The British Officer

Leading the Army from 1660 to the present

Anthony Clayton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138136335
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317864431
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

An Army officer must lead men into frightening and dangerous situations and sometimes make them do things that they never thought they could do. This book recounts how British officers have led their men, and commanded their respect, from the days of Marlborough to the Second Iraq war of 2003. Anthony Clayton explores who the officers, men and now women, have been and are, where they came from, what ideals or traditions have motivated them, and their own perceptions of themselves. His account tells the fascinating story of how the role of the military officer evolved, illustrated by a selection of captivating images, and the personal memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of officers.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION – THE HISTORY OF A PROFESSION

The British Army Regimental Officer of the early 21st century, on training or in action, will appear almost indistinguishable from the rank and file; only a small drab tag bearing the badge of rank hanging on his or her chest will show that the wearer holds the Sovereign's Commission. The uniform, a camouflage combat kit, will bear no medal ribbons; even rank badge shoulder epaulettes, too easy for a sniper marksman to discern, have gone. Nevertheless the simple tag carries an authority and a status that has a long historical tradition.

This work concerns the regimental officer of the Regular Army, the man and, from the 20th century on, the woman inside the uniform. Successive chapters will seek to show who the officers of the Army, from the days of King Charles II to the present, have been and are, from where they came, what ideals or traditions have motivated them and their own perceptions of themselves. Also discussed are officers' relationships with the men they command, their training, initial and continuous, for their role, the linkages between the military and the nation's royal, political and social establishments and, by no means least, the personal family issues facing officers in their careers. These all have to be seen amid evolving national history, developments in military technology and changing concepts within leadership practice and theory. All contribute to the mystique behind the drab tag, but the wearer is still an individual with a personal mix of values, virtues and weaknesses. Chapters 15 and 16 will be concerned with the Indian Army and colonial regiments, and with specialist professional officers such as doctors and chaplains.

Military combat has, from Old Testament times, always required the services of a small number of individuals who will provide the leadership required for, and by, large bodies of men, the followships. These men need, firstly, the purely professional skills required for the type of combat in which they are engaged, the skills of weaponry and tactics. However, equally important, good officers have increasingly needed and developed group dynamics, the ability to lead people to perform deeds of which they never believed they could be capable, to endure hardship, ceaseless toil and monotony, to subordinate their own individual interests to that of the team, to face fear and, if so required, the unlimited commitment of injury and death. Two such men, within recent memory, were Colonel James Carne of the Gloucestershire Regiment in Korea in 1951 and Colonel ‘H’ Jones of the Parachute Regiment in the Falklands in 1982. Without such abilities the ablest field tactician may not succeed in motivating his soldiers sufficiently to secure a victory. The abilities imply inner personal qualities much less easy to define or describe, an empathy with the followship, the ability to understand the needs of the soldier, to appreciate the qualities and recognise the anxieties in each individual, and an intuition that can sense the state of morale within a group even if it is not expressed in words. These qualities have roots in ancient Greek concepts of obligation, Roman stoicism, Christian concern for fellow humans and a romantic sense of purpose higher than self-interest. With many honourable exceptions, however, they were not greatly evident in the mass of officers of the 17th and early 18th centuries where the officer—soldier relationship was too often one of institutional corruption, indifference and social class superiority on the part of the officer, with fear of punishment among the soldiers. Change was to develop slowly throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, in part occasioned by the military needs of weapons and tactics and in part by the changing nature of both society and the followship. Soldiers became increasingly recruited from restless urban societies no longer possessing the hierarchic cohesion of the countryside, and in the mid-20th century expecting to be told very clearly why they were being asked to risk their lives. At the same time, officers' perceptions of their responsibilities progressively widened.

The qualities do not replace management, they extend it. Management can deploy a soldier to the front line, furnish him with clothing, equipment and weaponry that he will need, and train him for the conditions of battle. But something more is needed to provide the élan for an attack or for a dogged defence under great pressure, involving the risking of life; the challenge of the battlefield, whether the Northern Ireland border or Iraq, is of a very different order to that of the market or the production line and one requiring a much greater sense of purpose. Unit command certainly requires an element of management as well as leadership, but within a regiment, at sub-unit levels, company, squadron, battery, platoon, troop, personal leadership is all-important. The army, the regiment, needs to be seen by the soldier as an institution they admire, in which they are proud to serve, and not an occupational job to do in order to move on to the next, more profitable, appointment.¹

And here it becomes possible to extrapolate and summarise that within the institution, army or regiment, the leader – the officer – has to operate in a triangular relationship of which he or she is one point, the second being their rank and file, and the third the society and political direction that recruit, pay and deploy them. The styles of command from officer to soldier have varied and evolved clearly according to the changing social backgrounds, education and psychology of the soldier. Much more opaque has been the third, the attitudes of the British public and society as a whole towards the Army and its officers.

