Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902

Ian F W Beckett

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317322177
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

The British amateur military tradition of raising auxiliary forces for home defence long preceded the establishment of a standing army. This was a model that was widely emulated in British colonies. This volume of essays seeks to examine the role of citizen soldiers in Britain and its empire during the Victorian period.

1 Britain

Ian F. W. Beckett

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), the nature of the ‘amateur military tradition’ in Britain took on new forms. The militia, organized on a systematic basis since the mid-sixteenth century, was supplemented by a revival of the volunteers – first legislated for in 1782 at the close of the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) – and by the first appearance of the mounted volunteers or yeomanry. At the time of the Queen’s accession in 1837, however, the militia and volunteers were both in effective abeyance, and the yeomanry had been reduced in strength to just over 19,000 officers and men. That the triumvirate of militia, volunteers and yeomanry in Britain should number over 361,000 in 1903 was testament both to continuing anxieties concerning external and internal threats during the course of her reign but also to the continuing perception of the wider political, social and cultural utility of the auxiliary forces.¹ They provided the essential point of contact between army and society in Britain when the regular army was limited in size and invariably serving overseas. Thus, the militia, yeomanry and volunteers continuously reflected and transmitted attitudes towards military participation. Ultimately, the popular response to the South African War also demonstrated the role of the auxiliaries in the growth of militarism in Victorian Britain.

The militia had been disembodied at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and training suspended, only the permanent staff being retained. A new militia ballot – the force had been liable to conscription since 1757 – was ordered in July 1816 but actual training suspended annually until 1820. Training was then held in both 1821 and 1825. Another ballot was ordered in 1828 but suspended in 1829. In 1830 yet another ballot was ordered in the wake of the domestic reform crisis, and the fall of the French Bourbon monarchy, it being intended to train the force in the summer of 1831. In the event, popular opposition to the ballot brought its suspension in July 1831. The militia also came close to losing its permanent staff altogether in 1834–5. Despite growing Anglo-French tensions in 1840, and an invasion panic in Britain in 1846–7 resulting from fears of French naval expansion, attempts at revival repeatedly foundered until another invasion panic in 1851–2 following Louis Napoleon’s coup in Paris. The militia was seen as a cheaper option than augmenting the regulars and new militia legislation was enacted on 30 June 1852 after no less than 200 hours of parliamentary debate and thirty-two divisions. A total of 80,000 men were to be raised in England and Wales by voluntary enlistment to serve for five years. A bounty was offered together with daily pay during annual training. Questions were raised as to why the militia had not been extended to Scotland though English and Scottish militia legislation had rarely coincided. The outbreak of the Crimean War, however, saw legislation passed on 11 August 1854 to raise 10,000 militiamen in Scotland under the same provisions as those in England and Wales.²

The volunteers had disappeared even before 1815, most of the infantry having been absorbed into the semi-balloted local militia in 1808. The local militia was itself suspended in February 1816: the suspension was renewed annually until 1836 when the local militia was formally abolished. Partly prompted by the example of existing volunteer organizations in British colonies and in the United States, there was growing agitation to revive the volunteer movement in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. Some offers to form rifle clubs or corps were accepted in 1852. Most failed to survive but two – the Exeter and South Devon Corps and the Victoria Volunteer Rifle Corps in London – prospered. There seemed little prospect of a more permanent addition to the auxiliary forces, however, until the occurrence of another invasion scare in 1858–9, with renewed Anglo-French antagonism following an assassination attempt against the now Emperor Napoleon III. Orsini, the Italian refugee involved, had close connections to fellow exiles in London, and his bomb had been allegedly made in Birmingham. Accordingly, on 12 May 1859 the government authorized the formation of volunteer corps. By 1861 there were more than 161,000 volunteers in over 700 separate corps. Most were rifle corps but there were also artillery, engineer, light horse and mounted rifle corps.³ Thereafter, militia, volunteers and yeomanry existed together until the abolition of the militia in 1908, at which point the volunteers and yeomanry were absorbed into the Territorial Force.

In the past, the perceived threat of invasion and concomitant internal disorder had been the primary raison d’être for raising auxiliaries, not least during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mid and late Victorian Britain also had a propensity to succumb to periodic and often irrational invasion scares. Apart from the ‘three panics’ of 1846–7, 1851–2 and 1858–9 – so characterized by Richard Cobden – there was another in 1884–5. This was prompted by a combination of lingering agitation over the proposed construction of a Channel Tunnel; renewed fears of French naval expansion; the seemingly perilous situation of British forces in the Sudan; and a continuing Russian threat to India as epitomized by the Penjdeh crisis, in which Russian and Afghan forces clashed on the Afghan frontier. Press agitation had a continuing impact, as did popular invasion literature such as George Chesney’s Battle of Dorking in 1871, or William Le Queux’s England’s Peril in 1899.

