‘Joey’ by the troopers) had been standing in for a sick staff officer who returned to duty on the day of the battle, but he still managed to avoid the charge. Smith heard a soldier call out ‘There goes Joey’, and sure enough ‘in the distance could be seen the adjutant galloping back towards the encampment. This caused great amusement and laughter – he had only been with us a month and had made himself thoroughly obnoxious to everyone.’24 Adjutants were generally ex-rankers until well on in the nineteenth century, for, as Lord Panmure, Secretary at War 1846–52, observed, it was hard to get a gentleman subaltern ‘to take the office of adjutant from the arduous character of its duties and the constant confinement it requires to barracks’.25
What the adjutant did for an individual unit, so the adjutant general did for the army as a whole. He was based alongside the commander-in-chief in Horse Guards, before crossing Whitehall to the Old War Office, then moving to the MOD’s Main Building and eventually having his own headquarters at Upavon in Wiltshire before being swept up into the army’s new headquarters, Marlborough Lines near Andover. The best adjutant generals combined regimental experience (giving them an understanding of the impact of bureaucracy on the army in the field) with a sharp brain and a thirst for the administrative flood that drenched their regimental counterparts. Henry Torrens, a Londonderry man, was commissioned under-age into the 52nd Foot in 1793, and did a good deal of regimental duty in the West Indies, Portugal, and India. By 1805 he was appointed assistant adjutant general for the Kent district. Another interlude of regimental duty saw him wounded at Buenos Aires, where a musket ball ‘shattered a small writing apparatus which was slung to his side’. He became Assistant Adjutant General at Horse Guards, and then Assistant Military Secretary there, with a brief period in the Peninsula. A major general and a knight, Torrens became adjutant general in 1820. He managed to write a drill-book, Regulations for the Exercise and Field Movements of the Infantry of the Army, and played an important part in rebalancing the army as it ran down for a long period of peace. Contemporaries thought that his ‘excessive labours’ had weakened his health, and he died suddenly in 1828.
Individual armies in the field had their own adjutant generals, their tasks mirroring those of regimental adjutants on the one hand and the army’s adjutant general on the other. From February 1916 until the end of the war Lieutenant General Sir George Fowke was adjutant general in France. He had gone to war as the BEF’s senior Royal Engineer, and his promotion partly reflected GHQ’s discomfort with this big, clever man whose influence had grown inexorably with the importance of engineering. As adjutant general he left the routine of office work to others, but retained a penetrating overview, sharpened by a remarkable memory for detail. The scale and diversity of his branch’s work emerges from the digest of administrative routine orders issued to help all officers in the adjutantal line. Fowke’s branch warned individuals of the danger of being struck by the propellers of low-flying aircraft; established the grounds for reporting a man ‘missing, believed killed’; directed units to send the originals of their war diaries up to the Deputy Adjutant General on the last day of each month, and decreed that the only vehicle allowed to fly the Union Jack was the commander-in-chief’s.26
A commanding officer was no less dependent upon his quartermaster than his adjutant. Quartermasters were originally ex-NCOs given warrants to act in that appointment. When Charles Jones was reviewing officers’ duties in 1811 he observed that the quartermaster of the Blues was unusual in that he held a proper commission, but although quartermasters as a group ‘stand, in front, at the head of their class, [they] can never be on a level with the youngest cornet’.27 It was not a status that always made for comfortable relations between veteran quartermasters and less experienced junior officers. In July 1811, Quartermaster John Foster Kingsley of the 30th Foot was court-martialled at Campo Mayor for taking possession of bullock carts reserved, by Wellington’s orders, for ammunition and supplies, and using them for his own battalion’s equipment. One of the charges against him was that he had disobeyed the orders of Lieutenant Rae of the Royal Scots, who claimed use of the carts. It transpired that Rae had detained two members of the 30th’s cart-escort, alleging that they were drunk and insolent. When Kingsley declined to hand over the carts there was a quarrel in the street: Kingsley not only refused to acknowledge Rae’s authority but, when Rae threatened to take the carts by force, pointed out that he too had armed men at hand. If Rae demurred, suggested the quartermaster helpfully, then they should step aside and settle the issue ‘in a private manner’. Matters were not improved by Kingsley’s offer to return the carts when he had finished with them, for the commissariat official with Rae said ‘I would not take your word for you are no gentleman’, serving only to remind Kingsley of his position. Moreover, as commissariat officials did not hold commissions themselves, it was exasperating for one to lay claim to status that was by no means evident.
Most of the witnesses supported Rae, apart from Hospital Mate Evans, who was about to be appointed assistant surgeon to the 30th, and had good reason for not antagonising its quartermaster. The court martial found Kingsley guilty on two of the three charges against him, agreeing that Rae was indeed his senior officer. Kingsley was suspended from rank and pay for three months, a modest sentence in the circumstances, and earned a surprisingly gentle reproof from Wellington, who reminded him that ‘inconvenience may be felt at some time by individuals’ but the general interest had to take precedence. A modern quartermaster, shown the court-martial papers, concluded that he would have done exactly the same in Kingsley’s place, and put his own battalion first.28
After 1871 quartermasters were granted honorary commissions as lieutenants or captains, and the Manual of Military Law emphasised that, even though they still held substantive warrant rank, this made them officers within the meaning of the Army Act. They were invariably promoted from the ranks, usually moving on to be their battalion’s quartermaster after having served as its RSM. It was not until after the First World War that they were given full commissions, and not until later that the concept of a ‘Late Entry’ commission was introduced, enabling commissioned ex-warrant officers to do a wide variety of jobs. The post of quartermaster had never been the only outlet for officers commissioned from the ranks. There was the adjutant’s appointment until it became the preserve of mainstream officers. The regimental post of paymaster, once thought highly suitable for an ex-NCO, had become attractive to gentleman officers rather earlier, because it was seen to be ‘one of the best appointments in the service’ from a financial point of view. Riding masters in the cavalry were commissioned from the ranks, and the post still exists in the Household Cavalry. Later, directors of music (senior to bandmasters, who are warrant officers) and masters at arms in the Army Physical Training Corps were also ex-rankers. However, the concept of the Late Entry commission enabled such officers to do a wider variety of jobs than ever before, perhaps commanding headquarters companies in infantry battalions or furnishing the Royal Army Medical Corps with the non-medical administrative officers it needs.
Doug Beattie was commissioned in 2005 after his tour as RSM of 1/R Irish and twenty-two years’ service, and acknowledged that while this gave him the opportunity to stay in the army ‘for the immediate future and well beyond’, there was a catch. The army thought him ‘best suited to a training and logistical role’. After a training job he would then be likely to return to his old battalion where ‘I would probably become a welfare officer, looking after the families of those going off to fight.’ It was not for him, and he decided to resign. Before his resignation took effect, though, he was posted to Afghanistan, where he won a Military Cross in a burst of desperate fighting alongside the Afghan National Army and police at Garmsir in 2006. Although still determined to leave the army, he was unable to resist the opportunity of helping his own battalion prepare for its Afghanistan tour, and accompanying them when it deployed. ‘Soldiering was what I did and what I knew’, he wrote. ‘It was in my blood.’29 His unhappiness with the sorts of jobs on offer after commissioning is not untypical. It reflects a slow transition, not yet completed, between old army and new.
It is impossible to overemphasise either the importance of quartermasters or their impact on superiors and subordinates alike. Some might indeed have deserved the description given the quartermaster of a cavalry regiment in the Indian Mutiny as ‘old, excessively
