A British Profession of Arms: The Politics of Command in the Late Victorian Army

by Ian F. W. Beckett

Overview

“You offer yourself to be slain,” General Sir John Hackett once observed, remarking on the military profession. “This is the essence of being a soldier.” For this reason as much as any other, the British army has invariably been seen as standing apart from other professions—and sometimes from society as a whole. A British Profession of Arms effectively counters this view. In this definitive study of the late Victorian army, distinguished scholar Ian F. W. Beckett finds that the British soldier, like any other professional, was motivated by considerations of material reward and career advancement.

Within the context of debates about both the evolution of Victorian professions and the nature of military professionalism, Beckett considers the late Victorian officer corps as a case study for weighing distinctions between the British soldier and his civilian counterparts. Beckett examines the role of personality, politics, and patronage in the selection and promotion of officers. He looks, too, at the internal and external influences that extended from the press and public opinion to the rivalry of the so-called rings of adherents of major figures such as Garnet Wolseley and Frederick Roberts. In particular, he considers these processes at play in high command in the Second Afghan War (1878–81), the Anglo-Zulu War (1879), and the South African War (1899–1902).

Based on more than thirty years of research into surviving official, semiofficial, and private correspondence, Beckett’s work offers an intimate and occasionally amusing picture of what might affect an officer’s career: wealth, wives, and family status; promotion boards and strategic preferences; performance in the field and diplomatic outcomes. It is a remarkable depiction of the British profession of arms, unparalleled in breadth, depth, and detail.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806161716
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	10/25/2018
Series:	Campaigns and Commanders Series , #63
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Ian F. W. Beckett is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and retired Professor of Military History at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the author of A Guide to British Military History, coauthor of The British Army and the First World War, and editor of Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902.
 

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CHAPTER 1

THE PROFESSION OF ARMS

In beginning to assess the similarity of the military profession to others in the late Victorian period, it will first be necessary to explore the nature of professionalism in the army, before passing, in turn, to the matter of ambition, the seemingly pressing concern with monetary rewards, and the pursuit of honors and awards.

Professionalism

How far the late Victorian officer corps developed as a professional body in terms of the dissemination of military knowledge can be debated. Despite its being seen as dominated by the aristocracy, the army had not come under pressure from civilian reformers in the first half of the nineteenth century, other than in demands for further economies. With the exception of periodic interest in flogging, there was no real concern about conditions under which soldiers served.

While progress should not be exaggerated, that did not mean the army went unreformed. There was more practical education for artillery and engineer cadets at RMA Woolwich. By the 1850s there were competitive entrance examinations for Woolwich and RMC Sandhurst, and promotion examinations for those up to the rank of captain, albeit undemanding ones. It was not intended this would open up the army to the "great industrial class," but it was hoped it would encourage greater professionalism among those who would continue to officer the army. There was nothing to suggest that widening the officer corps' social basis would increase its ability.

There is an almost Whiggish sense in which historians have found a growth of British military professionalism from the "swordsmen" of the seventeenth century onward. Often it was a case of a minority struggling against amateur gentlemanly ideals. But then it has to be borne in mind that British officers were not separated from the interests, lifestyles, and accepted norms and values of their wider social class — that of the landed. Social relationships were more important than professional ones, and the supposed separateness of military life has been exaggerated. It has been suggested that officers of the Royal Navy had a special interest in maintaining their particular status in the face of the general rise of professional society. Given the impact of technology on naval affairs, they were confronted by the demand for scientific and technical expertise at a time when traditional landed society was under sustained social, economic, and political pressure. Soldiers were not challenged in the same way. Nor does there appear to have been any crisis of identity among army officers relating to the wider impact on landed society of the agricultural depression of the 1870s to 1890s, the expansion of the electorate, and the emergence of new elective regulatory bodies in local administration.

While examples of resistance to change are hardly absent from earlier periods, the late Victorian period is often particularly characterized in such terms. There are well-known stories of officers more interested in sport than war, and of character rather than intellect being the mark of suitability for commissioning. Character was shaped by an idealized contemporary vision rather than universal or timeless values. It was not contingent on the outcome of actions but on demonstrable qualities irrespective of success or failure. Character was one of the marks of the gentleman on whom the church, the bar, the higher ranks of the civil service, and the magistracy were all equally dependent.

