in the service, he is ineligible under the regulations to be promoted to the rank of Major, for which otherwise, in consideration of the services described by Sir Harry Jones, he would have been happy to have recommended him.8
Another hero of the Indian Mutiny, Lieutenant Henry Norman, had so many recommendations that all he needed was his captaincy for the honours to kick in. ‘On the day of his captaincy,’ wrote a delighted brother officer, ‘he will be Major, Lieut-Colonel, CB [Companion of the Order of the Bath], perhaps full colonel. He deserves it all and more.’9 Fred Roberts (who was to die as a field marshal in France in 1914) received his brevet majority on the day that his captaincy was gazetted in 1860, and a brevet lieutenant colonelcy followed almost immediately. Brevets were granted generously and gave commanders a quick and easy way of showing their approval.
The sniper’s fire of individual brevets, aimed at individuals, was interlocked with the wholesale bombardment of general brevet promotions that caught up whole batches of officers of similar seniority. In 1810 Henry Torrens assured a colonel that ‘It keeps up the spirit of an army to give frequent promotion to a Class of Men who have nothing to look to but the honourable attainment of rank in their profession.’ He enclosed an Army List showing the impact of a proposed general brevet. It would make ‘the Cols of 1803 and 1804 to be Major Generals, the Lieut Cols of 1800 to be Colonels, the remainder of the Majors of 1802 and the whole of 1803 to be Lieut Colonels.’ He added a postscript saying that he had just calculated the speed of promotion across the army, and reckoned that a man would be ‘tolerably fortunate’ to make lieutenant colonel with fifteen years’ service, and it would take him ten more years to make colonel and another seven as colonel before he became a major general. This meant that ‘the more fortunate’ of those who had entered the army at 16, could make major general at 51. The last general brevet, he added, had indeed promoted its youngest major general at 51 but its youngest lieutenant general at 75. Torrens understandably added an exclamation mark.10
General brevet promotions could mark an event like a Royal Jubilee, or the end of a war. A large promotion followed peace in 1815 ‘to reward those by whose brilliant service the peace had been achieved’.11 When the army was being shrunk in the 1820s, brevet rank was used as an inducement to get officers to leave. They could retire with ‘Superior Brevet Rank in the Army’ and receive the half-pay of that new rank. They could then, if they wished, sell this ‘Unattached Half-Pay Commission’, an enticing departure from the general principle that one could only sell a commission that had been bought. There were an enormous amount of general brevets awarded in 1846, 1851, and 1854, but the process created a huge amount of elderly generals: the average age of major generals in the 1854 brevet was over 65. Over a twenty-year period half the major generals had not served for ten years, many had not served for twenty, and one had had no service for thirty-five. General brevets were abolished in 1854 and a fixed establishment for general officers was introduced, with rules for promotion and retirement.
A brevet officer usually did duty in his regimental rank, though serving outside his regiment – for instance, as aide-de-camp to a general – would allow him to be employed in his army rank, and to draw the full pay for it. There were certain other advantages. In 1869 it was laid down that captains holding a major’s brevet would be allocated cabins in troopships ahead of mere regimental captains; and in 1898 all brevet officers were ordered to wear the badges and appurtenances of their army rank. An order of 1912, however, ungenerously warned that brevet rank did not exempt an officer from passing the appropriate promotion examinations.
The over-generous use of brevets, together with the granting of temporary rank to help officer an army swollen by war, could create anomalies, with a favoured few enjoying temporary and brevet rank well in excess of their regimental rank. The Duke of Marlborough tried to explain that just because an officer had a temporary commission as brigadier, and brevets taking him through major to colonel, he was still not the senior captain in his own regiment, and when all the froth and bubble had gone, he was likely to finish up commanding a company again. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission as brigadier,’ wrote the duke, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, and there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’12 In 1767, a dispute over command of the Cork garrison between Lieutenant Colonel Tulikens of the 45th Foot and Lieutenant Colonel Cunningham (regimentally a captain in the 45th, but holding his senior rank by brevet) established that ‘When corps join either in camp, garrison or quarters, the oldest officer (whether by Brevet or any other commission) is to command the whole.’13
Brevet promotion lasted for much of the twentieth century, although it was increasingly discredited. On 26 August 1914, 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders formed part of the 3rd Division, holding the line in front of Audencourt at the battle of Le Cateau. Troops in that sector did not receive the order for a general withdrawal, and so, true to the standards of that tough old army, they fought on. At about 7.45 p.m. that evening Colonel William Gordon VC, second in command of the Gordons as a regimental major, noted that his battalion now had a company of Royal Scots and two of Royal Irish fighting alongside it. He immediately took command of the combined force by virtue of his army rank, which made him senior to Lieutenant Colonel Neish, his own commanding officer. The little party began to fall back just after midnight. It eventually collided with a field gun blocking the route, and although the Gordons rushed the piece before it could be fired, nearby Germans immediately stood to their arms and after an hour’s battle the British were overwhelmed. The Gordons lost about five hundred men, although a few survivors made their way through the German lines to Antwerp and on to England.
‘The fortune of war was hard upon the 1/Gordons’, lamented the official historian. ‘For the time, they practically ceased to exist as a battalion.’14 Survivors found the circumstances of the capture extremely galling, and after the war there was a civil action when Gordon sued a Dundee newspaper for repeating a story that he had ordered the men to lay down their arms: he demanded £5,000 and received £500, which was nevertheless a substantial sum. Whatever the truth of the decision to surrender, command arrangements had certainly not made for a quick decision at a moment when time was of the essence. Nor did brevet rank make Major General Hubert Hamilton’s task any easier at Le Cateau. His 3rd Division was bearing the brunt of the battle, but when Brigadier General McCracken of 7th Infantry Brigade was wounded, Hamilton had to send for the Army List to determine that, although both Lieutenant Colonel Bird of the Royal Irish and Lascelles of the Worcesters were substantive lieutenant colonels, and the latter had gained substantive rank first, Bird had an earlier lieutenant colonel’s brevet that gave him command of the brigade.
Brevet rank lapsed in 1952 but reappeared (though only for major to lieutenant colonel) two years later, to increase the field of selection for promotion to colonel, and ‘earmark outstanding officers and give them incentive’.15 It was finally abolished in 1967, although it lingered on into the twenty-first century in the Territorial Army, for specific use in the case of a territorial second-in-command of a unit normally commanded by a regular officer.
Even if no brevet rank was involved, an officer could be granted temporary or local rank, both of limited duration and the latter more fragile than the first. Local rank began by having a specific geographical limitation, like the ‘for America only’ caveat that made James Wolfe a major general in 1759. When Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief, formed his command into three brigades, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Pigot (in Boston in 1775) was promoted locally to brigadier general. He was to command his own 38th Foot, together with the 5th and 52nd. It was Pigot’s brigade that led the decisive break into the Patriots’ redoubt on Breed’s Hill (the key point in the battle known as Bunker Hill), and Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the American Department, announced in the Gazette that ‘the Success of the Day must in great Measure be attributed to his firmness and Gallantry.’ It brought him not only one of the first available regimental colonelcies, but promotion to local major general. He succeeded to his brother’s baronetcy in 1777, and shortly afterwards seniority brought him the substantive step of major general. Sir Robert was promoted lieutenant
