Although two of the dominant figures in the late Victorian army, Wolseley and Roberts, were indeed peers, they gained their peerages by their own efforts. Wolseley, as we have just seen, was the son of a half-pay major, and Roberts of a major general in the East India Company’s service, who had begun his own career in the Bengal Artillery, transferring to the British army proper only when the company’s forces were absorbed by it in 1858. Neither officer would have judged himself to be in the top quarter or so of regimental officers with broad acres at their backs. Philip Browne had an atypical career, obtaining a free appointment as quartermaster of the 12th Foot in 1736, buying a cornetcy in the 2nd Horse the following year, and then, in 1745, purchasing the rank of ‘exempt [cornet] and captain’ in the 3rd Troop of Horse Guards, whence he disappeared onto half-pay in 1746. His quartermaster’s post could not have been gained without influence and his Horse Guards commission would have been very costly. He summed up his brother officers as ‘private gentlemen without birth or [influential] friends’, and the phrase is wonderfully apposite.67 The army appealed to a wide coalition of scions of lesser, landed families and sons of the growing middle class, keen to make their way in the world, who constituted a majority of officers. Interest, where they could command it, would secure them a step here or there, and the family could often muster enough money for a crucial promotion. John Houlding, that gifted historian of the eighteenth-century army, identified a third category, ‘drawn socially from a wide spectrum across the first two groups, and including a significant minority of foreigners, chiefly Huguenots’. Members of this group lacked land or much money, but ‘were nevertheless gentlemen well-enough born and educated’.68
As the army grew in size and became a more stable career, so it ‘bred up a professional class which was dedicated to its service’, and from the early eighteenth century this group was notable for constituting military families that played an increasingly important role in furnishing officers.69 In his study of 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers’ part in the American war, Mark Urban describes a regimental officer corps that typified many at the start of a long campaign, before death vacancies had opened up promotion. Most officers had grown old in their rank: Frederick Mackenzie, the adjutant, had been a lieutenant for about half his forty-four years. Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Bernard’s father John had commanded a company in the 23rd at Fontenoy in 1745, and his own son John was serving as a second lieutenant. Both the regiment’s colonel, Sir William Howe, and the Secretary at War, Lord Barrington, recognised the importance of looking after the poor but deserving officers who constituted such an important part of the regiment. Lord Barrington told Major Blakeney, who was anxious to avoid service, that ‘Those not capable of doing their duty should dispose of their commissions nor expect to be continued in the army to the detriment of the service, and the prejudice of other officers able and willing to serve.’ When Blakeney took the hint, Howe offered the majority at a knock-down price to the worthy Captain Nisbet Balfour, who was still feeling the pain of buying his captaincy, but knew that the majority was too good to miss and wrote that ‘I must trust to fortune to clear me’.70 By the end of the nineteenth century there was a marked tendency for officers to come from families with strong military connections. Of the sample of 1914 generals referred to above 39 per cent had fathers in the army; the next largest professional group was the 12 per cent of generals who were sons of the manse. Twenty-two of the forty-one military parents were generals or admirals, and most of those who had retired at ranks below colonel seem to have done so to claim the family inheritance. Just over half the eldest sons in this sample had followed their fathers into the service, a larger percentage than for any other major professional group. By 1910 a remarkable 43.1 per cent of the young men entering Sandhurst as ‘gentleman cadets’ had fathers in the service.
The growing tendency of these military families to remain associated with the same regiment is well exemplified by the Gores and the 33rd Foot. This was later known as the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment and nine Gores served in it over two centuries. John Gore was commissioned into it when it was raised in 1702 and retired as captain lieutenant twenty years later. Another John Gore was commissioned in 1748 after spending a year as a volunteer, and retired as a major in 1774. His sons Arthur and Ralph both served in the regiment: Arthur was killed as a brigadier general at Bergen op Zoom in 1814, and Ralph went off to another regiment as a lieutenant colonel. Both Ralph’s sons followed him into the 33rd; one of them was killed at Waterloo. Sir Ralph Gore, who became 1st Earl of Ross, lost a hand at Fontenoy and brought the regiment out of action at Laufeld in 1747. William Gore served from 1766 to 1794, retiring as a major. At the other end of our time-scale, Major General Sir John Adye observed that ‘The persistence of family names in the gunners and sappers is a very marked feature of these two corps and … my own family may almost constitute a record.’ He himself was a fifth-generation gunner, and when he died in 1930 the family had already accumulated 135 years of unbroken service – which was then continued by his son.71 Francis Davies, a major general in 1914, had been commissioned into the Worcester Militia in 1881 and then transferred to the Grenadier Guards, the regiment to which his father and grandfather had both belonged.
