Band of Brigands by Christy Campbell

Author:Christy Campbell [Campbell, Christy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-732585-6
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2000-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

First it was the turn of the junior officers, ‘many of them arriving straight from cadet school’. They soon found themselves ‘doing their first parade on the square under the RSM and were not released from this duty until the Colonel was satisfied with the smartness of their drill and the correctness of their word of command.’

Daniel Hickey found himself being shouted at by a Coldstreamer RSM who ‘instilled all the latest drill from Chelsea Barracks’. Colonel Willoughby admired the eventual punctiliousness of the subaltern's own shouted commands and intimated that if he carried on like this ‘he would gain promotion’.

Sergeants and corporals were, according to the battalion history, ‘similarly examined and instructed, while for the men, drill was the order of the day. The battalion commander set himself from the first to instil into his command as much as possible of the spirit of the famous regiment in which he himself had been trained.’ The type of recruit was the same ideal that Swinton had been after: a trained soldier with a knack for machinery. ‘A very large percentage of the personnel owed their original choice of unit to an interest in motoring of one kind or another and the number of motor cyclists in the battalion was considerable,’ said the battalion history. ‘At this late stage of the war however it was impossible to hold in any way strictly to these standards and all kinds and conditions of men formed the raw material of the new unit…’ A junior officer newly arrived at Wool expressed it more laconically: ‘Apparently infantry battalion commanders had been circulated and asked to recommend their most intelligent men, particularly those with some mechanical knowledge … Such a request produced the inevitable results and we found that the new drafts consisted not infrequently of agricultural labourers and men with interesting crime sheets.’

Pounding the parade ground in Dorset, Lt-Col. Willoughby might have tried to make his disparate flock think and behave like Guards-men. When they got to France, their new instructor (although himself no less keen on discipline) would strive to do the opposite.

Just as in Suffolk, the start in Dorset was an epic of improvisation. The first workshop was housed in a canvas aircraft hangar. Live 6-pounder- and machine-gun firing was carried out to the north of the camp until complaints from the locals led to a move to the coast at Lulworth. The workshop companies were found from the Army Service Corps depot at Grove Park in south-east London. There was also the urgent question of a commander for the ‘home side’.

Ernest Swinton had been sacked without too much fuss (he went back to the Committee of Imperial Defence).* Butler and Whigham seemed keen on a rather grand figure, Brig.-Gen. W. Thwaites, a Royal Horse Artillery brigade commander who was quite ignorant of tanks. Whigham thought him an ‘excellent man’. It was not to be Thwaites (he would end up head of Military Intelligence.) On 20 October, the fifty-two-year-old Brig.-Gen. Frederick Gore-Anley, DSO, veteran of the Sudan, South Africa and the Marne, was appointed in Swinton's place, and Lt-Col.

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