Arguably, the mid-Victorian invasion panics were partly a result of the fear that the steady progress towards political, social and economic stability compared to the often-turbulent years that had followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars could so easily be overturned. The marked admiration for science, progress and achievement, which played such an integral part in the transformation of Victorian attitudes, was itself seemingly a threat to that progress and prosperity through the challenge of technology to Britain’s security. That challenge was frequently interpreted in terms of the supposed progress of rivals – primarily France – towards parity with the Royal Navy. Thus, in a celebrated speech in July 1845 Lord Palmerston implied that the development of steam power had rendered the Channel ‘nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge’.⁴ By the early twentieth century it was Germany rather than France that appeared the most likely threat. The War Office, if not the Admiralty, still believed it necessary to plan for a possible foreign invasion of up to 50,000 men in 1903. Though the newly formed Committee of Imperial Defence considered invasion improbable in 1903, public fears forced it into further invasion enquiries in 1908 and early 1914.⁵

In wartime, the militia could be embodied for permanent service. During the Crimean War, sixty-one militia regiments were embodied. Over thirty volunteered for service overseas, and three for service in the Crimea itself: in the event, ten were dispatched to garrison on Gibraltar, Malta and the Ionian Islands. Some 30,000 militiamen were also embodied in 1857 during the Indian Mutiny, with 20,000 of them again serving in Mediterranean garrisons under temporary legislation. After 1859 there was a liability to serve anywhere in the United Kingdom. After 1875, it was also possible to accept voluntary offers from the militia for service at Gibraltar, Malta and in the Channel Islands where 75 per cent of the men agreed to do so: the remainder could not be sent overseas against their will. Five battalions and a garrison artillery brigade were embodied during the Penjdeh crisis.⁶ The entire militia was embodied in November 1899 though the initial intention was simply to release regulars for service in South Africa, and battalions were only invited to volunteer for overseas garrison duty. A total of sixty militia battalions eventually served in South Africa, as did elements of six militia artillery units and five militia engineer units. Five battalions served on Malta, three on St Helena and one in Egypt: many of the remaining battalions served in Ireland.⁷

The fact that the militia had been called the ‘old constitutional force’ in the past owed much to the parliamentary view of it in the seventeenth century as counterweight to a standing army that might threaten military despotism. The fundamental issue of control of the militia had been one of the causes of the outbreak of civil war in 1642. By the eighteenth century there was less mileage in the idea of the militia as a check on military despotism, and it was much more a case of how far the militia could genuinely supplement the army. What was supposed to be a temporary expedient of recruiting militiamen into the army in 1799 was repeated frequently throughout the Napoleonic Wars. The same thing happened again in the Crimean War with new legislation that enabled 33,000 militiamen to enter the army, often against the wishes of commanding officers. Militia recruitment into the army was suspended in 1860 but revived in 1866. By the 1880s, it was accepted that the militia was simply a draft finding body for the army: between 1882 and 1904 a total of 327,496 militiamen passed into the regular army, representing 35.4 per cent of the army’s manpower requirements in the same period.⁸ From 1872 onwards each militia regiment with at least ten companies also received an annual nomination for a regular commission from among subalterns aged between nineteen and twenty-two, who had attended at least two annual training periods and passed an examination in their professional duties. Thus, it became an acknowledged back door route to a regular commission for those who had failed to achieve direct admission to Sandhurst or Woolwich. Those finding such salvation as militia ‘birds of passage’ included the future Field Marshals, John French and Henry Wilson.

The purely military value of the militia can obviously be challenged. The Crimean embodiment had a detrimental impact with the constant drain of militiamen to the army, and their replacement with ever-younger recruits of increasingly lower social status. Men from three militia regiments were involved in what amounted to a three-day street battle among themselves on Corfu, while resentment at prolonged embodiment brought drunken brawls in a number of towns including Reading, Colchester, Plymouth, South Shields and Southampton. Few time-expired men re-enlisted in 1857, and the number attending the annual training was substantially reduced in 1859. By 1898 it was calculated that, of every twenty men recruited into the militia, seven enlisted in the army, four deserted, five were discharged, and only four completed a full term of service, this having increased from five to six years in 1873.⁹

