The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  In many regiments the commanding officer was a distant figure to the other ranks, but not in the 12th Lancers. Freddie Hunn,3 who joined up in 1937 just after the regiment’s return from Egypt, remembered that he was very popular with the men, as was Lumsden subsequently. He recalled that everyone in the regiment looked up to Dick, in spite of the fact that he was, on the whole, soft-spoken and gentle. There was no need for him to be a martinet as the regiment was already well-disciplined and there was great pride among all ranks in being a member. Dick participated with them regularly in one event, the monthly regimental 7-mile cross-country run from Tidworth around Tidworth Pennings and back. Hunn, who was a very good runner and usually won the race, admired Dick’s efforts going up the initial steep Clarendon Hill in spite of his limp, but remembered that he would then like to cut across so as to be able to run in with the winner!

  There were other lighter moments, including an occasion when the Duke of Gloucester came to dinner whilst the regiment was in Egypt. The all-male party – Lettice was in England – decided to move on to a night club and, once there, Dick was ordered by Prince Henry to dance with a well-known cabaret artiste called ‘Jelly Belly’ in honour of her act. When Dick protested that he was the senior officer present, the Duke replied that he was in Cairo in his capacity as Colonel of one of the regiments based there and was thus himself the senior. Threatened with disclosure to Lettice if he did not proceed as ordered and, worse still, to her sister Helen who loved to gossip, Dick saw no alternative but to comply. Not renowned for small talk, all he could think of to say to ‘Jelly Belly’ was ‘Do you know Tidworth-er?’4 It was an occasion of which he was occasionally reminded by Lumsden, Russell and others present if he ever became difficult!

  A number of officers, notably Kidston and Horsburgh-Porter, were close to Dick due to their common participation in polo. The same team as in 1936 contested the Inter-Regimental Cup the following year, only to be beaten in the second round, although it was some consolation that the regiment won the Subaltern’s Cup. In 1938, Dick’s last season with the regiment after a career which had begun in 1919, the team went right through to the Inter-Regimental final, to be beaten 10 – 8 by the Royal Scots Greys after leading 7 – 4 at the end of the fourth chukka. In 1937 Dick was also selected to represent the Army against Australia, whose team consisted of the four highly talented Ashton brothers, who had won 17 matches out of 22 on their previous visit to England. On this occasion there was a fast and very good game, from which the Ashtons emerged the winners by 6 – 5 after extra time.

  During 1937 Dick came into contact for the first time with a man who was to play a major role in his professional life. Just as they benefited from mentors when they were junior officers, the rising stars in the British Army needed patrons if ever they were to achieve high command. Patronage had actually been the scourge of the Army between the wars, successive CIGSs giving important jobs to their favourites rather than to the most deserving. The system depended on the judgement of those conferring patronage, which in some cases had been sadly lacking. The man whose attention Dick now attracted certainly did not lack judgement. Alan Brooke was widely admired by his seniors and his contemporaries as an officer of the highest capability. A gunner himself, at the end of 1937 he was selected for command of the new Mobile Division, the forerunner of the armoured divisions of the future, and although the 12th Lancers were not part of the formation, the regiment cooperated closely with it as the armoured car regiment of Southern Command. When Brooke was appointed to command the Anti-Aircraft Corps, he wrote to Dick to thank him for all his help and support. He had formed a high opinion of the young lieutenant colonel, whom he would not forget when the opportunity arose.

  In 1938 Dick’s time as commanding officer came to an end. In Egypt he had written to Lettice: ‘I cannot imagine who talks such rubbish about my only staying with the regiment about 2 years in command. I am sure to stay for my four years, unless I get the sack, as I am so young; even at the end there is no chance of a brigade. I am bound to leave to do a staff job first.’5 He was wrong about the term as he left less than three years into his appointment. He was right about the staff job. In May 1938 he heard officially that he was to become the GSO1, or chief staff officer, of 1 Division at the end of July.

  For Dick, leaving the 12th Lancers was a desperate wrench, the only consolation being that he had a very high opinion of his successor, Herbert Lumsden. He was dined out in the mess a week before he handed over, being carried to bed by Rodney Palmer at 12.30 and suffering a serious hangover as a result. The Old Comrades reunion took place some days later, attended by many old friends, including Bill Truman and Dick’s first squadron commander, Willy Styles, while Birdwood gave a most appreciative address. At the church parade Dick very nearly broke down during his speech and was said to have shed tears subsequently. The regiment had been an anchor for the whole of his adult life, always there even when he was at Staff College or on secondment to 2 Cavalry Brigade, but now he was being forced to part from it.

  Chapter 10

  Alex

  In spite of his accurate prediction to Lettice that he would not get a brigade as his first appointment after commanding his regiment, Dick was disappointed not to do so, mainly because Hugh Russell was chosen at much the same time to command an armoured brigade in Egypt. Birdwood queried the preference for Russell with Lord Gort, by then the CIGS. It was clear from Gort’s reply that Russell had caught his own eye, demonstrating the power of patronage, but just as Gort’s career was to stall in 1940, so Russell’s went little further.1 For Dick, on the other hand, going as GSO1 to 1 Division was probably the most significant career move in his life, as it brought him into direct daily contact with the General Officer Commanding, a man who was to have a huge influence on his later advancement and who was himself to become one of the two best known British generals of the Second World War.