When the soldier-adventurer Fred Burnaby, later killed at Abu Klea in the Sudan in January 1885, tried to interest fellow officers of the Royal Horse Guards in useful military pursuits, he received the reply, "We don't come here to soldier." Similarly, colleagues in the Guards sought to dissuade the Hon. Paul Methuen from going to Staff College, which would make him a "military book-man." Going in for the Staff College examination in 1878, Douglas Dawson of the Second Coldstream discovered it would interfere with Ascot. His commanding officer remarked, "My dear boy, if you will go in for this sort of thing, you must expect to have to do with people who don't understand the ordinary pursuits of a gentleman." According to Count Edward "Glick" Gleichen, Staff College students were seen as a "set of shirkers who left their regiments with a view to an idle two years at the College, to be followed by loafing and well-paid jobs in the plums of the profession." Famously, Frederick Maurice, professor of military art and history at the Staff College from 1885 to 1892, wrote in 1872 that "the British army officer hates ... literary work even in the form of writing letters."

On the face of it, there is much apparently substantiating the image, not least the struggle of the Staff College for recognition and its graduates for employment. From a point in 1870 when twenty candidates were admitted annually to the two-year course, the entry number rose to twenty-four in 1884 and to thirty-two in 1886. No infantry or cavalry regiment could provide more than one student in any year, and there could be only four artillery and two engineer officers (admitted only after 1872) per intake. In 1886, artillerymen qualified for the first seven places with the result that some failed candidates were admitted and successful ones excluded.

In any case, there were real difficulties militating against the development of an intellectual community with the army still widely dispersed across the globe, and with customary divisions between arms and regiments. There was a sense in which there was a "parochial professionalism centred on the regiment and the demands of imperial campaigning." There were also economic and political limitations. The army was perceived as less important than the Royal Navy. Britain was first and foremost a global maritime power, whose naval mastery depended on maintaining a technological lead over its immediate rivals. Naval supremacy required an ever-more costly investment in evolving technology.

Nonetheless, the army's officer corps was not one of unremitting intellectual bleakness. By the end of the nineteenth century, publishers were offering military series. There had been military journals much earlier: the United Services Journal (later the United Service Magazine; 1827), the Naval and Military Gazette (1833), the United Service Gazette (1833), and the Journal of the United Service Institution (1857). The Royal Engineers Institution published its first proceedings in 1837, and the Royal Artillery Institution in 1857. Membership of the latter reached over 1,700 by 1890. Military journals bear comparison to publications of learned societies such as those for zoology (1826), biology (1836), and chemistry (1841).

It is difficult admittedly to assess how far military publications were read or disseminated. Books consumed or written by officers might merely represent a consensus view, or be a synthesis of foreign treatises, lacking all originality. A distinctly "Continentalist" school of thought has been identified that had little relevance to frequent employment in colonial warfare. The rather more practical requirements of actual campaigning found a much more distinctive British voice in the theory of "small wars," of which the supreme example was Charles Callwell. The great strategic debate within the British and Indian military establishments over how to fight a war against Russia, however, was conducted primarily through the circulation of official or unofficial memoranda by leading protagonists. Success by one school or another was measured not by publication but by successful lobbying for senior appointments.

Irrespective of the sources of growing military professionalism, the empire could not have been expanded without soldiers harnessing advances in medicine, weaponry, and communications. There are innumerable examples of new technologies such as the telegraph and the railway being applied to the army's colonial campaigns. The reconquest of the Sudan certainly demonstrated the significance of modern artillery, magazine rifles, and machine guns. Winston Churchill wrote that the battle of Omdurman (2 September 1898), in which some eleven thousand Mahdists were killed for the loss of just forty-eight British, Egyptian, and Sudanese troops, represented the "most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians."

