by Richard Mead
Sport played a big part at West Downs and here Tommy began to show that he was his father’s son. The school was small and it was probably not difficult to get into the teams, but for two consecutive years Tommy kept wicket for the First XI at cricket and was awarded his colours. In the first of these, 1909, another member of the team was Oswald Mosley. Tommy also played for the First XI at football and won a number of cups and badges for diving. This last would have surprised those who knew him later in life, as he professed a lifelong aversion to swimming, but it was possibly the activity which allowed him out of the pool as fast as possible.
It does not seem that he was particularly distinguished academically, as he left as late as his age permitted, not much short of his fourteenth birthday. However, he enjoyed his time at West Downs, so much so that he had no hesitation in sending his own son there. Both Freddie – to whom Helbert used to write addressing him as ‘My dear ole [sic] man’ – and Tommy remained devoted to Lionel Helbert until he died in 1919 after a brief illness, exacerbated it was said by his horror at the slaughter of the Great War, in which so many of his former pupils had died: they included 25 per cent of Tommy’s 1905 intake.
Tommy did not follow his father to Wellington, but rather his grandfather to Eton, where he arrived as a new boy at the beginning of the Michaelmas Half in September 1910. The Headmaster of the day, Edward Lyttleton, was known as a sportsman rather than a scholar and his regime probably suited boys like Tommy well. He was placed in Somerville’s House1 situated in Keats Lane in Coleridge House. His housemaster, Annesley Somerville, was well regarded and the house was a successful one at the time.
Although he enjoyed himself there, Tommy did not have a notably sparkling career at Eton. Scholastically he was average, finding himself in the Middle Division as he reached the Fifth Form in September 1913. Shortly afterwards he moved to the Army Class for the remainder of his school career, joining those who were destined for a regular commission in the Army via the Royal Military College at Sandhurst or the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Quite when he made this decision it is impossible to say,2 but Army Class II, in which he sat, was under the superintendence of Somerville, who doubtless saw the boy’s potential in this direction. Tommy had in any event joined the Officers Training Corps (OTC) in May 1912 at the age of fifteen. The OTC was and remained an entirely voluntary activity and only a relatively small minority joined it until late 1914, when there was an understandably enormous expansion, so his early participation was an indication of real interest, although he never progressed beyond the rank of private. Entrance to the Army Class required a certain standard in both Maths and German in the School Trials (internal exams), but Tommy had taken German rather than Greek at School Certificate level so was well placed in that direction. Once there, the objective was no longer to pass the Higher School Certificate, but rather the Army Entrance exam.
Perhaps surprisingly in the light of his later athletic success, Tommy never represented the school in any sport. He continued to play cricket initially, but moved from ‘dry-bob’ to ‘wet-bob’ in his last year, when he rowed for his house in the Junior House Fours in the bumping races of 1914. The boat had some success, bumping up two places and moving from the second to the first division. More importantly, he and R. G. Barker won the Novice Pulling (Pairs) in the same year. Tommy also played at a senior level one of the two uniquely Etonian games, the Field Game, and was in the Somerville’s team which narrowly lost the House Cup Final at the end of his last term. Otherwise, the only sporting activity recorded was one which he would take up much more seriously some years later and at which he would eventually excel. On 28 March 1914 he ran in the finals of the hurdles at the Sports Day, coming in third.
It was probably on the social side that Tommy shone brightest, once again emulating his father. Eton had no prefects appointed by the Headmaster, so the authority of the boys was wielded through other means. In the individual house, this was through the House Debating Societies and the House Library, membership of both of which was by election, the voters being the existing members. Tommy was elected to the Somerville’s Debating Society in the Michaelmas Half of 1913, over a year before he left. The first debate at which he spoke came shortly afterwards and concerned ‘The advantages and disadvantages of a Channel Tunnel’, an issue which had exercised the nation since the days of Napoleon and was to continue to do so for a further seventy-five years. In the debate Tommy proposed the advantages, on the grounds that it would benefit trade and improve relations between France and Great Britain. He suggested that any objection could only be founded on the assumption that France was held by an enemy of Great Britain, but that in any event, a tunnel would be easy to defend and, if necessary, to destroy. The argument carried the day.
Tommy was also elected as a member of the House Library, which effectively comprised the house prefects, in the Michaelmas Half of 1914. As in gentlemen’s clubs, the election method involved the use of white and black balls, but he received none of the latter on this occasion. The same cannot be said of his election to Pop, the Eton Society,3 whose members are the nearest thing to school prefects and who are distinguished by their dress, which includes checked trousers and coloured waistcoats. Pop, to an even greater extent than the house equivalents, was and is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, as only those who find favour with a substantial majority of the incumbent members can enter. It requires four black balls to be rejected: Tommy received three!
In Tommy’s day, most of the twenty-three members of Pop were the school’s top athletes, although a few had achieved popularity for other reasons. Many of them were to feature subsequently in his life, although the coming conflict would reduce their numbers seriously. There were five debates during the period of Tommy’s membership, the first of which was ‘Whether the annihilation of Prussia is desirable’, a motion which was rejected by twelve votes to ten, a surprisingly mature outcome in the light of the jingoistic mood of the nation at the time.
