 10 per cent ‘decimation tax’ on royalists, stamped out seditious and ungodly pastimes like horse-racing, plays, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, and closed unruly ale-houses. They also punished those guilty of licentiousness, blasphemy, and swearing.

Although the rule of the major generals was unpopular, the scars left by the Civil War were far deeper. As historian Charles Carlton has observed, ‘No standing army’ was a Restoration slogan driven by ‘fear of soldiers, not because they killed people, but because they turned society head over heels’.³ Oxford scholar Anthony Wood thought that his fellow undergraduates who went off to be soldiers were ‘debauched’ by the experience. Although Bulstrode Whitelock, Cromwell’s ambassador to Sweden, was on the winning side when he told his hosts of the horrors of civil war, he believed that his fellow-countrymen were heartily sick of ‘seeing servants riding on horseback and masters in great want’.⁴

Although most of the New Model Army’s officers were not much different from their cavalier opponents – Lord General Fairfax was a peer’s son and Lieutenant General Cromwell a country gentleman – enough of them rose from humble beginnings to high rank to cause affront. Cromwell’s assertion that ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’ struck a jarring chord within a stratified society used to obeying its natural leaders.⁵ Amongst the reasons for the long-standing practice of the purchase of commissions, which disappeared only in 1871, was a desire to ensure that officers were gentlemen rather than enthusiasts.

Part of it was about national identity. The Civil War was not simply an English phenomenon, but had extended across each of the three kingdoms ruled by Charles I. It was at its most bloody in Ireland, where its agonies reflected long-standing religious frictions, and each new episode, from the revolt of 1641 to the Cromwellian pacification of 1649–53, simply added fresh horrors, with new heroes and martyrs, to a list that was long enough already. The Scots seemed to have prospered from their early alliance with Parliament, but their war soon turned sour. There was a bitter conflict within Scottish society: part clan feud, part power struggle, part confessional dispute. Alongside this there was an external war which saw Scots royalists suffer appallingly in their invasions of England in 1648 and 1651. So many were sent off as bondsmen to the West Indies after their defeat at Worcester, that merchants complained there was no profit in shipping them out. Suspicion of the soldier was writ large enough in England, but in Ireland and Scotland it was seared on the national consciousness.

The ripples of antimilitarism curled out across the Atlantic. Many Americans were ambivalent about their own Continental Army, without which the War of Independence could not have been won. After the Revolution, the State of Pennsylvania made its feelings clear by affirming in its constitution that a standing army was ‘dangerous [and] ought not to be kept up’. Americans did not simply dislike British soldiers, but regulars in general. ‘The general instinct to disparage the professional soldier,’ writes Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘which was discernable at the opening of the seventeenth century, had become by the eighteenth century a political and constitutional principle of enduring significance.’⁶ In 1812 President John Adams warned, ‘Nothing is more important than to hold the civil authority decidedly superior to the military power.’ The point was not lost on the opponents of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. A 2007 polemic lamented that ‘the conservative fawning over the military displays an attitude that would have infuriated those first generations of Americans who actually built this country.’⁷

When Charles II was restored in 1660 he found himself the proud possessor of not one army but two, though he had scarcely the money to pay for either. First, there was the remnant of the Parliamentarian New Model Army under the command of General George Monck, soon to become Duke of Albemarle. In the Declaration of Breda, which set out the conditions for his acceptance of the throne, Charles had agreed to ‘the full satisfaction of all the arrears due to’ the New Model Army, whose officers and men ‘shall be received into our service, upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy’.⁸ In practice, though, an ‘Act for the Speedy … Disbanding’ made provision for paying off the army, with a sweetener of a week’s bonus pay from the king’s own pocket. There was also a sensible relaxation of apprenticeship rules, so that discharged officers and men could practise civilian trades as they pleased. There were concerns, however, that pay arrears were too eagerly converted into ale, so in December 1660 discharged officers and soldiers were banned from coming within twenty miles of the capital. That month only Monck’s own ‘Coldstream Regiment’ of foot and his regiment of horse remained.

Next there was Charles’s own tiny army, raised in the Low Countries amongst exiled royalists. Much of this was stationed in the English enclave of Dunkirk, where life was complicated by the fact that the garrison included both royal troops, like Lord Wentworth’s regiment of foot guards, and former Cromwellian soldiers. The guards were brought back to England, and most of the rest were posted off to be part of the garrison of Tangier, which came to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Charles’s wife, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, or sent to Portugal to support Charles’s father-in-law, John IV. A smattering of plots culminating, in January 1661, in a rising in London led by the cooper Thomas Venner, encouraged Charles to proceed with earlier plans for the formalisation of a royal guard.

A new regiment of foot guards was raised by John Russell. He had commanded Prince Rupert’s guards in the Civil War; Wentworth’s regiment, at first dispersed amongst garrison towns, was soon amalgamated with it. In February 1661 Albemarle’s regiment of foot was mustered on Tower Hill and formally disbanded before being immediately re-engaged. The two senior regiments of foot guards, today the Grenadier Guards and the Coldstream Guards, both claim histories which pre-date the regular army’s formation: Monck’s regiment had been raised in 1650 and the royal guards in 1656. However, the peculiar circumstances of the Coldstream’s transfer to royal service made it junior to Russell’s 1st Guards. One would be pressed to notice the fact, however, for the Coldstream motto is ‘Nulli Secundus’ (‘Second to None’) and, despite Grenadier mutterings about ‘Second to One’ or ‘Better than Nothing’, the Coldstream has never been known as 2nd Guards.⁹

Charles’s little army had cavalry too, with three troops of Life Guards, and a single New Model regiment of horse, Colonel Unton Crooke’s, that had somehow escaped disbandment. This moved to London, where it became the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards. It is generally known, from the colour of its coats, as the Horse Guards Blue or more simply The Blues. In addition, there were twenty-eight garrisons elsewhere, larger ones at seaports like Portsmouth and Hull and smaller outposts like the castles of St Mawes and Pendennis, their Cromwellian officers now replaced by reliable royalist gentlemen with local interests. The cost of guards and garrisons exceeded Charles’s total income. Parliament was reluctant to fund a standing army, and there were fears that the soldiery would soon become, as Lord Treasurer Southampton put it, ‘insolent and ungovernable’.

Charles’s motives in raising the army were threefold. First, at a time when monarchs were on the move a good deal, he would be personally vulnerable without reliable troops for close protection. Second, it was evident that an army, however small, was needed to underpin his foreign policy. Furnishing overseas garrisons is a recurrent theme in the army’s history. It is no accident that the Dunkirk garrison predated the Restoration, and it was run down partly by the direct dispatch of units to the new garrison of Tangier. Third, the army created jobs, and Charles had been restored to a throne resting on the shoulders of men who felt entitled to them. Some royalists had accompanied Charles into exile, and far more had endured life under the Protectorate, often ruined by having to ‘compound’ with the new authorities for their ‘delinquency’.

In 1662, when Parliament decided to raise money to pension royalist ex-officers, it found that no less than 5,353 gentlemen, mostly former captains and subalterns, were entitled to a share. Ex-NCOs and men petitioned local magistrates for pensions, supporting their claims, where they could, by fulsome testimonials from former commanding officers, setting out the ‘many dangerous hurts’ they had received. Those who could manage it got jobs not just for themselves, but for their children too. Winston Churchill, father of the future Duke of Marlborough, was a West Country gentleman and lawyer turned captain of horse. He spent the 1650s living, with his growing brood, in the genteel poverty of his Parliamentarian mother-in-law’s house. But in 1660 he found himself the delighted recipient of royal favour, with an augmentation (‘Faithful but Unfortunate’, announced his new motto) to his coat of arms, a knighthood, a series of sinecures and a seat in Parliament. His daughter Arabella and his son John both obtained minor posts at court, and after the former had attracted the roving eye of James, Duke of York (she went on to bear him four children), young John was given an ensign’s commission in 1st Guards.

Charles’s little army survived, and by his death in 1685 had taken on some of the characteristics which still define it. It was the monarch’s own, its officers ‘trusty and well-beloved’ gentlemen bearing royal commissions whose wording has changed little over the centuries, with a fresh document marking successive promotions.

CHAPTER 2
KING’S ARMY

MANY OFFICERS AND men have felt comfortable in vesting the moral responsibility for their actions in the monarch’s person. Waterloo veteran Colonel Francis Skelly Tidy told his daughter: ‘I am a soldier and one of His Majesty’s most devoted servants, bound to defend the Crown with my life against either faction as necessary.’¹ Sergeant Sam Ancell, who fought in the 58th Regiment in the 1779– 83 siege of Gibraltar, announced:

Our king is answerable to God for us. I fight for him. My religion consists in a firelock, open touch-hole, good flint, well-rammed charge, and seventy rounds of powder and ball. This is the military creed. Come, comrades, drink success to British arms.²

In 1914 Dora Foljambe, married to a keen Territorial, with a brother in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a brother-in-law in the same battalion and two sons in the regular army, was delighted to see that the government had apparently shrunk from using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland. She told her daughter, married to yet another rifleman, that

I am very glad this did happen as it shows the feeling in the army against being used as a political tool – for one party against another – if there is to be civil war the army must break up or stand in a body for the King, it is impossible they should fight side by side with the [Irish] Nationalists who cheered every Boer victory in the South African war. Our army is not made up of paid levies.³

Writing in 1972, Lieutenant Colonel John Baynes affirmed that the monarch’s

immense significance to the armed forces must first be strongly emphasised … This link with the Head of State is not merely symbolic, but reflects a close loyalty to the person of the Queen as well as to her office. No firmer guarantee of the British soldier’s exclusion from politics exists than his personal dependence on the authority of Her Majesty.⁴

Robert William Lowry’s commissions lie before me. His appointment as ensign in the 47th Foot, dated 7 June 1841, is signed by Queen Victoria (black ink over a pencil cross reminding the young monarch where she should put her name), though by the time he became a lieutenant colonel on 18 February 1863 the queen entrusted such work to the army’s commander-in-chief, her uncle, George, Duke of Cambridge. He later became the epitome of conservatism, telling the officers of Aldershot garrison, assembled to hear a lecture on cavalry, ‘Why should we want to know anything about foreign cavalry? … We have better cavalry of our own. I fear, gentlemen, that the army is in danger of becoming a mere debating society.’⁵ But he had commanded a division in the Crimea, fighting bravely in the shocking bludgeon-match at Inkerman, and was, as William Robertson recalled, ‘a good friend of the soldier and extremely popular with all ranks of the army.’⁶ When he signed Robert Lowry’s new commission he was interested not only in military reform, but in maintaining (though with diminishing success) that he was directly subordinate to the monarch rather than to the secretary of state of war.

