hours to have any chance of winning. For weekend training the eight companies would parade on Saturday afternoon at Waterloo station and travel by train to Weybridge. They marched to the local drill hall, and had supper at a restaurant, followed by a singsong: ‘at such affairs every member of the LRB, whatever his rank, met on the basis of comradeship; on parade army discipline and routine took over again’. There was an early reveille, breakfast, and then manoeuvres on Weybridge Common. ‘These took the form of long lines of skirmishers extending to three yards, instantly advancing by short rushes, one half of the company giving covering fire while the other half moved forward,’ recalled Rifleman Latham. ‘The whole culminated in fixing bayonets and charging a hill.’ The battalion returned to Waterloo at about 8.00 on a Sunday evening:
Everybody was brown and felt fit; it had been, of course, a lovely sunny weekend, but then all weekends before the war seemed to be sunny, or perhaps it is merely the thought of them in golden retrospect.119
The London Regiment was unique: territorial infantry battalions were generally part of regiments which included regular battalions too. Most followed the pattern of the Queen’s Royal Regiment. In 1914 both regular battalions were in England, 1/Queen’s at Bordon in Hampshire and 2/Queen’s at Lyndhurst in the New Forest. The Special Reserve battalion, 3/Queen’s, was based at the regimental depot, Stoughton barracks in Guildford, and there were two territorial battalions, 4/Queen’s, with its headquarters at Croydon, and 5/Queen’s at Guildford. Most of the half-dozen or so regular permanent staff instructors attached to each of the territorial battalions were regular Queensmen, although the adjutant of 4/Queen’s, unusually, was Captain P. H. C. Groves of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Battalions of the London regiment had regular affiliations, the London Rifle Brigade with its regular homonym, for instance. The Queen’s was associated with 22/London and 24/ London (The Queen’s), based in Bermondsey and Kennington respectively, which wore its cap badge and had many Queensmen on its permanent staff.
There were inevitably exceptions to this pattern. Some counties, such as Cambridgeshire and Herefordshire, were too small to have their own regiments. Regular recruits went to a nearby regiment – the Suffolks for Cambridgeshire, and the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry for Herefordshire. Larger counties, such as Surrey, could maintain two regiments, in this case the Queen’s and the East Surreys. And three regiments with exceptionally good recruiting areas, the Royal Fusiliers (City of London), Middlesex Regiment and Worcestershire Regiment, had three regular battalions, which skewed subsequent battalion numbering. New Army battalions, as we shall soon see, numbered after the territorial battalions of the same regiment. The foot guards had only regular battalions, three each for the Grenadiers and Coldstream, two for the Scots and one for the Irish. There was, as yet, no Welsh Guards: the regiment would not be formed until 1915, mounting its first guard on Buckingham Palace on 1 March, St David’s Day, that year.
Haldane had stuck steadfastly to the principle that the Territorial Force should contain all arms, and so it did. The fact that it attracted many middle-class men who would have been unlikely to join the ranks of the regular army meant that many of the men who joined specialist units such as the Tyne Electrical Engineers – formed to maintain searchlights and communications in the Tyne defences – already had skills which the army could use. It was harder to create purely military skills in the training time available. Norman Tennant enlisted in 11th Battery, 4th North Riding Howitzer Brigade, in 1913, with several friends from Ilkley Grammar School. In August that year his unit camped at Aberystwyth. ‘To this day,’ he mused, ‘the smell of crushed grass, which is always to be found inside marquees, reminds me of the rough and ready meals on the bare trestle tables, slightly flavoured with smoke from the cookhouse fires …’. He found that the experience was useful in more than a military sense.
It was natural that groups of school friends should be drawn together, in addition to making new contacts, and this continued throughout the war. In due course we came to appreciate the sterling qualities of some of the rougher local types and responded to their innate friendliness but here in our first annual camp we felt rather shy and tended to associate with those we already knew so well.
Horses presented a real challenge, especially his ‘spare wheeler’ –
a vast immobile brute with thick hairy legs and drooping head; it seemed quite happy to spend much of its existence standing perfectly still, an occasional tremor of its lower bearded lip indicated that life was still present.
Tennant served in the same battery throughout the war, and recalled ‘the care and devotion to his men by the battery commander, Major P. C. Petrie DSO MC, who helped raise it, train it and commanded it till the end of the war’. Its discipline, he believed, ‘was derived more from a sense of comradeship than from the methods normally employed by the Regular army’.120
Haldane also formalised the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC). The forerunners of these had been founded in Victorian times as rifle volunteer corps attached to universities or public schools. Some of the latter took their corps very seriously: the Eton College Rifle Volunteers had a regular adjutant and turned out in a natty shade of the French grey. Enough members of Cambridge University Rifle Volunteers volunteered to fight in the Boer War for the unit to earn a ‘SOUTH AFRICA’ battle honour. Haldane established junior divisions of the OTC at public schools and some grammar schools: successful cadets earned Certificate B, a very basic certificate of military knowledge. Senior divisions were at universities, and their cadets could earn Certificate A, which was believed to fit them for a territorial commission. More broadly, the scheme was expected to attract men and boys of ‘the intellectual and moral attainments likely to fit them for the rank of officers’, even if they did not immediately put these qualities to use. Between August 1914 and March the following year, 20,577 officers were commissioned from OTCs, and another 12,290 ex-OTC men were serving in the ranks.121
That arch-regular Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in the summer of 1914, had a low opinion of the Territorial Force. In part it stemmed from his experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when he had served briefly with Chanzy’s Army of the Loire and had been less than impressed by French irregulars. In part it reflected the fact that he had spent most of his career abroad, and had been wholly untouched by Haldane’s advocacy of a national army. Indeed, he admitted to the formidable leader of the Ulster Unionists: ‘I don’t know Europe; I don’t know England; and I don’t know the British Army.’ And in part it embodied his own instinctive mistrust of the amateur: on the morning that he took over the War Office he declared that ‘he could take no account of anything but regular soldiers’.122 And to raise a new one he decided to bypass the territorial system altogether.
Kitchener’s decision has been widely criticised, but it was not wholly illogical. Many territorials immediately volunteered for foreign service: F. S. Hatton proudly remembered that in his unit ‘the men who did not wish to volunteer for foreign service were asked to take a pace to the rear. The ranks remained unbroken.’123 The Northumberland Hussars affirmed that all its men had already accepted foreign service as a condition of their enlistment. But the picture was far patchier elsewhere. Walter Nicholson, a regular staff officer in what was to become the very good 51st Highland Division, admitted: ‘We were very far from being a division fit for defence.’124 Some men immediately volunteered for foreign service; some officers automatically assumed that their men would volunteer, and unwisely took this assumption for assent. Others would not serve abroad. ‘It was not cowardice that decided them to say they wouldn’t fight,’ wrote Nicholson, ‘it was the