The Old Etonian network has always been extraordinarily influential and the connections which Tommy established during his time at the school, particularly through membership of Pop, were to be of benefit throughout his life. Even if he had not been particularly friendly with another old boy of the same vintage, the very fact that they had attended the school at the same time would give them common ground. His contemporaries included a future Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, and a number of other future politicians, including Oliver Stanley, Eden’s predecessor as Secretary of State for War and later Colonial Secretary in Churchill’s wartime Government, and Oliver Lyttleton,4 the Minister for Production in the same Government.
As for future army officers, there were a large number who would enter, but not survive the Great War. Of those who did, the most successful were Richard McCreery, the last commander of Eighth Army in Italy, and his predecessor in that role, Oliver Leese. McCreery was also in the Army Class, always destined to be a professional soldier, though his career and Tommy’s would hardly cross subsequently. Leese, on the other hand, would feature large in Tommy’s life thirty years later. Leese was about two years older, but stayed on at school until he was nearly twenty. Partly because of his long career there, he became a member of Pop in 1913 and was one of relatively few members of the Sixth Form. He was also a notable cricketer, although, to his lasting regret, he was Twelfth Man for the annual match at Lords in 1914 against Harrow. Confident and ebullient, he stood head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries and would go on to have an outstanding military career, but it was to end in controversy in circumstances in which Tommy was to be intimately involved.
Tommy sat the Sandhurst entrance exam on 24 November 1914. In common with a large number of other candidates he failed to achieve the required marks in some of the compulsory papers. He passed English and French comfortably, but fell short in the joint History & Geography paper and did very badly in Mathematics. All was not lost, however, as there was a provision in the Regulations for Admission to
the Royal Military College whereby the headmasters of certain schools, including Eton, could recommend candidates for nomination by the Army Council. Lyttleton obliged and the Army Council, probably concerned by the already significant losses of officers on the Western Front, made the required nomination.
Chapter 3
Boy (1914–1916)
After a brief Christmas holiday, Tommy entered Sandhurst on 27 December 1914. The Great War was less than five months old, but it was already apparent that it would not be the quick affair many had expected. The war of movement of the first two months, in which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had first been forced to retreat from Mons and had then struck back with the French in the ‘miracle of the Marne’, was followed by the inconclusive First Battle of the Aisne and the ‘race to the sea’, in which each side had attempted to outflank the other until the Allies reached Nieuport, north of Dunkirk, in early October. With a stalemate in place, the BEF was positioned around the town of Ypres, where a battle raged for four weeks from 30 October to 24 November. Although the town was held, with a salient to the east, the First Battle of Ypres was an unmitigated disaster for the Regular British Army, which was effectively destroyed as a fighting force. Replacement could only come from the Territorial Force, up until then essentially a home defence organization, and from Lord Kitchener’s New Army, which was in the early stages of its formation.1
Tommy could thus afford to take the time required by the Sandhurst wartime course without fear of missing the boat. Unlike during the Second World War, the Royal Military College and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich remained open and continued to prepare gentlemen cadets for regular commissions,2 although much the larger proportion of those who became officers during the Great War did so by other routes, usually through being commissioned in the Special Reserve or by promotion from the ranks. Upwards of twenty thousand officers were commissioned purely on the strength of their experience in the OTC.
Sandhurst had already expanded in the immediate pre-war years. In 1912, the completion of the New College allowed the formation of additional companies, and these were increased in number from eight to ten during the Great War. Additional accommodation was found by doubling up in rooms and by taking over the nearby Staff College and the course was reduced from a year initially to three months, but later extended to six in Tommy’s time, to eight in 1916, to ten in 1917 and back to twelve months with three terms in 1918. The curriculum was truncated accordingly, but drill and musketry retained their prominence.
In contrast to his modest achievements in both the OTC and the entrance exam, Tommy did well at Sandhurst, rising to Under-Officer in H Company. His contemporary, Collie Knox, later wrote that, on returning late from an evening in London, ‘None of us were too anxious to be caught by our Cadet Under-Officer. We all liked him, we all admired him, but we had a wholesome respect for him.’3 Knox went on to say that the Company Staff Sergeant, Bill Harley, stood in some awe of Tommy, whilst it was rumoured that even the College Sergeant Major, Mr Wombwell, had hushed his mighty voice in his presence.
Tommy graduated from Sandhurst and was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards on 16 June 1915. This was one of the most prestigious regiments in the British Army and, although he was interviewed successfully by the Lieutenant Colonel commanding the regiment, Colonel Sir Henry Streatfeild, a personal introduction would have been required for him to be accepted, even at a time of national emergency. This can only have come from one or more of the connections which Tommy’s father had been steadily building during the years leading up to the War.