His rather deliberate ‘George’, with a curlicue swinging round from the last letter to encircle his name, looks restrained on a document rich in stamps and seals. Both commissions are made of robust parchment, folded in four, with the holder’s name on an outer fold, and fit neatly in the inside pocket of an officer’s tunic. Lowry’s second commission is almost exactly the same size as my own – though that was produced almost a century later. When Cambridge was eventually prised out of office in 1895, after a tenure just short of forty years, Victoria resumed signing commissions on her own behalf. Declining health and the flood of new commissions necessitated by the army’s expansion for the Boer war (1899–1902) made things difficult but, borne on by a powerful sense of duty, she struggled hard against having a signature stamp until she was at last persuaded that it would not be misused.

With the exception of Queen Mary and her sister Anne, all British monarchs who ruled 1625–1760, had fought in battle. Charles II received his baptism of fire at twelve at Edgehill in 1642. His brother, James II, had also participated in the Civil War, and was a lieutenant general in the French service during the Interregnum. He accompanied the royal army to the West Country to face William of Orange in 1688 although, racked by nose-bleeds, he was not an inspiring commander. William himself was an accomplished general. His invasion of England in unreliable autumn weather, in the face of a well-posted royal navy and an army whose internal collapse could not be confidently predicted, betokened extraordinary self-confidence. He beat James (also present in person on the field) at the Boyne in 1689, where he was clipped by a cannon-ball that came within an inch or two of changing history.

The first Hanoverians came from a Germanic tradition of soldier-kings. The future George I had fought the Turks as a young man and served as an Imperialist officer in the War of Spanish Succession. His eldest son commanded the allied army in the victorious battle of Dettingen in 1743. The first two Georges took a close interest in the day-to-day running of the army. During their reigns it was still small enough for them to know all senior officers by name and repute. When Lieutenant General Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for failure to charge as ordered at Minden in 1759, George II personally struck his name from the roll of the Privy Council. The king also penned an order, which was read at the head of every regiment in the service, saying that such conduct was ‘worse than death to a man who has any sense of honour’. Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, the king’s second son, was wounded at Dettingen, narrowly beaten by Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy, and then broke the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746. Defeated in Germany in 1757, he was disgraced on his return home. Opinion on ‘Butcher Cumberland’ has now softened somewhat. His style of command was uncomfortably Germanic; he was easily impressed by severe officers like Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley. He backed the seedy and idiosyncratic James Wolfe, victor at Quebec in 1759. The attractive old Huguenot warrior, Field Marshal Lord Louis Jean, Lord Ligonier, always thought Cumberland a good general.

George III had a military brood. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales or ‘Prinny’ (later George IV) was no soldier, although in later life he came to believe that he had served with Wellington in the Peninsula. ‘So I have heard you say, Sir’, the Duke would observe when the Regent recounted another martial triumph and turned to him for support. Prinny’s younger brother Frederick, Duke of Albany and York, was not a successful field commander, for the French thrashed him in both 1793 and 1799. However, he was a serious-minded commander-in-chief of the army from 1798 to 1827. There was a brief gap in 1809–11, after he had been forced to resign when it transpired that his mistress, Mary Ann Clark, had been dabbling in the sale of commissions. George III’s fourth and seventh sons, Edward, Duke of Kent, and Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, both became field marshals, although they never held command in the field. His fifth son, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, lost an eye at Tournai in 1794, later commanded the Hanoverian army and succeeded as King of Hanover in 1837.

The third son of George III, Prince William, broke with family tradition by joining the navy at the age of thirteen, and fought at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780. Captain John Peebles saw him in New York during the American War, and reported that he was ‘a very fine grown young man, smart and sensible for his years … & sufficiently well grown, a strong likeness of the King … he was in a plain Midshipman uniform, and took off his hat with a good grace.’⁷ Commissioned lieutenant in 1785 he was a captain the following year. Prince William served under Horatio Nelson in the West Indies, and the admiral reported that: ‘In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the [Navy] list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal.’⁸

Created Duke of Clarence in 1789 by his reluctant father, to avoid political embarrassment, William sought active command during the Napoleonic wars, though without success. He managed to get involved in a skirmish near Antwerp in early 1814, narrowly avoiding capture thanks to the efforts of Lieutenant Thomas Austin of the 35th Foot. When George IV died without legitimate issue in 1830, Clarence ascended the throne as William IV. His simple, approachable style gained him many supporters, but his intervention in military affairs was not a success. Coming from a highly centralised service, he had no feel for the army’s innate tribalism. He insisted that soldiers should wear red, and sailors, blue, resulting in light cavalry (traditionally clad in what had begun as workmanlike blue) becoming redcoats. Most of them gladly reverted to blue in 1840, although the 16th Lancers, perverse as ever, retained red to become the ‘Scarlet Lancers’.

In her youth Queen Victoria appeared in a prettily modified version of a general’s uniform, and took military duties very seriously. She had a passionate interest in regimentalia, especially where it concerned the Scots regiments so close to her heart. In 1877 she told the Duke of Cambridge that projected amalgamations would create insuperable problems as far as tartans were concerned, for ‘to direct the 42nd to wear the Cameron tartan, or my own Cameron Highlanders to wear that of the Black Watch, would create the greatest dissatisfaction, and would be unmeaning.’ She went on to warn against the compromise of using the ‘Royal Hunting Tartan … which is a sort of undress Royal Stewart, [and] will not be appreciated by the Highlanders, nor considered advisable by the Queen’.⁹

Her husband Prince Albert was colonel of both the 11th Hussars and the Rifle Brigade. He ensured that two of the equerries allocated to their eldest son, the future King Edward VII, were upright men who had won the Victoria Cross in the Crimea. Albert, had he lived longer, might have ensured that the prince received a proper military education. As it was, young Bertie was commissioned lieutenant colonel on his eighteenth birthday, and in the summer of 1861 was sent off to the Curragh, the great military camp near Dublin, to train with the Grenadier Guards.

The project was not a success. Amongst the visitors to the Curragh was the actress Nellie Clifden, ‘a London lady much run after by the Household Brigade’ who did not need much persuading to share the prince’s bed. Bertie’s parents soon found out: Prince Albert wrote him a pained paternal letter, and Victoria always attributed her husband’s fatal illness to the shock and disappointment caused by the news. Despite this inauspicious apprenticeship and his reputation for being ‘lackadaisical’, Edward took a serious interest in military reform, notably in the period of national soul-searching that followed the Boer War. His adviser, Lord Esher, sought to persuade him that he was de facto commander-in-chief of the army, an argument strengthened by the abolition of the post of commander-in-chief in 1904. The following year he affirmed that:

There is always to be developed as time goes on the authority of the King as Commander-in-Chief. I mean in all personal questions. The King should adhere tenaciously to his right to veto any appointment. Gradually it will become clear to everyone that under the King a C-in-C was an anomaly.¹⁰

Edward’s heir apparent was Prince Albert Victor. Albert died from influenza in 1892, leaving his brother George heir. George married his late brother’s fiancée, Princess Mary of Teck. He had served as a naval cadet with his elder brother and was commissioned sub-lieutenant in 1884. George left the navy on his marriage and lived quietly in York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate, succeeding to the throne in 1910. The couple had six children, five of them sons. Their eldest, Edward (known in the family as David), had served as a naval cadet and midshipman. As an undergraduate at Oxford he had trained in the university Officers’ Training Corps. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, and urged Lord Kitchener to allow him to go to France with his regiment, saying ‘What does it matter if I am shot? I have four brothers.’ Kitchener pointed out that it was not the risk of death but the possibility of capture that prevented him from serving at the front. General Sir Dighton Probyn VC, the distinguished warrior-turned-courtier, feared that the young prince felt ‘disgraced’ by his inability to share his generation’s risks.

The Prince of Wales spent 1915–16 on the Western Front, occasionally under shellfire, sometimes closer to the fighting than was wise, but scarcely deserving the Military Cross he was awarded in 1916. General Sir Charles Monro tells us that he heard that the prince had gone up the line, early in the morning, with a Grenadier battalion. He set off in pursuit in his staff car, soon caught up with the young man, and ordered him in. ‘I heard what you said, prince’, said Monro, ‘Here is that damned old general after me again. Jump in the car, or you will spoil my appetite for breakfast.’¹¹ The prince also served in Egypt and Italy, but the same hard rule of no real action applied. He was unquestionably touched by all the suffering he saw. There is a painful account of his brushing the cheek of a badly wounded soldier with his lips. When assessing the complex character of Edward VIII, shot through with self-indulgence and populism, we should not under-emphasise the impact of the war, which saw him snared by a protective privilege he had never demanded and would willingly have discarded.

His brother Bertie’s status as ‘spare’ rather than ‘heir’ meant that he had been able to embark on a full-time naval career, serving first as a Dartmouth cadet and then being posted to the dreadnought HMS Collingwood in 1913. At Jutland three years later Collingwood was bracketed by a salvo from Derrflinger or Lützow. He recalled the excitement of being aboard a great ship shuddering under the recoil of her guns, with water from the splashes of shell-bursts surging across the decks. Bertie transferred to the RAF on its formation in 1918 and, when he succeeded to the throne on Edward’s abdication in 1936, he was the only British monarch who had qualified as a pilot. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had no sons, but their eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was appointed colonel of the Grenadier Guards in January 1942, on her sixteenth birthday. At her first official function officers found her ‘charming, and very sincere’. In February 1945 she was commissioned into the Auxiliary Territorial Service as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and completed her basic training in driving and maintenance at No 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot. She became colonel-in-chief of the Grenadiers on her accession, and for many years wore the regiment’s uniform at the Queen’s Birthday Parade. Until 1986 she attended the parade mounted, latterly on her favourite mare Burmese.