Volunteers and yeomanry could not be utilized for anything other than home defence without special legislation. It was also the case that there was always an uneasy relationship between volunteers and regulars. Discipline could be difficult where officers and men were of similar social standing, and volunteers had the right to resign on fourteen days’ notice. Professional soldiers assumed that amateurs could not attain the highest standards, and amateurs assumed that hidebound professionals could not comprehend the special value of the amateur approach. The army’s commander-in-chief, the Duke of Cambridge, had remarked in 1857 that volunteers would be a ‘very dangerous rabble’ and ‘unmanageable bodies that would ruin our army’.¹⁰ The decision to raise volunteers in 1859, therefore, met with little military support. Regulars pointed to the collapse of volunteer armies such as the Union forces at First Manassas in July 1861, Garibaldi’s followers at Mentana in Italy in November 1867, and the fate of the French Garde Mobile in the Franco-Prussian War. In vain did volunteers point to the relative success of auxiliaries in Canada and New Zealand. Some of the more extremist volunteers such as Lord Ranelagh did not assist matters by overtly challenging military authority, and demanding an entirely separate volunteer army. It could be argued that Ranelagh was projecting the volunteers as a constitutionally safe and cheaper alternative to regulars in much the way that the militia had once been seen as such an alternative.¹¹ Younger regulars and younger volunteers were more accommodating of each other by the 1880s and the auxiliaries generally began to be incorporated into home defence mobilization plans as it was perceived that they were a viable and cheap ‘second line’. Thus, ninety-seven out of 209 volunteer battalions were included in the mobilization scheme of 1886, while that of 1888 established eighteen volunteer brigades, each of six battalions, occupying six large camps in immediate defence of London.¹²

The localization and territorialization schemes introduced successively by Edward Cardwell and Hugh Childers first linked militia and volunteer battalions with regular battalions centred upon a brigade depot in 1873, and then converted them into militia and volunteer battalions of regular regiments in 1881. It was not always popular or successful. Many militia and volunteer battalions resented losing their separate identities.¹³ Compared with the yeomanry, however, at least militia and volunteers had a defined role. The yeomanry’s annual training was suspended on nine occasions between 1849 and 1881, and it was only in 1888 that it became liable to serve anywhere in Great Britain. Yeomanry regiments were paired in brigades in 1893 in the expectation of brigade training occurring every three years. The system was then abandoned in 1898, by which time the yeomanry had declined to under 12,000 men with less than 9,000 coming out for annual training. Of all the auxiliaries, the yeomanry also proved most resistant to change, remaining wedded to cold steel.¹⁴

Imperial crises stimulated recruitment. The volunteer force increased by over 17,000 men in 1877–8 during the Russo-Turkish War. Similarly, the Penjdeh crisis saw the volunteers increase by over 14,000 men, and the South African War saw an increase of over 58,000. The domestic yeomanry also added an additional 11,000 men during the South African War. Two volunteer units were willing to serve in Canada in the wake of the Trent affair in December 1861, when a Union warship forcibly removed two Confederate diplomats from a British steamer and thus raised the prospect of hostilities with the Union. Offers of home and overseas garrison duty were made in both 1878 and 1885, but all were turned down. The exception was the despatch of two officers and 100 other ranks from the 24th Middlesex (Post Office) Rifle Volunteer Corps (RVC) to Egypt in 1882 to perform the duties of an army post office corps. Subsequently, the battalion formed two field telegraph companies, and an officer and thirty-two other ranks were sent to Suakin on the Red Sea coast as field telegraphists in March 1885. Some forty men from the 1st Newcastle and Durham Engineer Volunteers and 1st Lancashire Engineer Volunteers also went to Suakin on railway duties.¹⁵

A wider interpretation of the potential volunteer contribution was adopted in new legislation in July 1895 but still fell short of permitting service overseas. Thus, in the South African War, both the City Imperial Volunteers, raised by the Lord Mayor of London, and the Imperial Yeomanry (IY) were raised specifically for service in South Africa. Special legislation also enabled the raising of volunteer service companies to be attached to regular battalions from January 1900. Some 7,000 volunteers enlisted in the regular army during the war, and over 19,000 saw active service in South Africa with the service companies or specialist units. Since the IY was recruited far more widely than simply from the domestic yeomanry force, it is harder to ascertain what proportion of its 34,078 members were yeomen. Certainly, only some 18.3 per cent of the other ranks of the first of the IY’s three contingents were pre-war yeomen. Sampling suggests the proportion was far less in the second and third contingents. The social composition of the IY was also much more varied, the third contingent in particular recruiting both the semi-skilled and the unskilled.¹⁶

Such wartime expedients were necessary because the existence of the auxiliaries prevented the army being enlisted by conscription. Apart from temporary legislation in the early eighteenth century to impress debtors, vagrants and criminals, there was no conscription for the regular army until 1916. The memory of the unpopularity of the militia ballot was sufficient to deter most politicians from raising the issue. The issue had dogged the various attempts to reform and revitalize the militia between 1845 and 1852, a clause being inserted into the 1852 legislation in the following year to suspend any possibility of a ballot since the original act had implied it might be applied if voluntary enlistment failed.¹⁷

The threat of internal disorder was also a factor in the survival of the auxiliaries. The yeomanry in particular survived disbandment at the end of the Napoleonic Wars for its usefulness as an improvized constabulary. Ironically, there was government reduction in the force in 1827 on economic grounds in those southern counties where corps had not been called out in aid of the civil power in the previous ten years. It was precisely those counties that then experienced the worst of the ‘Swing’ riots in 1830–1. A number of yeomanry corps were brought back on to the establishment or raised anew. Much the same happened after further reductions in 1...