worn for dinner on weeknights: officers relaxed in the down-market black tie for dinner at weekends.
Every part of the body had to be dragged and pinched and buttoned, and the boots were so tight that one could neither pull them on nor take them off, and remained for many minutes in a kind of seal-like flipper-limbo as to the feet. Only by the kindness and perseverance of Robbins – my new servant who, as I write, some thirty-three years later, is still with me … was I able to encase myself in this unaccustomed glory.104
In November 1912 he transferred to the regular army, and joined the Grenadier Guards at the Tower of London. Here he was interviewed by the regimental lieutenant colonel who seemed to be:
the improbable realisation of an ideal; an ideal cherished by a considerable number of contemporaries, including most officers and all the best tailors and haberdashers, hosiers, shoemakers and barbers in London, indeed in England … At a single glance it might be deemed possible by the inexperienced, such was the apparent sincerity and straightforwardness of his self-presentation, to know all about him, even to write a testimonial, strong sense of duty, hard-playing (golf, cricket, polo), generous, brave, fine shot, adequate rider, man of the world, C. of E.
He remembered the great royal review of the Brigade of Guards on 28 April 1913 as ‘a final salute from an old order which was to perish, and constituted for those taking part in it – and how few survived the next two years! – a sort of fanfare, heralding the war’.105
There were part-time soldiers in Britain long before the foundation of the regular army in 1660, and the London’s Honourable Artillery Company, once the Guild of St George and then part of the London Trained Bands, can trace its origins back to 1537. By Haldane’s time there were three distinct strands in the volunteer and auxiliary forces of the Crown, and the Norfolk Committee, one of the bodies which had investigated British military performance in the Boer War, had concluded that between them they were neither fitted for taking the field against regular troops nor for providing a framework of future expansion. Yet part-time forces provided relatively large numbers of inexpensive manpower at a time when the regular army was under-recruited; they had powerful political support, most notably in the House of Lords, where militia colonels were firmly entrenched; and they seemed to offer a real prospect of widening military service so as to create that ‘real national army’ that Haldane sought.
The militia was founded on men’s common law obligation to provide home defence, and was not obliged to serve abroad. Originally selected by ballot from lists of able-bodied men maintained by parish constables, its efficiency ebbed and flowed with the danger of invasion. It had spent much of the Napoleonic period embodied, that is called up for, full-time service, but in the nineteenth century it slipped back into its old torpor, its members turning out for infrequent training. In social composition the militia looked much like the regular army. Those who did not wish to serve could hire substitutes to do so on their behalf; militia officers were chosen by Lords Lieutenant of counties from the gentlemen of the shire, and there was a steady flow of both officers and men into the regular army.
The volunteers, first formed to meet the perceived threat of revolutionary France, had been revived by the invasion scare of the 1860s. They were wholly distinct from the militia. Members of volunteer units were required to purchase their own uniforms and much of their equipment. In many companies officers were elected, and they received their commissions from Lords Lieutenant rather than the monarch. This was Mr Pooter under arms, and as such a favourite butt of Punch’s cartoonists. In 1899 the volunteer Lieutenant Tompkins, ‘excellent fellow, but poor soldier’, was asked by an inspecting general:
Now, Sir, you have your battalion in quarter column facing south. How would you get it into line, in the quickest possible way, facing north-east?
Well, Sir, do you know, that’s what I have always wondered.106
Victorian volunteers were wonderfully bearded, favoured baggy uniforms of French grey, and took their marksmanship very seriously, spending weekends at Bisley ranges tending their muzzle-loading Enfield and new breech-loading Snider rifles and smelling powerfully of black powder, gun oil and cheroots. Regulars doubted whether these hirsute tradesmen were really soldiers at all, and had little doubt that they would not stand the onset of French infantry. Matters were not helped by the fact that the green-ribboned Volunteer Decoration, awarded for long service, carried the post-nominal initials VD, displayed with a pride which puzzled some regular soldiers.
The Yeomanry were different yet again. The first units of ‘gentlemen and yeomanry’ had been raised in 1794. They were volunteers who needed to own, or at least have regular access to, a horse, and this socio-economic distinction made them useful to a government which lacked a police force. Yeomanry were involved in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819: part of what went wrong that day was occasioned by the poor training of men and horses, and part by the fact that the yeomanry were middle-class men with an animus against the ‘mob’. The Yeomanry, like the volunteers, saw a revival as a result of the invasion scare of the 1860s, and there were thirty-eight regiments in existence in 1899. Many yeomen volunteered, as Imperial Yeomanry, to fight in the Boer War, no less than 178 companies grouped in 38 battalions, and after the war more regiments were raised, some of them from urban areas with few real links to the horse-owning farmers of yesteryear.
Yeomanry regiments had little in common with volunteer battalions. Their officers could (and so often did) fit comfortably into regular cavalry regiments, and many of their troopers were scarcely less well-heeled. They carried out their fortnight’s annual training in the grounds of the great houses of the land, where things were done in proper yeoman style, as a correspondent reported of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry in camp at Woodhall Park in 1903.
The camp is pleasantly situated on sloping ground in front of the mansion, and close to the River Beane … There are go bell tents, four men to each, though the officers, of course, have one to themselves. The tents all have boarded floors and folding iron bedsteads are provided. The baths and chests-of-drawers have this year been dispensed with, and if the men want a ‘dip’ there are the inviting waters of the Beane close by … The stables are wood and canvas structures … Messrs Lipton are again catering for the officers and Sergeant Buck and his son Trooper Buck are again supplying the regimental mess. A Morris tube shooting range has been fixed up by Mr Buck for the amusement of the men and there are also a skittle alley, reading room, ping-pong board and other forms of recreation.107
The Middlesex Yeomanry enjoyed an even more elegant camp on the very eve of war, as Trooper S. F. Hatton remembered.
Reveille about 7.00, hot coffee by specially engaged cooks, the early grooming, water and feed. A two-course breakfast in the Troopers’ mess – (the damned waiters are a bit slow this morning) – then dress for parade … A morning’s drill or manoeuvring on the Downs, and back to camp, grooming, watering, feeding; the regimental band in full-dress uniform playing all the time during ‘stables’. A wash, change into mess kit … Luncheon, beautifully served by hired mess waiters on spotless linen … In the afternoon saddlery and equipment were given over to a batman to clean for the morning – it was customary for four or five Troopers to run a ‘civvy’ batman between them during the camp – and then change into grey flannels for the river, lounging, sleeping or anything else Satan found us to do.108
Sir John French had served as adjutant of the Northumberland Hussars, and his foreword to the 1924 regimental history is a vignette