Between 1971 and 1976 Prince Charles trained with both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, qualifying as both fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. He also commanded the coastal minehunter HMS Bronington during the last year of his service. The Princes, William and Harry, both trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and were commissioned into the Blues and Royals – a 1969 amalgamation of the Royal Horse Guards, whom we first glimpsed as Colonel Unton Crooke’s Regiment, in 1660, and the Royal Dragoons, raised in 1661 for duty in Tangiers. Prince William, denied the chance of operational service by the same concerns that kept the future Edward VIII in limbo, qualified as a Search and Rescue pilot. Prince Harry characteristically affirmed, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’ He served in Afghanistan, and might have stayed there longer had an unhelpful intervention by the press not drawn attention to his presence, imposing unacceptable risk on those serving alongside him. In 2008 Prince Harry received his medal for campaign service at Combermere Barracks, Windsor from his aunt, Princess Anne, colonel of the Blues and Royals.

As we branch off from the direct royal line, so the undergrowth thickens, with junior members of the ruling house serving on their own account or marrying into military families. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was to marry the future George VI, lost one brother, in that most traditional of Highland regiments, the Black Watch, at Loos in 1915. She also lost a cousin, also in the Black Watch, at Ypres, Belgium in 1914, and another cousin, this time a Grenadier, at Cambrai in 1917. Centuries earlier illegitimate offspring also played their part in the process. Of Charles II’s extensive illegitimate brood, Henry, Duke of Grafton commanded the 1st Foot Guards, lined out along the Bussex Rhine as the Duke of Monmouth’s rag-tag men ran in through the mist at Sedgemoor in 1685; he was mortally wounded attacking Cork in 1690. His half-brother Monmouth, on the other side of the ditch at Sedgemoor, had commanded English troops in French service, showing courage that left him briefly when he pleaded with James II for his life, though he had recovered his self-possession when he faced the axe on Tower Hill.

James II’s own child, James, Duke of Berwick, one of the four offspring borne him by Arabella Churchill, emerged as a general of European stature. He had already served against the Turks in Hungary when, in 1688, he did more to check the disintegration of the royal army than his father. In French service after 1690, he was largely responsible for wrecking allied hopes in Spain during the War of Spanish Succession. Although his character showed that streak of inflexible cruelty that had marked his father’s, he was the most capable of the later Stuarts, and had become marshal of France by the time that a cannon-ball carried him off at Philippsburg in 1734.

William IV’s illegitimate son, George Fitzclarence, served in the Peninsula, became the army’s deputy adjutant general, and his father eventually made him Earl of Munster. All four of his boys served in the army or the navy; the youngest was killed in the assault on the Redan in the Crimea. Amongst George Fitzclarence’s grandsons were twin brothers, Edward, killed at Abu Hamid in the Sudan in 1897, and Charles, who won the VC with the Royal Fusiliers (first raised in 1685) in the Boer War, then transferred to the Irish Guards in its formation in 1900, and finally died as a brigadier-general on 11 November 1914 in the desperate fighting outside Ypres. His name heads the cruelly long list of officers and men missing in the Ypres Salient battlefields between 1914 and mid-1917, graven in stone on the Menin Gate memorial.

It would be easy to develop the theme more widely, but the point is already hammered home. The monarch was at the centre of a wide constellation of military officers, often serving in the regiments of the Household Division, who were familiar figures at many of the court’s activities, from official events at Buckingham Palace or Windsor, Royal Ascot or shooting parties at Sandringham. Members of the royal family serve as colonels-in-chief of regiments, and Court and Circular announcements still chart the passage of lieutenant colonels as they report at the palace to formally take over command. Although George VI was constitutionally more cautious than his predecessors, he encouraged senior officers to open their hearts to him. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) for much of the war, found the process very helpful. ‘At 3.15 went to see the King,’ he wrote on 21 December 1943, ‘who kept me for 1¼ hours. He was in excellent form and most interested in all details of conferences and of my visit to Italy. He has a wonderful knowledge of what is going on.’¹² But regimental politics could corrupt even the most scrupulous monarch. In 1946, Field Marshal Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, hoped to reduce the Foot Guards by the same proportion as the infantry of the line, but found his plans dashed when the major general commanding the Household Division appealed directly to the king. Nor should the long influence of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother be underestimated, especially as far as the Black Watch and the London Scottish were concerned.

The military importance of the monarchy goes beyond the ties of family, friendship, and familiarity. The significance of both the Dukes of York and Cambridge serving as commander-in-chief of the army for such long periods can scarcely be overstated. Moreover, some of the monarch’s most trusted servants were military officers, whether at court for short tours of duty as aides-de-camp or equerries, or in key long-term appointments like private secretary and assistant private secretary. The urbane and gossipy Frederick ‘Fritz’ Ponsonby was grandson of Peninsula veteran General Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby. He served in the Grenadier Guards during the Boer War and the First World War. His court career started as an equerry to Queen Victoria in 1894, going on to be assistant private secretary to both Victoria and Edward VII, and ending up as lieutenant governor of Winsdor Castle till 1935, the year of his death.

His immediate superior in 1901–13 was Francis Knollys, long a civilian, but a former officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with good military connections. Both his father, a general and Crimean veteran, and brother served in the Scots Guards. Knollys’s successor as private secretary was the honest but humourless Arthur Bigge, better known by his peerage title of Lord Stamfordham. Bigge was a gunner who had served in the Zulu War of 1879, he was the queen’s private secretary for the last years of her reign, and then served George V in the same capacity for most of his life. He was succeeded by Clive Wigram, who had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1893 and had then gone off to the Indian army. Wigram made his mark as assistant chief of staff to the Prince of Wales (the future George V) during his 1905–6 tour of India, returned to serve as equerry until George succeeded, and became the king’s assistant private secretary, going on to be private secretary between 1931 and his retirement, gaining the peerage that has generally rewarded royal servants of his status, in 1936.

Focusing on Wigram’s family is instructive. He was married to the daughter of a paragon of British India, Field Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain. Their eldest son served with the Grenadier Guards in the Second World War and then commanded its 1st Battalion in 1955–6. He was married to the daughter of another Grenadier, General Sir Andrew ‘Bulgy’ Thorne, who had made his mark on history while staff-captain to Brigadier-General Fitzclarence, by whipping-in the fine counter-attack that enabled the Worcesters to repair the broken British line on the Menin Road on 31 August 1914. ‘The Worcesters saved the Empire’, wrote a grateful Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force.¹³ Not only did their eldest son, heir to the family’s barony, also serve in the Grenadiers, but so too did their son-in-law, Major General Sir Evelyn Webb-Carter, who commanded the Household Division in 1988– 2001. Clive Wigram’s grandson, Captain Charles Malet of the Coldstream Guards, has served in Afghanistan, and was an extra equerry to the queen at the time of writing.

Michael Adeane, maternal grandson of Lord Stamfordham, was private secretary to Elizabeth II for the first twenty years of her reign. He had taken over from Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, unusually a yeomanry (territorial cavalry) officer rather than a regular, and handed over to Martin Charteris of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It was only with the latter’s departure in 1977 that military officers lost what had become firm tenure of this crucial post, although Robin Janvrin, who took over in 1999, had served in the Royal Navy for eleven years. It may be that his successor, Christopher Geidt, represents a definitive break with tradition, having been a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before initially joining the royal household as assistant private secretary in 2002.

CHAPTER 3
PARLIAMENT’S ARMY

AS THE MONARCHY’S power has shrunk over the three and a half centuries of the army’s existence, so that of the House of Commons has increased. We can chart this process and its effect on the army through events like the constitutional settlement of 1688, the last royal veto of legislation in 1707, the great reform bills of the nineteenth century, and the 1911 Parliament Act. It has certainly not removed royal influence, but it has transformed the nature of political control. What is less obvious is that, as the process has spun on, the links between the army and the legislature have become progressively weaker, to the point where almost any major professional group is more widely represented in both houses of parliament than the armed forces. In one sense the development is as much social as political, with the army’s increasing professionalisation and diminishing size reducing the political visibility and impact of its officers.

Restoration parliaments imposed no control over the army, provided the king was able to pay for it. The 1661 Militia Act gave Charles II command of ‘all forces by land and sea and all forts and places of strength’, and both Charles and his brother James II proceeded to run the army as what John Childs calls ‘a department of the royal household under the command of the king and his nominees’.¹ It had no foundation in common or statute law, and its code of discipline, the Articles of War, stemmed from the royal prerogative. It was not until 1689 that discipline was given the force of statute.

The senior regiment of infantry of the line, the Royal Scots (in existence since 1633 but allowed to claim seniority only from 1661), had fought at Sedgemoor in 1685 as the Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment. It had previously served under Monmouth on the continent, and a poignant story has him looking out from Bridgwater church towards the royal camp and seeing the regiment’s saltire colours in the gloaming. He would be sure of victory, he sighed, with Dumbarton’s drums behind him.

In 1689 the new government of William and Mary was shipping troops to the Low Countries to fight the French. The fact that the army had not fought for James II the previous year reflected the defection of senior officers and James’s failure of will rather than its affection for William. Scots troops were particularly concerned about being sent abroad while English and Dutch units remained in Britain. After serious unrest along the line of march, the Royal Scots mutinied when they reached Ipswich; over 600 of them set off northwards. The deserters were rounded up with little bloodshed, escorted back to London, and shipped thence to Holland. Nineteen officers were tried, and all but one, who was executed on Tower Green, were simply stripped of their commissions.

