Tommy (22 page)

Tyndale-Biscoe happily went off in his OTC uniform with hasty alterations to the sleeve for his new badges of rank. But he received a rude shock when he joined his battery at Deepcut in Surrey.

He managed to get posted to Woolwich for some proper training, and the other officers he met typified the young men commissioned by these rough and ready methods. ‘I have met a lot of nice fellows here,' he told his father. ‘Apart from Paul, there are two from Cambridge – one shared the same staircase at Jesus with Harold [his brother] and the other who is in my battery stroked the Trinity boat.' Posted back to a battery at Aldershot with some decent training under his belt, he found that he had fallen into the clutches of a battery commander of the horsier persuasion. ‘I don't believe in all these angles and things,' he announced. ‘What I say is – “Gallop up to the top of the hill and poop off”.'
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On 1 December 1914 Second Lieutenant Jim Mackie of 2/4th Somerset Light Infantry, himself only commissioned in September that year, told his brother Andrew:

When the battalion sailed for India there were three Mackie brothers in its officers mess.

In August 1914, Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister, enlisted in the Artists' Rifles and was speedily commissioned into a New Army battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Sir Thomas Pilkington, his CO,

It struck young Harold that he could get to France quicker with a better regiment, and after an interview with the regimental lieutenant colonel found himself translated to 3/Grenadier Guards, whose legacy never left him. ‘I have preserved the habit of being five minutes early for appointments,' he acknowledged in later life.

This spate of commissioning went on into 1915. Bernard Martin, still at school, was summoned by his headmaster to be told:

A public school boy who wanted a commission could scarcely fail to get one. But when R. C. Sherriff was being interviewed he gave the name of his school, only to discover that it was not on the approved list: the fact that it was a grammar school with a long and distinguished history did not help. His interviewer regretted that there was nothing that could be done, and Sherriff duly signed on as a private, to gain his commission the hard way.

Not all public school boys, students or graduates wanted commissions. Sometimes this was a matter of principle. Frederick Keeling (‘Siberian Joe') was twenty-eight in 1914, a Cambridge graduate and a member of the Independent Labour Party. He enlisted in 6/Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and refused a commission, though he rose steadily through the ranks to become a company sergeant major in 1916. That summer he wrote to his mother-in-law:

He was killed at Delville Wood on 18 August, and never knew that he had won the Military Medal, gazetted the following February.
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Richard Henry Tawney, a devout Christian, socialist and distinguished economic historian, enlisted in a New Army battalion of the Manchesters at the age of thirty-four, also declined a commission and was wounded as a sergeant on the Somme. A general visited him while he was in hospital and warned the sister in charge of his ward that she was looking after a national treasure. Shocked, she asked Tawney why he had not told her that he was a gentleman. Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of the
Morning Post,
joined 2/2nd London in 1914, refusing to apply for a commission. ‘No, I will do the thing fairly,' he declared. ‘I will take my place on the ranks.'
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He fought in Gallipoli, and was then transferred to 12/London. By now a sergeant, and recommended for the commission he felt he had to earn, he was killed when 56th Division assaulted Leuze Wood on 7 October 1916. By then he had established himself as a poet of some distinction and, like so many poets, expressed a rage in his writing that was absent from his military persona.

Even more volunteers wanted to stay in the ranks because that was where their friends were. Some units, like many of the London battalions constituting 33rd Division, were filled with men who might more naturally have been officers. The division included five public school battalions, 18/ to 21/Royal Fusiliers and 16/Middlesex; an ‘Empire' and a Kensington battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; a West Ham battalion (13/Essex); the 1st Football Battalion (properly 17/Middlesex); and the Church Lads' Battalion (16/King's Royal Rifle Corps). Even the divisional pioneer battalion, best, if bluntly, described as military navvies, was 1st Public Works (18/Middlesex).
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The Sportsmen's Battalion (23/Royal Fusiliers) included in its ranks two England cricketers, the country's lightweight boxing champion and the former lord mayor of Exeter. A member of the unit described his hut in the battalion's camp at Hornchurch:

Many of these men subsequently did earn commissions – some 3,000 from 33rd Division alone – but many more were killed or crippled before they did so.