These broad social groups were neither static nor self-contained. Henry George Hart was a major’s son from a Devonshire family. In 1829 he was given a commission in the 49th Foot, and rubbed along until, nineteen years later, having made some money compiling Hart’s Army List, he managed to buy the regiment’s majority. He died a lieutenant general, and his brother, an engineer officer who won the VC in Afghanistan in 1879, reached the rank of general. Henry’s son, Arthur FitzRoy, was born in 1844, and was named after the two officers his father admired as the greatest soldiers of the age: the Duke of Wellington and Lord FitzRoy Somerset, the future Lord Raglan. He attended Sandhurst but was too young to take a commission at the end of the course. From here Arthur went on to Cheltenham College, failed the entrance examination to Woolwich, and promptly went back to Sandhurst, thereby earning the distinction of being the only man to pass out a second time. He obtained a free ensigncy in the 31st Foot and purchased a lieutenancy in 1867. The following year Arthur married Mary Synnot, daughter of Mark Synnot who owned the Ballymoyer estate, with over 7,000 acres in Armagh. He served under Wolseley in the Ashanti war, and eventually commanded the Irish brigade as a major general in the Boer War before retiring to live the life of a member of the landed interest and serve as a JP. Slim, ramrod straight, and sharply moustachioed, he looked every inch the Irish landowner he had become – by marriage. His son Arthur Henry Seton Hart-Synnot was educated at Clifton College, commissioned from Sandhurst into the East Surrey Regiment (as the 31st had now become) in 1890 and served as his father’s brigade major in the Boer War. A cultivated man and a talented linguist, he learned Japanese and served as an observer of the Russo-Japanese War, and commanded an infantry brigade on the Western Front in 1917–18. His substantial landed interest might put him towards the top of our second category.
The fourth group comprises what Houlding called ‘subaltern officers of advanced age and experience promoted from amongst the non-commissioned officers’.72 These men, typically, rose from sergeant major to become ensign and adjutant, and were often commissioned so late in life that that they would be lucky to get beyond captain. Indeed, Thomas Barrow, father of George, author of Lavengro and The Bible in Spain, joined the army in 1783, became a sergeant nine years later and retired as a captain. When fifteen senior regiments of foot were expanded by being given second battalions in 1756, five of the new ensigns in 2nd Battalion 3rd Foot (The Buffs) were provided by commissioning the quartermaster and four sergeants from the 1st Battalion. When this battalion moved on to become a regiment in its own right, as the 61st Foot, in 1758, six of its subalterns had been commissioned from the ranks. One had served for 25 years, three for 19, one for 13 and the remaining one for 11 years.
The eighteenth-century army se
emed more prepared to grant cavalry NCOs commissions in the infantry than it was to commission infantry NCOs within their own arm. Mark Odintz suggests that this might have been because they already understood something of those gentlemanly attributes, horsemanship and swordsmanship, or because it was easier for a man from a traditionally ‘high caste’ arm to impose his authority. It may equally well reflect the fact that the cavalry always recruited a proportion of well set-up young men with a natural affinity with horses. These often came from a yeoman farmer background, and made admirable NCOs, but they would have little chance of surviving as officers in such a costly arm. When the army was reduced on the outbreak of peace, commissioned rankers were usually the first to be sent off onto half-pay, a process encouraged by the fact that they were often amongst the oldest of their rank. However, even in the eighteenth century there were several examples of men who began low and rose high:
John Jeffries, one of the marine colonels of 1741, began life as a gunner: Joseph Guest who was deputy-governor of Edinburgh Castle and a lieutenant general was originally a Yorkshire groom; James Robertson, colonel of the 15th Regiment and a lieutenant general when he died in 1788, was given a commission in a marine regiment in 1740 after spending some years in the ranks.73