The Commons at once passed the first of the many mutiny acts. In theory all it allowed the army to do was to inflict capital or corporal punishment for serious offences, thus meeting the demands of the moment, and it was not conceived as a means of asserting parliamentary control. Indeed, there were times during William’s reign when it lapsed altogether without bringing about a collapse of discipline. From 1690 to 1878 Parliament passed mutiny acts annually, and as time went on both their scope and intent changed. As late as 1761 it was decided that neither the act nor articles of war deriving from it were binding on the army when engaged in war abroad, although discipline in such circumstances was preserved through similar articles issued under the royal prerogative. In 1803 the Act was extended to include the army within or without the Crown’s dominions in peace or war. It was replaced by the Army Discipline and Regulating Act of 1879, itself superseded by the Army Act of 1881 which, just like the old Mutiny Act, had to be passed annually. By this stage it was, as the Manual of Military Law announced, the essential means of ‘securing the constitutional principle of the control of parliament over the discipline requisite for the government of the army.’² This was in turn replaced by the Army Act of 1955, the current basis for military discipline, whose Section 69 – the catch-all ‘conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline’ – has been the bane of the scruffy, ill-disposed or unlucky ever since.

Alongside the assertion of parliamentary control came a gradual shift of power as the army became first a department of state in its own right, and eventually part of a unified Ministry of Defence. The detail does not concern us here, but the salient features are worth noting. ‘The Sovereign is Commander-in-Chief,’ affirmed the Manual of Military Law, ‘unless the office is granted away.’ Such was often the case. The Duke of Marlborough, the army’s captain-general under Queen Anne, commissioned officers on his own authority, telling a delighted Lady Oglethorpe that her boy could have his promised ensigncy in the Foot Guards: ‘If you please to send me the young gentleman’s Christian name, his commission shall be dispatched immediately.’³ Sometimes the office was not filled, and sometimes its holders were ineffective, but as we have seen, the royal dukes of York and Cambridge both exercised substantial power.

The secretary at war was a civilian official, who had begun as the commander-in-chief’s secretary, based in the army’s headquarters which established itself at Horse Guards at Whitehall in 1722. The secretary at war became increasingly important, and in 1793 was made responsible for submitting the army estimates to parliament. Since the Restoration there had been two secretaries of state, peers or members of the House of Commons, initially for the northern and southern departments of Britain, but with their responsibility later refined to cover home and foreign affairs. A third secretary of state had been appointed from time to time. In 1794 the office became permanent, and its holder took charge of the army’s efforts in the war against revolutionary France. The secretary at war was now responsible to this secretary of state, a system which continued until 1855 when the Crimean reforms shifted all the former’s duties to the secretary of state for war. Although this minister’s effectiveness depended on many factors – not least hitting-power within a cabinet that might not have the army in the forefront of its thinking – he made steady inroads into the influence of the commander-in-chief, and in 1870 was made formally superior to him.

As part of the reforms that followed the Boer War, the office of commander-in-chief was abolished in 1904, and the Army Council came into being. It initially had seven members – the secretary of state, the chief of the imperial general staff, the adjutant general, the quartermaster general and the master general of the ordnance, as well as a finance member and a civil member. In 1906 the War Office crossed Whitehall from Horse Guards to the neo-baroque War Office Building. When the three service ministries merged to form the Ministry of Defence in 1963 the Army Council became the Army Board of the Defence Council, now established in the Ministry of Defence’s main building. This solid monolith was built in the 1930s, and Anthony Beevor surmises that the ‘muscular, large breasted women in stone’ surmounting the entrance date from the days when the Board of Trade had half-tenure. Although the style ‘falls short of the totalitarian architecture of that decade … it is still not a place calculated to lift the spirits.’⁴ The Army Board’s membership now includes six ministers, one official and five senior generals. The board’s executive committee (ECAB in unlovely abbreviation) dictates the army’s immediate policy, and comprises its most senior generals under the chief of the general staff, whose office lost its ‘imperial’ designation in 1964.

This shift of power away from the military and into the hands of politicians was paralleled by changes in the Civil Service. The Northcote–Trevelyan report of 1854 recommended that this should be divided into ‘mechanical’ and ‘administrative’ classes, and instituted processes that led to entry by open competition into a service that, until its corrosion by politics over the past decade, was a source of impartial professional advice to ministers. The Fulton Committee’s 1968 report judged that the Civil Service was too close to the traditional sources of power within the British establishment, and though its recommendations did not succeed in creating a British equivalent of the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration the process of breaking down formal barriers within the Civil Service, and between it and outside agencies, has continued steadily.

A by-product of all this was the rise of senior Civil Servants within ministries, notably their permanent under secretaries. They tend to remain in post longer than military officers, who serve in the ministry for between two to three years at any one time, and their links with senior colleagues across Whitehall often give them a sense of collegiate expertise which serving soldiers lack. To this must be added the influence of a Treasury, which, long before the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, was both intrusive and pervasive. No balanced assessment of the Ministry of Defence in the first decade of this millennium should ignore the slurry of management-speak that washes across its decks from time to time, and the many officials who have come to regard defence as they might a commercial organisation with the receivers in. It is certainly not a case of ‘boots versus suits’, for if there are civil servants who believe in the commodification of defence, there are those who work purposefully towards the preservation of military capability in times of real stringency. Conversely, some military officers, especially those ‘Whitehall warriors’ on a second or third tour of duty, become so wise in ‘the ways of the building’ that they sometimes forget that men and women in uniform are much more than ‘line serials’ on a spreadsheet. Part of this book’s contention is that soldiers have, across the army’s history, been subjected to treatment that has fallen far short of that to which they have reasonably been entitled, and it is not enough to maintain that this all happened in a distant land where things were done differently. We have done it in recent memory and, given half a chance, would still do it today.⁵

The increase of political control over the army, the diminution of the power of its senior officers, and the growing authority of the Civil Service were all products of wider developments. The two great wars of the twentieth century added their own weight to the process, emphasising that what happened on battlefields was only an index of a much broader national effort. Interwoven with all this has been the increasing professionalisation of the officer corps, a process that has ensured that officers are now educated for longer than ever before. The period spent at Sandhurst is now half the length it was in the 1960s, but many more officers are now recruited as graduates.

In the process the army has become estranged from the political nation. From the army’s birth until 1945 serving officers sat in both Houses of Parliament. Retired officers, and gentlemen holding commissions in the auxiliary forces, were added, to make a substantial military voice. The close association between officers and legislature had begun under Charles II and accelerated under James II, who saw officers as convenient placemen, deployable either to Westminster or to local councils. James encouraged officers to seek election not because he valued their opinions, but because he wanted their votes. Those elected in 1685 were told to ‘give their attendance to the House of Commons as soon as possible’, and James made it clear that they were not to simply to turn up as ordered, but to vote for the court party.⁶

Crossing the inflexible James II was fatal to a man’s career. That year Charles Bertie lamented that

My nephew Willoughby, my brother Dick, and brother Harry – the three battering rams of our family – are all turned out of their employment as captains … and I am also told that my nephew Peregrine Bertie – who is cornet [the most junior commissioned officer in a troop of horse] to his brother Willoughby – is also dismissed, so they have cleared the army of our whole family, which proving so unlucky a trade I would not have us bend our heads much to for the future.⁷

The precedent established by the later Stuarts proved durable. Army and navy officers regularly sat in parliament thereafter. Between 1660 and 1715 up to 18 per cent of MPs were serving officers, and subsequent general elections regularly returned at least 10 per cent. There were 60 military officers in the 558 members elected to the English House of Commons in 1761. Sixty-five were elected to the century’s last parliament in 1796. Gwyn Harries Jenkins argues that ‘from the late eighteenth century the military formed the largest single occupational group in the unreformed House.’⁸ Of the 5,134 MPs who sat in the period 1734–1832, 847 held commissions and of these two-thirds seem to have been career officers. The reform acts of the nineteenth century helped reduce the number of military MPs by making it harder for interest to procure a man’s election, at the same time that the army’s growing use as an imperial police force made it more difficult for officers to carry out duties that their constituents were now coming to expect of them. Traditionally the Foot Guards had furnished a disproportionately high number of MPs, pointing not simply to ‘a close link between wealth, birth and military-cum-parliamentary activity’, but to the fact that it was easier for officers quartered in London to get in to the House than it was for their comrades in the marching regiments, scattered across realm and empire.⁹ In 1853 the military, with its 71 sitting MPs, had been eclipsed by the law and their 107 solicitors or barristers – the largest profession in the house. By 1898 there were still 41 officers in the house (all but four of them Conservatives) and 165 lawyers.

From 1660 until 1945, when the serving military were no longer allowed to sit in parliament, most military MPs were officers, though there were a handful of exceptions, like Sergeant W. R. Perkins MP, called up for service with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1939. So too were the huge majority of former members of the armed forces who were elected to the Commons. There was one remarkable exception. William Cobbett, born in 1762 to an‘honest, industrious and frugal’ labouring family, joined the 54th Regiment in 1784. He had trudged all the way to Chatham to enlist in the Marines, only to be assured by the recruiting sergeant that they were full up. His literacy and steady ways soon brought promotion to corporal, and he went on to be a regimental clerk, using his spare time to study ‘Dr Louth’s Grammar, Dr Watt’s Logic … Vauban’s Fortifications and the former Duke of York’s Military Exercises and Evolutions’. Promoted to sergeant major, at a time where there was only one in each battalion, he took on much of the day-to-day work of running his unit, for the adjutant was ‘a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate’ and the other officers were distinguished by ‘their gross ignorance and vanity’.¹⁰

Cobbett was discharged on his battalion’s return from Nova Scotia in 1791, and at once set about the prosecution of some of his former officers for corruption. The attempt misfired, and he fled abroad to avoid retribution: while in America he wrote pro-British articles under the name of Peter Porcupine. Soon after his return he started the news-sheet Weekly Political Register, and in 1802 began publishing Parliamentary Debates, forerunner of the modern Hansard. Refusal to bribe voters lost him the Honiton election in 1806 and accelerated his shift from Tory to radical. In 1810 the Register’s furious condemnation of the flogging of militiamen by German soldiers saw him sentenced to two years imprisonment for treasonous libel. On his release he was honoured by a huge dinner presided over by Sir Francis Burdett, a leading champion of reform.