The Royal Engineers were constantly at the forefront of innovation in the science of fortification and submarine mining. Given the small number of civil engineers and scientists, the corps supplied engineering services to society at large. Ordnance survey, irrigation, dams, railway and road construction, prison and museum design all claimed their skills. Contributions to other scientific pursuits such as astronomy and archaeology were equally marked.

Of course, technology was not always the answer to the problems encountered in colonial warfare. Nor did technology count necessarily on the battlefield itself. Well-known lines from Belloc's Modern Traveller — "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim Gun, and they have not" — need to be balanced by those equally familiar lines from Newbolt's Vitae Lampada: "The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead." The fabled square was indeed broken at Abu Klea, despite the presence of Gardner machine guns. Generally, however, it could not be said the army lagged much behind its Continental counterparts even if the challenge of the South African War demonstrated how much more needed to be achieved to shape a thoroughly modern army.

Ambition

It is hardly surprising if soldiers harbored ambitions of rising in their profession. Neatly encapsulating all professionals, Lord Salisbury once warned the viceroy, Lord Lytton, "If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe." On another occasion, Salisbury told Lord Cromer that if soldiers "were allowed full scope, they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the moon in order to protect us from Mars."

Oliver St. John, political officer at Kandahar, wrote to Alfred Lyall, the foreign secretary of the government of India, in January 1879 after the conclusion of the first phase of the Second Afghan War that Sir Donald Stewart deserved credit for keeping things quiet when his subordinates "are burning for a row, and egging him on to march somewhere in hopes of stirring up one, the more so that [Frederick] Roberts & [Thomas] Baker have fully indulged their warriors." One of Garnet Wolseley's leading adherents, George Colley, successively MS and PS to Lytton, suggested the CinC in India, Sir Frederick Haines, envisaged "a great campaign on the Oxus and a peerage."

Reflecting on the disaster befalling Lord Chelmsford at Isandlwana in Zululand in January 1879, Sir Charles Gough, commanding a brigade in Afghanistan, wrote:

Is there not too much presumptuous pushing in the British Army? Men thrusting themselves forward on very superficial grounds and often accepted at their own valuation in trusting to luck to pull them through and gratified by public applause and decorations. Fortunate is the man whose progress upward is gained step by step and with experience upon experience. These are my moralizings on the downfall of Lord Chelmsford, but then the appointing authorities must seek for the best man of the public service — and they are to blame if inferior men are appointed — if when they fall foul as Lord Chelmsford they also fall foul on the authorities who appointed him!

Wolseley was certainly seen as ambitious, egotistical, and dictatoria1. Famously, Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria in 1879, "It is quite true, that Wolseley is an egotist, & a braggart. So was Nelson." Wolseley's great rival, Frederick Roberts, was characterized in September 1879 by a former friend as "one of the most self seeking men I have ever come across and would override everybody & anything that stood in the way of the attainment of his ends." Roberts "would do anything or say anything which he thought would be acceptable to the reigning powers." Henry Hanna, a constant critic, accused Roberts of the most ruthless careerism.

With expeditions in the offing, there was always the clamor to be chosen. On the eve of the Egyptian expedition in July 1882, Sir Daniel Lysons wrote a wonderfully nuanced letter to the CinC at Horse Guards, the queen's cousin George, Duke of Cambridge. Lysons suggested volunteering services was "a conceited assumption of superiority over ones comrades and an expression of want of confidence in ones superiors." Yet, he was "always ready to do any thing and go any where at a moment's notice should my services be required." In 1875 Lt. Gen. William Napier, the RMC governor, wrote to the MS to say he was not sure general officers should offer their services but that, in the event of a war, he would wish to be considered for a field command. Wolseley had at least some admiration for the attempt by "that madman," retired Lt. Gen. William "Hellfire Jack" Olpherts VC, to join him on his way out to Zululand in May 1879 in the hope of employment. Wolseley had to get him removed from the steamer at Dartmouth. In 1882 the highly eccentric Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Havelock-Allan VC turned up in Egypt and took part in the Highland Brigade's attack at Tel el Kebir allegedly armed only with a riding crop. As "mad as ever," Havelock-Allan wanted a recommendation for employment, which was impossible.