A more liberal view was taken in the nineteenth century. From 1830 to 1859, 1,016 NCOs were commissioned, a figure that includes both combatant commissions and promotions to quartermaster and riding master; these thousand men represented 18.69 per cent of the non-purchase total of 6,146. There were some years in which the number of NCOs commissioned actually exceeded that of cadets commissioned from Sandhurst. In 1854, for example, with the army expanding for the Crimea, 372 commissions were bought and 319 given free, 50 of which went to Sandhurst cadets and a remarkable 121 to NCOs. Some regiments were veritable nurseries of new officers: between March 1854 and May the following year, the 13th Light Dragoons commissioned six of its sergeant majors, one into a death vacancy, another ‘for distinguished service’, and two into the regiment as quartermaster: another was sent off as riding master to the 1st Royal Dragoons, and the sixth as adjutant to the 2nd Dragoons. There were some remarkable stories. The Scotsman William Webster joined the 23rd Light Dragoons in 1812 and was a sergeant by the time the regiment was reduced after Waterloo, when, to avoid being discharged he volunteered for the 16th Lancers as a private. Webster was back up to sergeant again in 1818, became sergeant major two years later, and bought his cornetcy in 1827. This is in itself astonishing, for we can only imagine how someone from the ranks could afford something beyond many middle-class families. Perhaps a regimental officer with money to spare gave his sergeant major a leg up. Webster became lieutenant in 1832 and captain in 1847, both without purchase, and when he retired in the latter year he had a remarkable total of 45 years and 3 months service, with 23 years, 9 months on postings abroad, including the regiment’s whole scorching tour of duty in India – from 1822 to 1846.
Not all officers commissioned from the ranks had grown grey in the service by the time they laid aside their musket to buckle on a sword-belt. While there are not enough of these men to constitute a group in their own right, they should certainly not be ignored. The orphan John Shipp joined the 22nd Foot in 1797, and became a sergeant very quickly. He was commissioned into the 65th Foot after repeated displays of bravery at the siege of Bhurtpore in 1805, and given a lieutenancy in the 76th three weeks later. Exceptionally, Shipp was allowed to sell out to pay off his gambling debts, and promptly re-enlisted in the 24th Light Dragoons. After making his way up to sergeant-major, he was commissioned again, this time into the 87th Foot. In 1823 he was sent on half-pay after being court-martialled following a dispute with his major, a sad end to a remarkable career. Charles Robert Cureton was a gazetted lieutenant in the Shropshire Militia in 1806 who, after getting into severe financial difficulties, faked suicide by leaving his clothes on a beach, then enlisted in the 16th Light Dragoons under the pseudonym Robert Taylor, soon becoming a corporal. Wellington’s military secretary, Lord FitzRoy Somerset (who had known Cureton as a civilian) had him attached to headquarters as a confidential clerk, and he was commissioned without purchase into the 40th Foot in 1814. He transferred to the 20th Light Dragoons almost at once, was lieutenant and adjutant in 1816, shifted to the 16th lancers in 1819 and made his way on up to become a lieutenant colonel in 1839 and colonel in 1846. Cureton was killed as a brigadier general at Ramnagar in the Second Sikh War.
NCOs who were both brave and lucky might become officers while they still had time enough to make their way. Bernard McCabe, probably the son of Irish immigrants, enlisted in the 31st in 1839, and was a sergeant when the regiment assaulted the Sikh entrenchments at Sobraon on 10 February 1846. He picked up the regimental colour and planted it on the ramparts, was commissioned into the 18th Foot, and promoted lieutenant in the 32nd in 1849. He was mortally wounded as a captain at Lucknow, leading a sortie against the rebel guns. As the British advanced up the slope from the River Alma in the Crimea under heavy fire, Colour Sergeant Luke O’Connor, a 23-year-old Irishman in the colour party of 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers, saw that Lieutenant Anstruther (bearing the regimental colour) was hard hit. He picked up the colour and, although wounded himself, carried it until the battle was over. He was no less brave in the assault on the Redan, part of the fortifications of Sevastopol, where he was twice wounded. O’Connor was commissioned and became the first member of the army to be awarded the newly instituted VC. When he died in 1915 it was as a retired major general and a knight. William McBean of the 93rd Highlanders had already been commissioned from the ranks and was a 40-year-old lieutenant and adjutant when his battalion assaulted the great breach in the Begumbagh at Lucknow. He hewed down eleven men with his broadsword, earning the VC, and when congratulated on a good day’s work replied ‘Tuts, it did’na take me twenty minutes.’