Cobbett deftly changed the format of the Political Register from newspaper to pamphlet to avoid tax, and it was soon selling 40,000 copies a week. In 1817 he left for America to avoid prosecution for sedition. After his return repeated attacks on the government culminated, in 1831, in prosecution for an article supporting the machine-breaking and rick-burning of the Captain Swing rioters. Cobbett conducted his own defence and was triumphantly acquitted. He was a major political figure and author. His Rural Rides was an affectionate description of an old, honest countryside progressively corrupted by the seepage of poison from the towns. It was first serialised in the Register and then published as a book in 1830. Despite repeated attempts to get into Parliament, he would have to wait until the 1832 Reform Act, when he was elected for Oldham. By now he was a confirmed radical, though his beliefs were shot through with a profoundly conservative yearning for a pre-industrial world of honest toil, interlaced with duty, and for political dispute across the class divide to be undertaken ‘with good humour, over a pot or two of ale’.¹¹

A conflict soon developed between the constitutional theory that an officer-MP required no permission to attend to his parliamentary duties and could express an opinion freely, and the awkwardness of giving military pay to non-serving men who might make statements of which the government or army might disapprove. In December 1880 Major John Nolan, MP for Galway North, was appointed a Conservative whip, although he was on full pay and commanding a battery on its way to India. The Speaker thought that the best solution was for officers to be seconded from the service on election, but, given the fact that MPs were not then paid, this smacked of penalising the peoples’ choice. It was felt safest to let the matter run on unresolved, and Nolan left the army in 1881.

The number of military MPs would have doubtless continued to decline had not the two world wars reversed the trend. Members of both houses volunteered on a huge scale in 1914. Twenty-two MPs died: Arthur O’Neill, Unionist member for Mid-Antrim and a captain in the Life Guards was the first MP to die, at Ypres in 1914. They ranged in rank from lieutenant, with 39-year-old Viscount Quennington (Michael Hicks-Beach MP) dying of wounds in 1916 as a subaltern in the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, to lieutenant colonel, with Guy Baring (elected for Winchester in 1906 while still a serving officer) killed at the head of his Coldstream battalion on the Somme. In the field, a man’s politics could be ignored. Willie Redmond, an Irish Nationalist MP since 1884, joined the attack on Messines Ridge in 1917 (at 56, he was too old for front line infantry service). Hard hit, he was carried from the field by two Ulster Division stretcher-bearers who disapproved of his politics but would not leave him to die alone.

In volunteering, many MPs turned their backs on the manicured world of old, comfortable Britain. Tommy Agar-Robartes left beautiful Lanhydrock to die at Loos commanding a company of the Coldstream, and William Gladstone, grandson of the grand old man of Victorian liberalism, set off from Hawarden Castle to perish as a lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915. Sir Fredrick Cawley of Berrington Hall, Leominster had four sons and of these, three died. One was a regular cavalryman in 1914 and the other two, both MPs, died at Gallipoli in 1915 and the Western Front in August 1918. Sometimes we remember them for oblique reasons. Major Valentine Fleming, member for South Oxfordshire, died at Arras in May 1917 commanding a squadron of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars: his son Ian was to be the creator of James Bond.

Distinctions between Commons and Lords are unhelpful, for eleven of the MPs who died were peers’ sons, and some would have gone on to inherit the family peerage. Approximately 1500 members of the 685 peerage families in the United Kingdom served in the war, and 270 were killed or died of wounds.¹² The oldest was 82-year-old Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who had won his VC in the Indian Mutiny. He had been the army’s last commander-in-chief and was carried off by pneumonia at St Omer in November 1914, during a visit to Indian troops in France. The youngest was 17-year-old Midshipman the Hon Bernard Bailey, youngest son of Lord Glenusk, who perished when the armoured cruiser HMS Defence blew up at Jutland. His eldest brother fought with the Grenadiers on the Western Front throughout the war, and was commanding a battalion at the war’s end. His second brother, farming in East Africa when war broke out, returned to England at once and the fact that he had been a lance corporal in the Eton College OTC helped him waft into the Grenadiers. He was killed at Givenchy on 10 August 1915, and lies in Guards Cemetery, Windy Corner, not far from Brigadier-General the Hon John Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, late of the Irish Guards and one of Lord Clinton’s sons, who died two weeks later.

The concentric ripples of family and friendship made the relationship between Westminster and the war even more pervasive. Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister at the start of the war, had four sons. The eldest, Raymond, died with the Grenadiers on the Somme; Herbert served as a gunner officer on the Western Front, and the much-wounded Arthur commanded a brigade of the Royal Naval Division. Anthony, being born in 1902, was too young to serve. All three sons of Labour leader Arthur Henderson fought: the eldest was killed on the Somme, where he lies, with a brisk walk in the lee of Delville Wood between him and Raymond Asquith. Liberal politician Jack Seely, had served in the yeomanry in the Boer War, and been forced to resign as secretary of state for war over the Curragh affair in 1914. He commanded the Canadian Cavalry Brigade on the Western Front, and his son Frank, a second lieutenant in the Hampshires (the family lived on the Isle of Wight and this was the county regiment) was killed at Arras in 1917.

Although the military demand for manpower in the Second World War was much smaller than in the First, twenty-three MPs died on war service, although this includes seven who perished in aircraft crashes, a retired lieutenant colonel who killed himself, fearing that an old wound might prevent his going on active service, and Private Patrick Munro, MP for Llandaff and Barry, who died on a Home Guard training exercise. Sir Arnold Wilson had served in the Indian Army before the First World War, had gone on to become a colonial administrator, and was elected Conservative MP for Hitchin in 1933. The New Statesman thought him ‘an admirer of Hitler’, but when war came he affirmed ‘I have no desire to shelter myself and live in safety behind the bodies of millions of our young men.’ He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as a pilot officer air gunner, and was killed at 56 over France in 1940. John Whiteley, elected MP for Buckingham in 1937, had served as a gunner officer in the First World War, and died as a brigadier when the aircraft carrying General Sikorsky crashed at Gibraltar in 1943. Peers and their children (for women were now conscripted) also served in large numbers, and relationships within the Westminster village meant that, just as had been the case in the First World War, there were intimate links between the two houses. The Hon Richard Wood, third son of the Earl of Halifax, lost both legs but went on to serve as a junior minister in four administrations, and was ennobled as Baron Holderness. He married the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Orlando ‘Flash’ Kellett, MP for Birmingham Aston, who had been a regular officer before joining the yeomanry: Kellett was killed commanding the Sherwood Rangers in North Africa in 1943.

The cases of Edward Kellett and John Whitely underline the strength of military representation in the parliament of the inter-war years. In 1919, 12 per cent of new Conservative MPs had served in the forces. Between 1919 and 1939, ex-regular officers were, after lawyers, the second largest occupational group in the Commons. There were the very senior: Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston was elected Unionist MP for North Ayrshire in a October 1916 by-election while commanding a corps on the Somme. He left the army in 1919, and sat as an MP till 1935. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was elected Unionist MP for North Down in 1921, though he was murdered by Irish nationalists outside his London home the following year. And there were the more junior: Jack Cohen sat for Liverpool Fairfield in 1918–31, and lost both legs at Passchendaele. Ian Fraser, who sat for St Pancras North in 1924–9 and 1931–7, then for Lonsdale in 1940–58, had been commissioned into the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in time to be blinded on the Somme. He crowned a remarkable career by being ennobled as Baron Fraser of Lonsdale, Britain’s first life peer, in 1958.

Most striking is the close connection between military service and high office. Winston Churchill had fought on the North-West Frontier, at Omdurman and in the Boer War before entering politics. In 1916, widely blamed for the Gallipoli fiasco, he rejoined the army (having maintained his military status by serving in the yeomanry), and was attached to the Grenadier Guards to learn the ways of trench warfare before commanding 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers in the Ploegsteert sector, south of Ypres, for the first five months of 1916.

Churchill’s deputy from 1940 to 1945, and his successor after that year’s general election, was Labour leader Clement Attlee. He had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics when war broke out in 1914, and was immediately commissioned into the South Lancashire Regiment. In 1915 he commanded a company on Gallipoli, and probably owed his life to the fact that he was being treated for dysentery during some very heavy fighting. His company was one of those chosen to furnish the rearguard during the withdrawal from Suvla Bay in December, and he was the last but one man to leave. Attlee was wounded in Mesopotamia, so spent 1917 in Britain, and was then posted to the Western Front for the last six months of the war. In the inter-war years he styled himself ‘Major Attlee’, and his open, collegiate style of leadership reflected the skills needed to command a mixture of wartime volunteers and conscripts in a middle-of-the-road infantry regiment.

Attlee was ousted by Churchill in 1951, and Churchill himself was succeeded in 1955 by Anthony Eden, a classic example of the well-connected officer (Durham landed-gentry, Eton and Oxford) who had a good war. He was commissioned into 21/King’s Royal Rifle Corps, proudly known as the Yeoman Rifles and raised by Charles, Earl of Feversham. The battalion was first committed to battle on the Somme on 15 September 1916; Feversham was killed that day. Eden won the Military Cross, became adjutant of his battalion and finally, aged just 21, became the youngest brigade major (chief of staff of a formation then comprising three infantry battalions) in the army. Styling himself Captain Eden he was elected to parliament in 1923. In 1939 he returned, briefly, to the army as a major. He served as foreign secretary from 1935 to 1938, when he resigned over appeasement. He held important posts during the war, lost one of his two sons in Burma, and again served as foreign secretary for part of Churchill’s second administration. By the time Eden became prime minister he was already past his best, and ended up resigning in 1957 as a result of the Suez affair. There is a strong case for blaming some of Eden’s misfortunes on the strains imposed by two years on the Western Front.