A conditioning factor for the relationship between the first two points of the triangle, the officer and the soldier, is the tradition, with origins derived from the insular situation of the country and its common law tradition, that service in the Army should generally be voluntary and not obligatory. Of course push factors such as poverty, unemployment and a tiff with either a lover or the law have led men throughout the ages to volunteer where in happier economic or social circumstances they might have chosen a less demanding profession. Nevertheless, the ethos has, except for the last years of the First World War and the years 1939 to 1960, generally been one of voluntary engagement, free men from a free society of their own will accepting discipline and the responsibility of bearing arms. The British soldier is a ‘private’ and has never been an automaton; on parade he looks the inspecting officer in the eye as he stands in front of him, he does not swivel his gaze around before and after the officer passes. Drill and division into small units and sub-units, both essential for military duties, have over the last 200 years been designed for officers and soldiers alike to remould the individual as a soldier, not to destroy his individuality as a person. Perhaps the most famous of all the British Army marches, Kenneth Alford's Colonel Bogey – especially the traditional barrack room words attached to the tune – illustrates best the paradoxical mix of respect and readiness to accept discipline with at the same time a good humoured, almost two-fingered, gesture towards authority.

It can also be argued that the antecedents of the British Army in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods left other specifically English marks on the concept of a military officer that survive to this day. In the Middle Ages no standing army was thought necessary except, from 1486, the purely palace force of the Yeomen of the Guard. When men were needed, the monarchs, from Saxons to Tudors, turned to landowners, many of whom at one time or another had received gifts of land from the monarch, and expected all landowners, aristocrat or squire, to furnish men for the fyrd (the Saxon armed force) and later the Militia. For this they were given a Colonelcy commission and some money – insufficient for the costs involved. Later, individuals were given indentures to raise bodies of mercenaries for operations outside England as the Militia were not liable unless they volunteered – or were coerced. A rudimentary draft system for the Militia, providing for some very basic military training, was created in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Throughout, however, for its commanders, the Militia process involved concepts, later inherited by the Army, of an element of financial ‘sacrifice’, of noblesse oblige. This element included a linkage binding local notables in any particular county or region with the monarchy, together with a leadership based on the local notables, gentlemen.² Until 1939 officer cadets at both the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and the Royal Military College Sandhurst were styled ‘Gentleman Cadet’, a style abolished by the post-1945 Labour Government.

The units of volunteers and Militia sent to fight, not always very satisfactorily, in the Netherlands in the last fifteen years of the 16th century were formed of between 700 and 900 men with a Colonel in command and the men divided into companies commanded by a Captain. Above unit level were a number of ‘Colonel-Generals’, with at the summit a Master General of the Ordnance, a Master Gunner and a Forage Master, and at Commander-in-Chief level a Serjeant-Major General. The term ‘Colonel’ derived from the Italian word colonnal, a little column, i.e. the officer leading the little column at the head of a regiment; ‘General’ became the term attached to an officer whose command was general, i.e. not limited to one or a very small group of units. But, in sum, the style, one to last for a long time, was that of the amateur rather than the professional and Queen Elizabeth I's military units were far from being a standing army.

The Civil War armies, those of both the King and the Parliamentarians, and especially Cromwell's New Model Army, provided even more distinctive and long-lasting marks. The Royalists' tradition reaffirmed a personal loyalty to the person of the Sovereign; at the battle of Naseby the field word of the Royalists was ‘Queen Mary’. Cadets at Sandhurst are to this day commissioned following a ‘Sovereign's Parade’. From the Parliamentarian armies came the concept of military service in a just moral cause, both the cause and the role of the officer being execution of the Will of Almighty God. At the battle of Dunbar Cromwell's Army's word was ‘The Lord of Hosts’!