William McBean died a major general, his career epitomising that of a brave, well-conducted soldier who had made his way through his own efforts, with a happy ending to his story. Hector Macdonald or ‘Fighting Mac’ was not so fortunate. Born in 1853, son of a crofter on the Black Isle, he worked in a warehouse in Inverness and served in the local company of Rifle Volunteers, before enlisting in the 92nd Highlanders in 1870. By the time he joined a draft for India the following year, he was doing so well that he was given the local rank of ‘salt water corporal’ for the voyage, and was a colour sergeant when the regiment fought in the second Afghan War in 1879. His first citation for bravery, in an action involving small detachments of his own battalion and an Indian unit, told how ‘The courage and skill with which this party was handled reflected the highest credit on Colour Sergeant Hector Macdonald, 92nd Highlanders, and Jemadar Sher Mahommed, 3rd Sikhs.’ He ‘again distinguished himself’ in another small action, and his conduct in the defence of Roberts’s cantonment at Sherpur was so remarkable that he was allegedly offered the choice of a VC or a commission. Whether the question of the choice is apocryphal, he was certainly commissioned, and the men of his company carried him shoulder-high to the officers’ mess, before the pipes played ‘Cock of the North’ as each man marched up to salute him. His battalion went from India to South Africa, and he was captured at Majuba Hill, earning a third mention in dispatches for his ‘conspicuous gallantry’.
Hector Macdonald shone in war but made heavy weather of peacetime, when he was just about able to survive on his pay. T. P. O’Connor knew him well, and wrote, ‘He was one of those men who ought never to have appeared out of uniform … He just looked a Tommy, and a Tommy in his Sunday clothes, which is not Tommy at his best.’74 He went through ‘an irregular form of marriage’ to Christina Duncan, and although a son, Hector Duncan Macdonald, was born in 1887 the couple never really lived together and his documents still listed his next of kin as his brother William. He transferred to Egyptian service in 1880, commanded a Sudanese battalion, and in 1898 (by now a brevet lieutenant colonel) led a brigade at Omdurman. The war correspondent George Warr
ington Steevens described him as being ‘very gleeful in his usual grim way’ as he swung his brigade, with consummate skill, to meet a flank attack. He was appointed CB, made a full colonel and an aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, but hated all the publicity. When the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and Silversmiths presented him with a sword in 1899, he privately admitted that he wished that he had the price of the sword in his pocket. He commanded a brigade in India and then moved on to lead the Highland Brigade in the Boer War after its first commander was killed in a night attack. On catching some shirkers at Paardeberg, he drew his revolver on them: ‘Ye dairty hounds, ye know what I should like to do with ye. Now git on, I say, git on, ye dairty hounds.’75 Macdonald was knighted after the war, and was soon promoted major general and appointed General Officer Commanding Ceylon.
There he fell from grace, and fell hard. Trevor Royle, his sympathetic biographer, suggests that his ‘lack of allegiance to the white planter class’ meant that he had enemies ready to pounce on him when he committed ‘a habitual crime of misbehaviour with several schoolboys’, or perhaps exposed himself in a railway carriage. Royle suggests that this ‘was not a court-martial offence, by any stretch of the imagination’, although the Manual of Military Law observes that an officer’s behaviour that might bring a scandal on the service should be tried by court martial as ‘Disgraceful Conduct’ and ‘there is no power to award any other punishment than cashiering on conviction for this offence.’76 The colony’s governor granted him leave ‘to save public scandal’ and he went to London, called on his wife in the ‘relative middle class comfort’ of Dulwich, and then went to see Lord Roberts, now commander-in-chief, at the War Office. Roberts had been responsible for commissioning Colour Sergeant Macdonald all those years ago, and was not naturally inclined to court-martial senior officers. He wired Colombo that he did not propose to confirm the six months’ leave given by the governor ‘as he does not desire to remove Macdonald from the ordinary process of law.’ On his way back to Ceylon, Macdonald broke his journey in Paris, where he saw in the papers that he was returning to face a court martial. He shot himself through the head at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, using a small-calibre pistol he had bought the day before. His body was brought back for burial in Edinburgh, though a persistent (and wholly incredible) legend has him covertly spirited away to Prussia, where he became Field Marshal Freiherr Anton Ludwig Friedrich August von Mackensen.