Eden was succeeded by Harold Macmillan, who had served him as both foreign secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. A publisher’s son, Macmillan was at Oxford in 1914 and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He was first wounded at Loos in 1915 and had been wounded again by the time he was hit in the pelvis as the Guards Division attacked Guillemont on 15 September 1916. This was the same battle that killed Lieutenant Raymond Asquith and Lieutenant Colonel Guy Baring. Macmillan lay in No Man’s Land reading Aeschylus in Greek, and then spent the rest of the war undergoing a series of operations. Like Eden, he was marked by his experiences. He could not bear to return to Oxford to finish his degree, for he could never forget that of his first-year group at Balliol, only one other had survived the war.

In 1924 he was elected, as Captain Macmillan, for the industrial constituency of Stockton. He lost his seat in 1929, but returned to the Commons in 1931. Like Eden he was scornful of appeasement and appeasers, and his easy but authoritative style made him a natural choice for high office when Churchill came to power. From 1942 to 1945 he was resident minister in the Mediterranean. He took over from Eden in 1957 and served till 1963, assuring the country that ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Macmillan’s concern for social reform, which put him towards the left of the Conservative party of his day, reflected his contact with ordinary folk in the trenches. ‘They have big hearts, these soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘and it is a very pathetic task to have to read all their letters home. Some of the older men, with wives and families who write every day, have in their style a wonderful simplicity which is almost great literature.’

The pattern was broken by Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had contracted spinal tuberculosis in 1938. He was bedridden for the first two years of the war and unfit for service thereafter. Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister 1964–70 and 1964–6, had volunteered for service in 1939 but had, very sensibly in view of his first-class economic brain, been directed into the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Edward Heath, Conservative Prime Minister 1970–74, had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and soldiered on part-time with the Honourable Artillery Company after the war.

Martial prime ministers are the tip of the iceberg. Until the 1960s the front benches were packed with men who had fought in the world wars, and, certainly as far as the Conservatives were concerned, having had the proverbial ‘good war’ was almost a sine qua non of political success. But a man’s service record did not determine his political stance. Denis Healey had been at Balliol College, Oxford with Edward Heath (the men remained friends) and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers, serving as military landing officer at Anzio in 1943. He gave a ‘barnstorming and strongly left-wing’ speech, still in uniform, at the 1945 Labour Party Conference. But although he made a massive dent in the traditional Conservative majority at Pudsey and Ottley that year, he was not elected till 1952.

In 1962 it was estimated that 9 per cent of MPs were former regular officers, and that military representation in the Commons was nearly a hundred times greater than in society more broadly.¹³ Conscription endured till 1962 and, until the sharp cuts of 1967, the Territorial Army was over 100,000 strong: both factors helped maintain military experience in parliament. Margaret Thatcher selected all her secretaries of state for defence from former officers. Michael Heseltine, who held the post in 1983–6 was the least martial. Son of a Second World War lieutenant colonel, Heseltine was called up in 1959 in the dying days of National Service and commissioned into the Welsh Guards. From 1945, serving officers were suspended from duty when they ran for parliament, and were required to retire if elected. Heseltine contested the safe Labour seat of Gower in 1959, and was not required to resume service after his defeat. It was not until the appointment of Malcolm Rifkind in 1992 that this chain was broken. No subsequent secretaries of state for defence have had military service, although John Reid, first-rate minister for the armed forces 1997–9 and secretary of state for defence 2005–6 owed part of his affinity with the military to his family ties, for his father had served in the ranks of the Scots Guards.

The passing from politics of the Second World War generation was underscored by the last of the ‘good war’ Tories. Lord Carrington had been commissioned into the Grenadiers in January 1939, and fought from Normandy into Germany with the Guards Armoured Division where he earned a Military Cross commanding the first tank across the great bridge at Nijmegen. Foreign secretary in 1982, he resigned, with characteristic probity, to acknowledge his department’s failure to predict the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. William Whitelaw, ex-Scots Guards and awarded a Military Cross in Normandy, 1944, held a variety of government appointments. He exercised huge influence over Margaret Thatcher, who made him the first hereditary peer created for eighteen years after her victory in the 1983 election. His resignation in 1987, on grounds of ill-health, deprived her of a major steadying influence.

The Parliament whose life ended with the general election of 2010 contained 43 MPs with military service of some sort. Eighteen were ex-regular army officers, ranging from Michael Mates, sometime lieutenant colonel in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, to Andrew Mitchell, who had held a ‘gap year commission’ between school and university. There were thirteen Territorials, one of them an ex-regular army officer and another a former member of the RAF; seven former members of the RAF; one of the Royal Navy; one who transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Naval Reserve; and another naval reservist. One, Rudi Vis, Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, had served in the Dutch Armed Forces in his youth. This constituted 6.6 per cent of a house of 646 members. The breadth of the definitions above, which includes both an MP who served in his university’s Officer Training Corps forty years ago, and another medically discharged after a brief period of regular training, underlines the thinness of real military experience, though at least two of the Territorials have been mobilised for service in Iraq or Afghanistan.

To enable peers and MPs without military service to speak with more knowledge of the armed forces, Sir Neil Thorne, a Conservative MP and Territorial colonel, founded the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme (AFPS) in 1987. ‘The whole purpose of the scheme,’ he writes, ‘is to enable Members of all parties to speak in debates on the Armed Forces from a position of experience’.¹⁴ The scheme lasts a year, during which participants are expected to spend at least 21 of 30 offered days with the armed forces, selecting the service of their choice. They are initially given status roughly aligning them with majors or their equivalents to enable them to spend time with soldiers, sailors, and airmen, rather than to receive the two-star status normally accorded to MPs visiting military units.¹⁵

The AFPS makes it possible for participants to return, ‘at four levels from Major to Brigadier equivalent’. At least one, Dr Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East, spent some time at the Royal College of Defence Studies, writing a 10,000-word dissertation that was rated in the top ten for his year. In all about ninety MPs have participated in the scheme. The opinion of serving army officers on its usefulness is divided, with some contributors to the invaluable Army Rumour Service website arguing that anything that brings MPs into closer connection with the services can only do good. The facts that the scheme has flourished despite its lack of official funding, and attracts both peers and MPs who take it very seriously, underline the perceived need to remedy the progressive demilitarisation of parliament.

Political allegiance and holding a senior military position have existed independently of each other at many points in history. Most military and naval MPs still sitting immediately after 1688 were Tories, although they were soon outweighed by Whigs. It was, by then, possible for an officer to be opposed to the government and to enjoy senior command. Major General James Webb won a useful little victory at Wynendaele in 1708, ensuring that a vital convoy got through to Marlborough who was besieging Lille. Webb was a Tory and the Tories were in opposition. His supporters in the Commons at once complained that he had been insufficiently rewarded for the Wynendaele exploit. The credit seemed to have gone to Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, who sat in the Whig interest for Woodstock – the town adjacent to Marlborough’s country estate, Blenheim Palace.

Ministers were assailed by those who shook the tree of patronage to get commissions, promotions, and appointments for family, friends, and clients. As time went on, ministers became more reluctant to intervene save where they could do so with probity. The papers of the hard-working William, Viscount Barrington, Whig secretary at war 1755–61 and 1765–78, show how patronage worked in the high eighteenth century. In 1760 George, Duke of Marlborough wrote asking for ‘a troop of Dragoons, or a company [captaincy] in an old regiment for a gentleman whose name is Travell: his father was a very zealous friend to us in the late Oxfordshire election … he may stick some time unless your Lordship will favour him with your interest to get promoted.’¹⁶ Marlborough’s insistence on an ‘old’ regiment was intended to ensure that Travell did not get appointed to a junior regiment that would be disbanded at the first opportunity, shoving him off onto half-pay. Barrington failed to oblige the duke, for Francis Travell soldiered on unpromoted, and the 1800 Army List has him as a half-pay lieutenant in the now-disbanded 21st Light Dragoons.

Barrington was unusually scrupulous in refusing to break the army’s rules even when pressed hard. In 1771 he told Lord North, then Prime Minister, that although he valued the influential Scottish Whig Sir Gilbert Eliott just as much as North himself did:

Yet I must not assist you in getting a company for his son.

Two invariable and indispensable rules of the army are that every man shall begin military life with the lowest commission, and that he shall be at least 16 years of age till he shall obtain any …

Mr. Elliot was not I believe ten years of age when he had a commission of lieutenant & soon after he was most irregularly made a captain. At the reduction [disbandment] of the corps, he was not kept on any list, or kept on half pay … What shall I say to the friends of Mr Stuart, or Price, or a great many others if Mr Elliot is a Captain before them? I shall be told with great truth that his former commission is a nullity though it still remains in his possession. The whole world will condemn me, and what is worst of all, I shall condemn myself.¹⁷

There was a growing belief that an officer should not be penalised, in his military capacity, for opinions expressed as a Parliamentarian. Yet there were still some serious upsets. William Pitt the Elder was commissioned into Lord Cobham’s Dragoons, with Treasury approval, so that the government could expect the support of his brother, already an MP, and joined his regiment at Northampton. William himself soon became Whig member for that most addled of rotten boroughs, Old Sarum, which had no resident voters at all. He made strident attacks on government policy, causing Prime Minister Robert Walpole, always slow to turn the other cheek, to observe ‘We must muzzle this terrible cornet of horse.’ In 1736 Walpole duly secured the dismissal of Pitt and several other military and naval MPs who had opposed the government. The move was not popular in the house, but none of the dismissed officers was reinstated. In 1764 Lieutenant General Henry Conway, who enjoyed the prestigious colonelcy of the 1st Royal Dragoons, voted against the government and was stripped of his colonelcy. The opposition at once protested that this was military punishment for political offence, and although George III did not restore Conway ‘he never again breached the principle enunciated by Conway’s supporters’, and Conway himself went on to be commander-in-chief.¹⁸

By the 1780s it was clear that the espousal of firm political views was not necessarily a bar to either high rank or employment in sensitive posts. Three of the most senior generals in North America, William Howe (C-in-C 1775–78), Henry Clinton (C-in-C 1778–82) and John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, were serving MPs. Both Howe and Burgoyne were Whigs, and had spoken in Parliament against the American war. Howe had assured his Nottingham constituents that he would not serve against the colonists. When he agreed to do so one told him that: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’¹⁹

The social unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars saw the clearest example of politically-engaged officers attaining high rank despite firmly held opinions. Charles James Napier was a scion of a military family: his father Colonel George Napier and brothers George and William were soldiers, and another brother was a sailor. He earned a brilliant reputation as an infantry officer in the Peninsula. The Napiers were all radicals, and in George senior’s case experience of revolt in America, Ireland, and France had given him much sympathy for the rebels. For Charles, the process owed much to his wide reading while at the Senior Division of the Royal Military College. In 1839 the government appointed him to command Northern District as a major general. It was a courageous choice, for he was known to sympathise with the Chartists, who constituted the greatest threat to the order he was sworn to preserve, to hate the Corn Laws that kept the price of bread artificially high, and to tell the government precisely what its errors were.