In choosing the staff for the Indian expeditionary force for Egypt in 1882, Sir Donald Stewart deprecated the offer of Lt. Gen. the Hon. Sir Arthur Hardinge, CinC at Bombay, to serve under Wolseley. If circumstances arose unexpectedly in the field, then all would be well and good, he said, "but I cannot admire the spirit of the man who deliberately disregards his rank in the Army, and says he will serve under any body." Cambridge warned Wolseley not to accept the services of any officers who went to Egypt without authorization. He repeated the instruction for the Gordon relief expedition in 1884 with particular regard to Fred Burnaby: "What I object to is officers finding their own way out, having the means to do so, & then getting themselves appointed whereas quite as good men, who have not the means & possibly the independence to put themselves forward are doing their duties at home & are naturally much disheartened by seeing their fortunate comrade pushing themselves forward." Burnaby slipped out of England suggesting he was going to the Cape, the War Office fearing he wanted to take part in any operations in Bechuanaland. Instead, Burnaby passed swiftly through Egypt to arrive at the front.

In 1895 during operations for the relief of Chitral, George Younghusband's attention was deliberately drawn away from the ranks of the King's Own Scottish Borderers by Sir Bindon Blood as Lt. Col. Philip "Micky" Doyne of the Fourth Dragoon Guards was serving in the ranks disguised as a private when supposedly on leave. The number of officers trying to get to the Sudan in 1898 led Charles à Court (later Repington) to write cheerfully to Reginald Wingate, "please arrange to have 2 or 3 campaigns before the dervishes are extinguished in order to wipe off the most pressing claims."

Younger officers could be forgiven for doing their utmost to go on service when their seniors were so ready to do so. Hugh "The King" McCalmont was a serial offender. McCalmont was wealthy enough to visit China at his own expense in 1876 to report on the political situation. He anticipated this might be useful experience in the event of any hostilities. McCalmont then used his leave to go to Constantinople "to watch how things were proceeding, and to try and get a footing out in these parts in advance of hostilities in due course supervening." McCalmont extracted a promise from the British military attaché to employ him in the event of a crisis. When war broke out between Russia and Turkey in April 1877, McCalmont was appointed an additional attaché.

McCalmont employed the same tactic in 1880, going to Afghanistan at his own expense despite his OC's initial opposition. He got attached to the brief expedition against the Marri. McCalmont's most blatant venture was to slip away from his command of the Fourth Dragoon Guards in Ireland without informing either the general officer commanding (GOC) of the Belfast Brigade or the GOC in Dublin to try to see action at Suakin. Then adjutant general, Wolseley allowed McCalmont to go. McCalmont and Arthur Paget, whom he met up with at Brindisi, decided to bypass Cairo in case the GOC there, the Hon. Sir James Dormer, tried to stop them. They made it to Suakin but Sir Francis Grenfell only allowed them to observe his operation to clear the Mahdists away from the town. In 1898 McCalmont volunteered to go to the Sudan, a hopeless request given there was no place for a major general, not least one senior to the Egyptian Army's sirdar, Sir Herbert Kitchener.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Abbreviations and Acronyms,
A Note on Titles, Ranks, and Currency,
Introduction,
Part I: Contexts,
1. The Profession of Arms,
2. Promotion and Selection,
3. The Rings,
4. External Influences,
Part II: Case Studies,
5. High Command,
6. The Second Afghan War, 1878–1881,
7. The Anglo-Zulu War, 1879,
8. The South African War, 1899–1902,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

The result of many years of painstaking research, Ian Beckett’s A British Profession in Arms is an invaluable and original addition to the study of the workings of the British Army in the late Victorian period. In what is a complex topic, he skillfully navigates the disparate archive material to produce a book that provides a fascinating insight into the workings of the British Army in the late-nineteenth century.”—War in History
 

“Ian Beckett is perhaps the most important, and certainly the most prolific, historian of the British military writing today. [He] is a treasure, and his latest book is essential for any military historian or scholar engaged in the culture of the late-Victorian Empire.”---Victorian Studies
 

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