were commanded by the Earl of Ravensworth, than whom no better sportsman ever lived. The officers were all good sportsmen and fine horsemen, and to those who can look back fifty years such names as Crookson, Straker, Henderson and Hunter will carry conviction of the truth of what I say. Two of them were Masters of Hounds, but my most intimate friend was Charley Hunter, a born leader of cavalry, whose skill in handing £50 screws over five-barred gates I shall never forget.109
Yeomanry officers were as active in both Houses of Parliament as they were on the hunting field. Major Winston Churchill MP was in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, and Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. H. C. Henderson MP commanded the Berkshire Yeomanry. The Hon. Walter Guinness was Conservative MP for Bury St Edmunds and a major in the Suffolk Yeomanry: when war broke out B Squadron, whose command he had just relinquished, ‘had recently been taken over by Frank Goldsmith, who was Member of Parliament for the Stowmarket Division’.110 B Squadron was graced by Sir Cuthbert Quilter, MP for Sudbury. Brigadier General the Earl of Longford was to die commanding a Yeomanry brigade at Gallipoli.
Haldane’s reforms swept up militia, volunteers and yeomanry. They turned militia battalions into Special Reserve battalions, which trained part-time just as the militia had, but would provide drafts to reinforce the regular battalions of their regiments in the event of war. Their composition, too, mirrored that of the militia: well-to-do officers and soldiers who could have fitted easily into the regular army. Some young men used the Special Reserve as a way of testing the water. George Ashurst was born in the Lancashire village of Tontine in 1895. ‘We were a poor family,’ he recalled. ‘My father worked in a stone quarry about a mile from the village, and his wages were rather poor. To make things worse, he kept half of his wages for himself and spent them at the village pub.’111 He became a colliery clerk on 12/6d a week, but when he lost his job his father warned him that if he took on manual work ‘I will break your bloody neck.’
Ashurst went to a recruiting office to sign on. He said that he wanted to sign on for seven years, but the sergeant, kinder than many, replied: ‘When you get into the army you might not like it, so I will tell you what to do. Join the Special Reserve, which means that you will do six months in the barracks and seven years on the reserve, with just a month’s camp every year.’ He joined the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers, and trained at the depot at Wellington Barracks, Bury. ‘I got on very well as a soldier,’ he recalled,
except for little reminders from the sergeant-major that I was a soldier now and ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, stick your chest out and your chin in’ as I walked across the barrack square. I felt really fit, too, with cross-country running and the gym exercises we had daily, and I loved the musketry lessons and the shooting on the firing range with the .22 rifles.
There was also a school and a teacher in the barracks where one could go in the afternoon and sit at desks with pen and paper to improve one’s education. There were examinations, and we could get a third-class certificate. If you were also a first-class shot with the rifle you got sixpence a day on your pay.112
Haldane faced a far greater challenge in forming the Territorial Force, which came into being on 1 April 1908. It was organised in fourteen mounted brigades each consisting of three regiments of yeomanry, a battery of horse artillery and a field ambulance, and fourteen infantry divisions, each with three four-battalion infantry brigades, artillery, engineers, transport and medical services.113 He hoped that it would both support and expand the army, first providing home defence, thus freeing the regulars of the BEF to go abroad, and then, after six months’ post-mobilisation training, being fit to take the field abroad itself. But the Territorial Force was the child of compromise. The National Service League was right to see it as a means of avoiding conscription, and by 1913 the Army Council was itself in favour of conscription. Yet in order to persuade men to sign up, they were not to be liable for foreign service unless they volunteered for it. Because he rightly believed that, given a chance, the regular army would drain territorial funds in order to finance itself, he created County Territorial Associations which maintained the Territorial Force property, with drill halls and rifle ranges, and supplied units with much of their equipment. These not only went some way towards protecting the Territorial Force from regular army pillaging, but, with the active co-operation of King Edward, swung county hierarchies solidly behind the new force. Lords Lieutenant were ex-officio presidents of their associations, and The Territorial Year Book for 1909 shows just how successful Haldane had been in linking landed wealth, local military experience and big employers in his associations.
But the experiment was not wholly successful. The Territorial Force peaked at 270,041 officers and men in 1909, and was only 245,779 strong by September 1913. Wastage ran at 12.4 percent per annum compared with the regular army’s 6 percent, and while the old unreformed auxiliary forces had represented 3.6 percent of the male population in 1903 the Territorial Force represented only 0.63 percent of it ten years later.114 Its equipment was obsolescent: infantry had early marks of the Lee-Enfield rifle, not the Short Magazine of the regulars, and artillery, organised in four rather than the six-gun batteries of the regular army, had 15-pounder guns and 5-inch howitzers. When the regular infantry restructured from eight companies to four in 1913, the territorials did not follow suit. Many employers were no more helpful about releasing men for service with the Territorial Force than they had been with the volunteers. While some regiments took their territorial battalions to their hearts, others did not. There was a long-running dispute about the wisdom of giving territorials artillery at all, and eventually territorial gunners wore the Royal Artillery cap badge with a blank scroll where regulars bore their battle honour ‘UBIQUE’.115
The territorials had their own marked differences. ‘I was commissioned into the 5th Scottish Rifles in February 1911,’ recalled John Reith. ‘The social class of the man in the ranks was higher than that of any other Regiment in Glasgow.’116 The London Regiment, which consisted of twenty-eight battalions, all territorial, ranged from the very smart 28/London (Artists’ Rifles) which had been commanded by Frederick, Lord Leighton and had been formed for men with artistic leanings, to the rather less smart 11/ London, the Finsbury Rifles according to the Army List but known, from the location of its drill hall at the top of Penton Street and the alleged propensities of its members, as the Pentonville Pissers. When young Alan Harding, a post-office clerk, decided to join the territorials he chose 11/London precisely because he was able to get a commission: he would have had little chance in, say, the 13/London (Kensington) or 14/London (London Scottish). He was a lieutenant colonel with a Military Cross in 1918, joined the regular army and died Field Marshal the Lord Harding of Petherton.117
Bryan Latham agreed about the difference between battalions. ‘Amongst foremost London clubs before the war,’ he wrote,
could be numbered the headquarters of half a dozen of the leading Territorial battalions. Such regiments as the Artists’ Rifles, Civil Service Rifles, the HAC, the London Rifle Brigade, London Scottish and the Kensingtons … Friends would join the same battalion, almost on leaving school; I was in my nineteenth year when I enlisted in 1913, my brother Russell 18, and my cousin, John Chappell, the same age.118
Latham joined 5/London, the London Rifle Brigade, whose headquarters in Bunhill Row included offices, stores, a large drill hall (also equipped as ‘a first-class gym’), messes, canteens and a billiard room. The athletic club met there once a week. There were shooting matches at Bisley, and an annual marching competition, with a