Charles Napier was able to distinguish between personal sympathy with the Chartists and professional determination to keep the peace. He was inclined to the view that ‘the best way of treating a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards’, and a notion of responsibility to the Crown rather than its ministers also helped him deal with the inconsistencies in his own position. He made it clear that if the ‘physical force’ Chartists rose, then he would crush them. ‘Poor people! They will suffer’, he wrote. ‘We have the physical force not they … What would their 100,000 men do with my hundred rockets wriggling their fiery tales among them, roaring, scorching, tearing all they came near.’²⁰ This combination of genuine sympathy and absolute firmness made him a notable success in the post.

He went to India, where his sense of natural justice (laced with a good slug of ambition) encouraged him to beat the Amirs of Sindh at Miani, going on to rule the newly annexed province with benevolent despotism. He returned home in 1847 after much bickering with the East India Company’s hierarchy. In 1849 that arch-conservative the Duke of Wellington was sure that Napier was the only general capable of rescuing the Sikh War from the head-on enthusiasm of the commander-in-chief in India, Sir Hugh Gough. By the time Napier arrived Gough had sledge-hammered his way to victory, and his subsequent trial of strength with the viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, saw Napier return home under a cloud.

Charles Napier died a general and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, an achievement not prevented by his political views or notorious scruffiness. His brother William, who had also fought with distinction in the Peninsula, was no less radical. When on half-pay in the 1830s, he declined suggestions that he should stand as an MP, and even more wisely refused command of the Chartists’ projected ‘National Guard’. He was a regular speaker at political meetings, and argued that while the army as an institution might indeed be politically neutral, ‘if a soldier does not know and love the social happiness springing from equal and just laws, how, in God’s name, is he to fight as the soldier of a free nation ought to fight?’²¹

He was not re-employed between the end of the Napoleonic wars and appointment as lieutenant governor of Guernsey in 1842, and in the meantime had produced his multi-volume History of the War in the Peninsula. This remains an extraordinary achievement, not least because of its flashes of tangible affection for private soldiers, such as John Walton, in Napier’s company of 43rd Foot on the retreat to Corunna. Walton was charged by determined French horsemen, but

stood his ground, and wounded several of his assailants, who then retired, leaving him unhurt, but his cap, knapsack, belts and musket were cut in about twenty places, his bayonet was bent double, and notched like a saw.²²

There was much more to the book than narrative. Napier was convinced that the French army embodied the egalitarian principles of which he approved, while the British was dominated by privilege. ‘Napoleon’s troops fought in bright fields where every helmet caught some beams of glory,’ he wrote, ‘but the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of the aristocracy.’²³ William Napier also died a general and a knight, as did his third martial brother, Thomas, who lost his right arm at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812. Being in the same political camp as the rest of his family, Thomas was delighted to be governor of Cape Colony when slavery was abolished across the empire in 1834.

In the early nineteenth century in the unreformed House of Commons, officers sometimes sat for family-controlled constituencies. Occasionally, as an ingredient of the oleaginous mix of influence and obligation then known as ‘interest’, they were installed on behalf of a powerful patron, either because he valued their support, or because he believed that possession of a seat in parliament might improve their own career prospects. Lieutenant General Sir John Moore (killed at Corunna in 1808) was the son of a Glasgow doctor who acted as bear-leader to the Duke of Hamilton on his Grand Tour, travelling with the party. Hamilton not only secured John an ensign’s commission in the 51st Foot, but then proceeded to have him elected for the family-run Lanark Burghs in 1784–90. General Sir Henry Clinton sat from 1772 to 1784, first for Boroughbridge and then for Newark upon Trent. These were both constituencies controlled by his cousin, the Duke of Newcastle, who devoted almost as much attention to fostering his career as he did to the breeding of his affable Clumber spaniels. His widow married Thomas Crauford, and in 1802 gave another of her family’s pocket boroughs, East Retford, to his brother Robert ‘Black Bob’, who was to be mortally wounded commanding the Light Division at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812.

There was much the same pattern in the Irish House of Commons until its disappearance with the Union of 1800. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, sat for the family borough of Trim, and Edward Pakenham, brother of Wellesley’s wife Kitty, for his own family’s Longford borough. Galbraith Lowry Cole (Kitty’s rejected suitor) sat first for Irish constituencies, and then represented Fermanagh in the British House of Commons, although he spent most of his time commanding one of Wellington’s divisions in the Peninsula. He might have discussed politics with several of his senior colleagues, including cavalry commander Lieutenant General Sir Stapleton Cotton, MP for Newark in 1806–1814 and in the upper house as Lord Combermere thereafter.

From the 1790s there were as many redcoats as black in the Commons, for, with the country mobilised against France, it was hard to tell regulars from militia or volunteer officers. About half the members returned in 1790–1820 held part-time commissions. Indeed, Robert Crauford was nicknamed ‘the regular colonel’ to distinguish him from the numerous MPs whose colonelcies reflected their local status. William Pitt the younger, out of office as prime minister from 1801 to 1804, raised three battalions of Cinque Ports Volunteers. He modestly referred to them as ‘the advanced guard of the nation’, drilling them himself as their colonel commandant and expatiating, red-coated in the House, on the virtues of volunteering. There was a similar rash of part-time officer-MPs during the French invasion scare of the 1860s, and in 1869 no less than 130 had connections with the volunteer movement.

While a government could not affect a senior ranking military career, they could influence their income, being in control of the much desired government appointments. All promotion above lieutenant colonel was, until the reforms of the 1880s, wholly dependent upon seniority, and so once an officer had reached this rank even the government’s concentrated spite could not stop further ascent. But generals received no pay (getting by on the half-pay of their regimental rank) unless they were given a specific appointment, like command of troops engaged in operations or a governorship, at home or abroad. There were a good deal more such jobs than one might expect: Regency Brighton kept three generals gainfully employed. All of these posts were at the government’s disposal, as were regimental colonelcies, a useful source of income until the late nineteenth century.

George De Lacy Evans – ‘an obstreperous radical from an Irish landowning family’ – had served in the Peninsula, was present at the burning of the White House in 1814, and fought at Waterloo the following year.²⁴ On half-pay after the war, in 1835–7 he commanded the British Legion that fought for Queen Isabella, the liberal claimant to the Spanish throne, in the first Carlist War. The British Government was anxious to help Isabella against her uncle Don Carlos but was not prepared to do so directly, although it is clear that Evans’ officers and men were ex-soldiers, most serving because of the lack of employment at home. But Evans was also an MP, sitting for Rye in 1830 and 1831–32, and then for Westminster from 1833 to 1841 and 1846 to 1865. Although the diarist Charles Greville testily described him as republican, he was impeccably radical, pro-Chartist but (like his middle-class electors, whose opinions he took very seriously) firmly opposed to political reform by force. He was passed over sixteen times for the colonelcy of a regiment, but when Horse Guards was reviewing the long list of generals to find commanders for the Crimean expedition, it settled on Evans to head the 2nd Division. His broad military experience commended him even though his political views did not, and, in the event, he proved one of the war’s most capable generals – and returned to radical politics after it.

The dukes of York and Wellington, as commanders-in-chief, did their best to consider claims to commissions, promotions and appointments on their own merits, and in 1827 Wellington told the king, ‘The principle is that the pretensions of officers to Your Majesty’s favour should be fairly considered, notwithstanding their conduct in Parliament.’ He was less scrupulous during his second term as commander-in-chief (1842–52) when ‘he made partial sacrifice of the claims of merit to those of political or party interest’, and Rowland Hill (commander-in-chief 1828–42) was, in the kindly way that had earned him the nickname ‘Daddy’, inclined to favour ‘Conservative members of Parliament, old friends, the offspring of brother soldiers and unfortunate widows, [who] all found the way open to their solicitations.’²⁵

The abolition of the purchase in 1871 and the increasing formalisation of promotion made it harder for politics to influence an officer’s career for good or ill, though it has never wholly prevented it. While government could not stop the declining number of officer-MPs from speaking their minds in parliament, it stamped down hard on the public expression of political opinion by serving officers. Redvers Buller was one of the heroes of his generation. His VC, won in a dreadful fight with the Zulus on Hlobane mountain in 1879, was a remarkable achievement even by the high standards of that award. He was less successful commanding British troops in the Boer War, and in the mood of recrimination that followed his recall he was widely attacked. On 10 October 1901 he replied publicly to an outspoken article by Leo Amery. Both Lord Roberts, now the army’s commander-in-chief (and, no less to the point, Buller’s successor in South Africa), and the Conservative Secretary of State, St John Brodrick, had much to gain from off-loading the blame for initial failures onto Buller. For speaking without authorisation he was summarily dismissed on half-pay and denied the court martial he requested. Buller remained popular in the country at large, and when the Liberals came to power in 1905 they offered him a safe seat, which he was wise enough to decline.

The Buller affair did not stop officers from having political views, although the fate of a general with a VC and close connections to the king made them cautious about expressing them while they were serving. In 1913 it seemed likely that if the Liberal Government persisted in its plan to give Home Rule to Ireland, then Ulstermen would fight to avoid rule from Dublin. Thousands flocked to Unionist rallies, and the newly formed Ulster Volunteer Force drilled hard. Lord Roberts, outspokenly sympathetic to the Unionist cause, recommended Lieutenant General Sir George Richardson, a retired Indian Army officer, as its commander. Captain W. B. Spender, hitherto the youngest Staff College graduate, resigned his commission to serve on his staff. The North Down Regiment was commanded by a retired major general, and Richardson’s chief of staff was a former colonel. All these officers were recalled to service in 1914 when the UVF formed the bulk of 36th Ulster Division, whose service on the Western Front has left such an enduring mark on the province’s history.