Freddie had actually been in France himself during the autumn of 1914 as a result of his membership of an organization with which he had become involved many years earlier. The National Service League (NSL) had been founded by the 4th Duke of Wellington in 1902 to campaign for compulsory military training. Its President was Field Marshal Earl Roberts of Kandahar, who had taken on the role in 1905, not long after he retired from the Army. The NSL was an unashamedly patriotic organization which had been formed in the aftermath of the South African War. That war had started very badly and was only rescued from disaster by Roberts during the first nine months of 1900, by which time it had exposed serious failings in the direction of the Army. It was partly in response to this and partly because of the growing threat of German militarism that a number of leading politicians and businessmen had formed the NSL.
At the time Great Britain and the United States were the only major powers not to have large conscript armies. The former had always relied on naval supremacy, but many thought, correctly as it turned out, that another major conflict in Europe would require a much larger army than one primarily designed for colonial wars and which had shown itself ill-equipped to fight even an amateur European foe in South Africa. The NSL did not propose full-time conscription, because it realized that it would be deeply unpopular, but instead advocated a requirement for all men in a certain age group to undergo two months of initial training, followed by annual periods of training for three years. Although opposed by most in the governing Liberal Party, it attracted a number of influential members, including Rudyard Kipling and Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Roberts’s predecessor as Commander-in-Chief.
Freddie was one of a number of businessmen who joined and he became exceptionally close to Roberts at the centre of the NSL’s activities. Early in 1914 he used an I Zingari cricket tour to Egypt to canvas Field Marshal Viscount Kitchener, the British Agent, Consul-General and Plenipotentiary, and effective ruler of the country, for his support. Kitchener, although himself a Tory by personal persuasion like most supporters of National Service, had held himself aloof from the campaign. However, sitting next to Freddie at dinner, he agreed that he was broadly in favour and would come out in support at the right time. In the event he was never to do so as events supervened, notably his own appointment as Secretary of State for War in August 1914.
Roberts was appointed Colonel-in-Chief of the Empire Troops in France at the beginning of the Great War and selected Freddie to accompany him to the front as his ADC in the autumn of 1914. Roberts, however, having discovered on a visit to Ypres that the Indian sepoys lacked winter greatcoats, declined to wear his own, contracted pneumonia and died in St Omer on 14 November. Although this meant an end to his patronage, Freddie had by that time built up an impressive list of powerful contacts throughout British society, including a number of serving and retired army officers. He was thus in a good position to see his son into the best possible regiment.
The Grenadier Guards, in which Tommy was to serve for twenty-four years, was not the oldest regiment in the British Army, but it was possibly the most celebrated. Formed by the future King Charles II in 1657 during his exile, it became the First Regiment of Foot Guards in about 1685 and the Grenadier Guards in 1815, after it had defeated Napoleon’s Imperial Guard at Waterloo, in further recognition of which it adopted the bearskin as a mark of distinction. Its former members include the great Duke of Marlborough and numerous Field Marshals, its Colonel-in-Chief is invariably the monarch and its Colonel is as often as not a member of the Royal Family: in 1915 he was King George V’s uncle, the Duke of Connaught.
On the outbreak of the Great War there were three regular battalions of the Grenadiers, two of which, the 1st and 2nd, joined the BEF in 1914. Tommy was initially posted to the 4th Battalion, which had recently been formed out of the former Reserve Battalion and which had moved out of London to Bovingdon Camp, near Marlow, to carry out field exercises. This was the first time in the history of the regiment that a battalion of this number had been formed, the reason lying in Lord Kitchener’s decision to form a Guards Division, the completion of which required this additional unit. Both the 3rd and 4th Battalions left for France to join the new division in the summer of 1915, the latter in mid-August. The remaining unit was designated the 5th (Reserve) Battalion and acted thenceforward as the training battalion for new recruits, the receiving battalion for the sick and w
ounded from France and the provider of guards for duties at St James’s and Buckingham Palaces, the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and the Bank of England.
Tommy was still considered too young and inexperienced to accompany the 4th Battalion to France and was transferred to the 5th. With the departure of the active service battalions, most of the remaining officers were relatively elderly Reservists, many of whom had served in the Boer War. They were, however, supported to a substantial extent by regular NCOs, who continued to run the training, which focused initially as much on traditional drill as on the more appropriate courses in musketry, machine guns, hand grenades and gas. As far as drill was concerned, Tommy was in his element, seeing it as an essential part of discipline. He was already establishing a reputation as an exceptionally well turned out officer, but he also showed signs of being an excellent shot.
It was almost certainly early in his military career that Tommy received the nickname which was to stick to him throughout his life. For a regiment widely perceived by others to be the epitome of strict discipline and military precision, the Grenadiers have a relaxed attitude to personal forms of address. It is customary for all officers up to the rank of major, and even lieutenant colonels if they have not yet commanded a battalion of the regiment, to address each other by their Christian names. Moreover, the regiment at this time was notoriously fond of nicknames, which were often used in preference to given names. In many cases these suggested the opposite of the bearer’s physical characteristics, examples being ‘Fatty’ Cavan, ‘Fatboy’ Gort and ‘Bulgy’ Thorne, all of whom were noticeably trim in figure, and ‘Tiny’ Freyberg, who was very tall. 4