Even getting into the ranks could prove tricky. Stuart Dolden was ‘absolutely shattered' when he was turned down at his enlistment medical because his chest measurement was two inches under requirement. He immediately went to a ‘physical culture centre' in Dover Street, whose proprietor told him that his course, of ten half-hourly sessions, would cost 30 guineas, and had been taken by many famous people including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Field Marshal Sir John French. Dolden riposted that ‘I was not concerned with these gentlemen since it was my father who would have to foot the bill', and managed to get it reduced to 6 guineas. The exercises worked, and Dolden joined the London Scottish, paying a pound for the privilege of doing so. It was a good deal easier for Anthony French, signing on at Somerset House, with a grunted monologue from the medical officer:

I. G. Andrew enlisted in the Glasgow University Company of 6/Cameron Highlanders. He found life in a tented camp near Aldershot ‘almost unendurably hard', though it ridded him of ‘a certain priggish donnishness'. The bonds of mateship came quickly. He and three comrades ‘marched together, drank together, ate together and at night slept next to each other wherever it might be – tent, hut, billet or under the open air of heaven'. His company sergeant major was no ordinary man, but ‘a Roberston of Struhan, the son of a Colonel, the grandson of a major-general and an undergraduate of Magdalen College, Oxford'. Roberston had been a captain of rifle volunteers, a justice of the peace in India, and gave his profession on enlistment as ‘actor'. Officially too old for the front, Roberston nonetheless managed to engineer his way to France, where he was wounded at Loos. There was initially too little khaki to go round, and most New Army units wore ‘Kitchener Blue', deeply unpopular because it made them look like bus drivers. 6/Camerons, however, had red tunics with white facings, postmen's trousers, and, as Andrew found, ‘cap comforters closely resembling tea cosies'. The full majesty of the kilt did not come till 1915.

One night in camp Andrew's pal John Irish sang ‘that grand old song
The Trumpeter'.
It is the most poignant of the old army's tear-jerkers, with the trumpeter urging his comrades to:

‘It is a solemn moment,' he reflected, ‘when a young man first senses his own mortality,' and many sensed it then. Offered a commission through the good offices of a friendly MP, he turned it down and went to France as a lance corporal. John Irish departed to be a second lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the farewell was painful.

Andrew's battalion was part of the exceptional 9th Scottish Division. Second Lieutenant R. B. Talbot Kelly, a regular gunner in one of the batteries supporting it, remembered how:

The Camerons went into action at Loos 820 strong and emerged with two officers and seventy men: Lance Corporal Andrew, himself wounded, saw Regimental Sergeant Major Peter Scotland standing over the commanding officer and asked if he should fetch stretcher-bearers. ‘It's no good,' said the RSM, ‘the old man's dying.' Andrew at last felt able to take a commission and, while convalescing, wrote to the commanding officer of 5/Scottish Rifles, who agreed to take him. ‘A man of means' thanks to his outfit allowance, he went to the best tailor in Glasgow for his uniform, but when he reported for duty at Catterick he discovered that ‘second lieutenants were two a penny'.
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Not all Pals' battalions broke the old army's rules quite as dramatically as units such as 23/Royal Fusiliers or 6/Camerons, with their high proportion of educated men serving in the ranks. The 31st Division presented a fairer social cross section, though even here there were far more artisans, students and office workers than ever appeared in the old army. The division's 92nd Brigade had four battalions of East Yorkshires, known as the Hull Commercials, the Hull Tradesmen, the Hull Sportsmen and, for want of a better name, the Hull T'others. In 92nd Brigade were three West Yorkshire battalions, the Leeds Pals and 1st and 2nd Bradford Pals, as well as 18/Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals. The third brigade, 94th, contained 12/York and Lancaster (The Sheffield City Battalion, with many university students in its ranks), 13/ and 14/York and Lancaster (1st and 2nd Barnsley Pals) and our old friends 11/ East Lancashire (The Accrington Pals).