It was evident that using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland would be fraught with difficulties, and in September 1913 the king wrote a statesmanlike letter to Prime Minister Asquith, reminding him

that ours is a voluntary army; our soldiers are none the less citizens; by birth, religion and environment they may have strong feelings on the Irish question; outside influence may be brought to bear upon them; they see distinguished retired officers already organising local forces in Ulster; they hear rumours of officers on the active list throwing up their commissions to join this force. Will it be wise, will it be fair to the sovereign as the head of the army, to subject the discipline, and indeed the loyalty of the troops, to such a strain?²⁶

Sir John French, the CIGS, had already assured the monarch that the army ‘would as a body obey unflinchingly and without question the absolute commands of the King no matter what their personal opinion might be,’ though he added that intervention in Ulster would subject discipline to serious strain, and ‘there are a great many officers and men … who would be led to think that they were best serving their King and country either by refusing to march against the Ulstermen or openly joining their ranks.’ He concluded, though, that he would impress on all serving officers ‘the necessity for abstaining from any political controversy’.²⁷

The so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ of 1914 remains instructive. It was not in fact a mutiny, and the best evidence suggests that while deployment to Ulster would have imposed a severe strain on the army’s loyalty, most officers would have obeyed unequivocal orders. Because they then required private means to serve, resignation would not have been as damaging as it would be today, when almost all officers live on pay and look forward to pensions. There remains little evidence of how the army might have behaved even if many of its officers had indeed resigned. In Francis Foljambe’s artillery brigade (then the equivalent of a regiment in any other army) all officers but one decided to go, changed into plain clothes and left command in the hands of the sergeant major and the NCOs. Non-commissioned personnel did not have the luxury of being able to send in their papers, and most had joined the army to make a living. Regiments recruited in Ireland would have been in an agonising position, and many of the Irishmen serving across the rest of the army would have found their own loyalty taxed. Most soldiers would have stayed true to their salt, and we would do well to remember that issues that generate heat in officers’ messes do not necessarily cause such dissention in barrack rooms.

Lastly, the incident occurred when Jack Seely, secretary of state for war, was a reserve officer with a reputation for personal bravery, and who knew most major players personally. The CIGS was very close to his political master and on good terms with both the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor. Soon after French’s resignation he went off to lick his wounds with Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, aboard the admiralty yacht Enchantress. It was not a case of political ignorance of the ways and attitudes of the military, rather a crisis that slid out of control, leaving the army’s professional head caught between the hammer of government policy and the anvil of military opinion. Few senior officers would necessarily have fared better at the point of impact than Johnnie French.

The army has faced nothing on the scale of the Curragh ever since. Although there have been suggestions that it would have resented being asked to carry out some tasks, like intervention to help enforce majority rule upon Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the 1960s, all the evidence suggests that the army does as it is told. This is the case even when some senior officers have substantial moral and practical reservations about the task, as was undoubtedly the case with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is striking that none of them, well aware of the rules against making public pronouncements, spoke at the time, although some of the evidence given to the Chilcott enquiry makes the scale of their unhappiness evident.

Some officers suffered for the public expression of their views. In 1938 Duncan Sandys, Conservative MP for South Norwood, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law and a subaltern in a Territorial anti-aircraft unit, raised issues of national security that reflected his own military specialism. He was then approached by two unidentified men (presumably representing the security service) who warned him that he risked prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Sandys at once reported the matter to the Committee on Privileges, which ruled that disclosures to parliament were not subject to the Act, although an MP could be disciplined by the house if, in its view, his disclosures were damaging or unwarranted. Sandys’ territorial career was unharmed. He was badly wounded in Norway in 1941, retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1946, and as defence minister in 1957 produced the Sandys Review. The First World War case of Sir Henry Page Croft MP was different. He went out with his Territorial battalion in 1914, and was first of the few Territorials to command a brigade. Frank reports on his dissatisfaction with the high command – delivered informally rather than on the floor of the house – caused sufficient controversy to get him recalled in 1916: all his political connections could not save him.

The army’s own regulations grew progressively sterner about the need for serving officers to gain formal clearance for their publications. They had once been very relaxed. Lieutenant Winston Churchill published his idiosyncratic Story of the Malakand Field Force in 1898. The first edition of The River War, his account of the Omdurman campaign, was highly critical of Lord Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb and of the poor quality of some military supplies, notably the soldier’s boots. Kitchener was furious, and although Churchill left the regular army soon afterwards, he was recommissioned during the Boer War, then became a yeomanry officer and commanded a battalion when Kitchener was still secretary of state for war.

The rules were much stricter after the Second World War. In 1949 the future Field Marshal Lord Carver, then an acting lieutenant colonel, reviewed Field Marshal Montgomery’s Alamein to the Sangro for the Royal Armoured Corps Journal. He unwisely observed that it was ‘a high price to pay for a short book’, and was nearly court-martialled. Montgomery ordered Carver’s director to ‘tell him that a junior officer is not allowed to criticise the head of the army’. Later, when Carver had written his own book on Alamein he found it difficult to get permission to publish. Although he was by then an upwardly mobile brigadier, permission was actually refused for a chapter on training and doctrine which was to have formed part of a Festschrift to mark Basil Liddell Hart’s seventieth birthday ‘as it was clearly controversial’.²⁸

A more recent case of a serving officer being disciplined for public criticism, this time of his own superiors rather than politicians, is that of Major Eric Joyce. He enlisted into the Black Watch in 1978 and subsequently attended Stirling University, graduating with a degree in religious studies. Joyce became a probationary second lieutenant while at university, attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst after graduation, and was commissioned into the Royal Army Educational Corps in 1988. His service took him to Northern Ireland, Germany, and Belize, and during it he obtained two master’s degrees. He was promoted captain in 1990 and major in 1992 – the year that the RAEC was amalgamated into the newly-formed Adjutant General’s Corps and became the Educational and Training Services branch.

In August 1997 the Fabian Society published a pamphlet by Joyce called ‘Arms and the Man – Renewing the Armed Services’, maintaining that the forces were ‘racist, sexist and discriminatory’. He had written it without getting the permission to publish required by Queen’s Regulations, telling The Times that ‘you can’t get radical ideas like this into the public domain if you go through the chain of command.’²⁹ Joyce denied that he was being covertly supported by ministers, but argued that ‘what I’m saying is broadly in line with the modernising agenda which the government is promoting.’³⁰ He went on to launch the Armed Services Forum, which was authorised by the military authorities but contained severe criticism of the forces. When at length the army moved to discipline him, he affirmed that it was ‘terribly important’ that soldiers should be allowed to speak freely. He also condemned the army’s obsession with an ‘officer class’, and argued that Queen’s Regulations, simply ‘a convention’, were not legally enforceable.³¹ The Conservative opposition saw the Labour Government’s hand behind Joyce’s continued survival. In December 1998 Keith Simpson MP, a former Sandhurst lecturer, told the Commons that the case ‘strikes at the heart of the important principle that our armed forces do not participate in party politics.’ He went on to argue that:

He has his own political agenda. As a serving officer, he has openly been a Labour party supporter and, for the past four months, has been actively seeking to become a parliamentary candidate. Not only has he repeatedly and blatantly broken every agreement that he has ever made, but he has become party politically partisan.³²

Major Joyce was eventually directed to resign his commission and did so in 1999. He went on to become Public Affairs Officer at the Commission for Racial Equality (Scotland), and, unsurprisingly, a Labour MP after winning the Falkirk West by-election the following year. He served as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to a number of ministers, and in September 2009 resigned as PPS to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth. As one of the few Labour MPs with recent military experience he had been a logical choice for the post, but his letter of resignation went to the heart of his old unhappiness:

The Conservatives … think they can convince the public that we have lost our empathy with the Defence community … I do not think the public will accept for much longer that our losses [in Afghanistan] can be justified by simply referring to the risk of greater terrorism on our streets … Most important of all, we must make it clear to every serviceman and woman, their families and the British public that we give their well-being the greatest political priority. Behind the hand attacks by any Labour figure on senior service personnel are now, to the public, indistinguishable from attacks on the services themselves. Conversely, in my view we should allow our service personnel greater latitude to voice their views on matters which make distinctions between defence and politics pointless.³³

Joyce’s resignation was overshadowed by the fact that he had become the first MP to claim more than £1 million cumulatively in expenses. The website Army Rumour Service suggests far more resentment amongst serving officers of an MP on the gravy train, than sympathy for a former colleague with a reformist agenda. His case underlines two hard old truths. First, no government, whatever its persuasion, relishes serving members of the armed forces pointing to political failings. Tony Blair abolished the individual services’ directors of corporate communication to reduce the risk of senior officers briefing the press ‘off message’. In that climate Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, when Chief of the Defence Staff, declined a ‘non-attributable’ lunch with the distinguished author Sir Max Hastings, regretting that he could only attend if a civil servant was on hand to take notes of the conversation. When General Sir Richard Dannatt spoke, within a few weeks of his appointment as Chief of the General Staff, of the need to withdraw troops from Iraq, it was immediately clear that he would not, as had been expected, succeed Sir Jock as CDS. Second, the army itself remains profoundly uneasy about criticism from within its ranks, especially when that criticism has an explicit political purpose.

For most of the army’s history its officer corps was closely aligned to the social class that sent members of parliament to Westminster. The proportion of serving officers sitting in parliament fell away substantially as the nineteenth century went on, but the two world wars of the twentieth century packed both houses with an unusually high number of folk with wartime service. That generation has now moved on, though in the second decade of the twenty-first century there are again MPs with direct links to the military. Modern wars have never been more political and senior officers are inevitably politically ensnared.

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