In 1644, in the Souldiers Catechisme, the troops of the Parliamentary Army were instructed that the Word of God assured them that their profession was a noble one; that their cause, a religious one, was just, as their adversaries had persecuted justice, liberty and true religion; that they owed it to posterity and to themselves to stand up for the good; that those who did not share these beliefs were at best cowards if not actual enemies with whom God would deal; that their cause being good would prevail and that of the enemy being bad would fail because God was on the side of the righteous; and that if soldiers were good and God-fearing they would be blessed by God.³ This catechism could have been written by Field-Marshal Montgomery in 1944, the wording in his Orders of the Day was but little different.⁴

The demands of the wars forced both sides into organising armies and units into much more clearly defined structures and military hierarchies for the sake of efficient command and control. Cromwell's New Model Army of 1645, which by 1649 had incorporated most of the units of the other Parliamentarian forces, already shows a familiar officer rank structure. At the top was the Commander-in-Chief, the Lord General (one, briefly, was even given an honorific role as Field-Marshal), the General's deputy a Lieutenant-General, a number of staff Generals for particular purposes, such as pay, transport, victuals and intelligence, Serjeant-Major Generals (Serjeant being soon dropped from the title) commanding formations, Colonels in command of infantry, cavalry or dragoon regiments assisted by a Lieutenant-Colonel and a Major, together with Captains, Lieutenants and Ensigns for the infantry companies or Cornets for the cavalry troops, and Quartermasters. Surgeons and Chaplains were also provided for regiments.⁵ The officers of both the Royalist and Parliamentarian armies were mostly landed gentry and squirearchy, though the Parliamentarians did also include a number from trades and crafts. Equally important from the Civil War period, more from the red-coated Parliamentarian units than those of the King, was inherited the vital and distinctive British component of the relationship between the officer and his soldiers, the regiment itself, with binding personal and psychological linkages. With the possible exception perhaps of the French Army's Troupes de Marine, no other 21st century army has a military unit system in which the unit is so much a mutual-obligation extended family in which the officers develop a paternal concern for the welfare of their men. In time this came to extend to assistance in times of trouble not only during but also after military service. Regiments and regimental esprit de corps also create both a determination not to let the regiment and fellow members down and, in addition, a competitive spirit in rivalry with other units, all of enormous value for military efficiency.⁶ Both sides sought, with varying degrees of success, to discipline their armies with a strongly developed regimental system. From medieval times army commanders had issued codes, laws, articles or orders for the disciplining of soldiers – and officers. In both the Civil War armies these were modelled on Swedish or Dutch codes. In the Parliamentarian armies, officers commanding units were required to have a copy and read it aloud regularly to the men under their command. Regimental courts tried minor offences, courts-martial the more serious. The New Model Army was the better disciplined, punishments ranged from shooting or hanging for mutiny; whipping (up to sixty lashes) for plundering, violence or fraud; or for minor offences running the gauntlet, sitting for periods of time on an uncomfortably angled wooden horse stand with hands tied and weights attached to legs, mutilation and branding, or an open humiliation. Marriage without leave was severely punished. Officers convicted of offences were usually cashiered; pay fraud and drunkenness were the commonest officer offences.

The Cromwell Protectorate era also saw the first example of a commitment to be undertaken by the British Army in centuries to follow: colonial warfare and the maintenance of order in tropical territories. In 1655 General Monck sent four companies of foot soldiers to take Jamaica. The expedition, like many others subsequently, was poorly prepared in every way, the soldiers suffering and dying from disease; it was, however, eventually successful. A final but less fortunate mark left by the political armies of the Civil War, in particular the Parliamentarians, was a public distaste for the military, a consequence of the bloodshed and destruction caused by the war, high taxation, billeting, the depredations of unpaid soldiers and the arbitrary rule of ambitious generals. Other factors, among them the peripheral but dominant social class from which the majority of officers were drawn in the three centuries that followed, the occasional use of the military for repressive purposes, military incompetence and the on-going looting and raping by drunken soldiers, all served to perpetrate this distaste and, for the Army and its officers, contributed to their sense of distance from wider society. Change in public attitudes really only became effective during and after the Second World War, with, firstly, the popular image of Field-Marshal Montgomery, ‘Monty’, at last bringing both military success and a remarkable common touch when addressing soldiers or the general public and, secondly, the increasing skill show...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction — The History of a Profession
• 2 The Officer in the Restoration Army
• 3 The Officer in the Armies of the Later Stuarts
• 4 The Officers of the Georgian Army to 1793
• 5 The Officer in the Era of Wellington
• 6 The Officer from Waterloo to the Crimea
• 7 The Crimea and the Indian Mutiny
• 8 The Victorian Army Officer
• 9 The Edwardian Army Officer
• 10 The Regular Officer, 1914–18
• 11 The Regular Officer Between the two World Wars
• 12 The Officer, 1940–45
• 13 The Officer in the First Post-War Years
• 14 From Aden to Belfast and Basra
• 15 British Officers of Imperial Regiments
• 16 The Officers of the Support Services
• 17 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Address Given by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins to His Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment on the Day Before the Opening of the 2003 Iraq War
• Appendix 2 Maintenance of Tradition in the British Army of 2004–05
• Appendix 3 Income, Pay and Expenditure
• Appendix 4 Officers Training Corps
• Index