  Even by 1938 Harold Alexander had enjoyed a stellar career. Born in 1891 and commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1911, he had commanded two of his regiment’s battalions during the Great War and, during the German offensive of March 1918, had assumed temporary command of a brigade at the age of 27. Shortly after the Great War he led the Baltic Landeswehr, fighting the advance into Latvia of the Bolsheviks, driving them back into Russia and thereby earning the admiration of his troops, who were largely Baltic Germans. Following rapid advancement, he was appointed in 1934 to the plum job of command of the Nowshera Brigade, one of two conducting campaigns on the North-West Frontier, his fellow brigadier in the Peshawar Brigade being Claude Auchinleck, the coming man in the Indian Army and some seven years his senior. Alexander was promoted to major general at 45, at a time when the average age for such appointments was nearly ten years older, and shortly afterwards he was appointed GOC of 1 Division, one of only five regular UK-based infantry divisions in the British Army.

  Alexander’s rise had been seemingly effortless. There were those, however, who were doubtful about his abilities, including his former instructors at the Staff College, Brooke and Montgomery. The latter, in many ways his complete antithesis as a soldier, regarded him as a triumph of style over substance. All agreed that his interpersonal skills were excellent and that he was imperturbable in adversity, while it also became evident that his instinct was of a far higher order than his intellect. He relied heavily on his subordinates, both as commanders and staff officers, as he disliked detail and he tended to look for ideas from others rather than conceiving them himself, although after assimilating them he would always make the final decision and it would usually turn out to be the right one. He and Dick, whose intellect was of the highest quality and whose grasp of staff duties was first-class, were thus almost certain to make an excellent team.

  Although Dick was not to take up his appointment formally until the end of July 1938, when he was simultaneously promoted to colonel,2 his first visit to 1 Division in Aldershot was on 2 June, just over a week after he had received the news. He was there again
on numerous occasions in June and July, as he needed not only to be briefed by the outgoing GSO1, Tom Hutton, but also to provide input into the divisional exercises, which had begun by his start date. Hutton told him that his job would be to ensure that Alexander was kept out of the way and only appeared when he had to take command. As Dick wrote later: ‘He presented me with a paper on the subject. What would have been much more useful to me would have been to find that some of the exercises were prepared, at any rate in draft form, but all I found were the actual subjects of the exercises. This meant that I had a very busy time ahead of me, especially as I was still commanding my Regiment for the next 2 months.’3

  Dick’s appointment was in every way an accolade. A cavalryman by training and inclination, his only practical experience of staff work was as brigade major to a cavalry brigade, whilst his more recent experience of working with the Mobile Division was limited to the armoured car role. His acquaintance with the infantry came from his time in the trenches with the dismounted companies and the theoretical knowledge picked up at the Staff College. His selection as the chief staff officer to an infantryman in an infantry division was thus remarkable and he often wondered what Alexander thought about being presented with him, yet they got on well from the start. Dick’s first note on his new chief in his diary was ‘Alexander is quick and good’ and it was evident very quickly that their skills were complementary. Hutton had actually been quite accurate in his advice, Dick writing subsequently: ‘At quite an early stage I realised that my divisional commander was a man who liked to decentralise, and although he gave the direction he expected me to do most of the detailed work.’4 The first major exercise for which Dick was entirely responsible came just over two weeks after he took up his new role. He had been concerned that, as a cavalryman used to operating on a wide front, he would tend to give the infantry brigades too much to do: in the event it went very well.

  The advance notice of his new appointment had given Dick and Lettice time to look for new accommodation. After inspecting houses in the Aldershot area they bought one called Runwick, just outside Farnham. It needed extensive repair and decoration, but by early September the family was able to move in. From a gardening perspective the timing was good, as planting spring flowering bulbs could begin immediately, and the autumn was the best season for preparing new herbaceous borders and shrubberies. In such spare time as he could afford, Dick threw himself enthusiastically into the necessary work.

  In the wider world the political background was by now deeply concerning, with Germany making hostile moves towards Czechoslovakia, resulting in the Munich Agreement at the end of September and the annexation of the Sudetenland by the Germans. Dick and most of his contemporaries thought that war was inevitable, despite Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of ‘peace for our time’. The pace of training was given added urgency as Aldershot Command, of which 1 Division formed part, had already been identified for conversion to a corps in any expeditionary force which Great Britain might have to despatch to the continent. For Dick this meant a lot less time hunting and a lot more preparing schemes, the major one of which was the Winter Exercise, scheduled to begin on the Berkshire Downs at the end of the following January. This required frequent reconnaissance trips with Alexander, which enabled Dick to get to know his commander well. He was fascinated to find that Alexander, a talented artist, would take pencil and paper with him to sketch the details of some tactical problem. Alexander, for his part, tested Dick by making various suggestions and seeing how he would react. A less agreeable feature of these journeys was the requirement to sit in the back of the GOC’s staff car, where with windows closed due to the cold weather and no other ventilation, Dick frequently fell victim to his old enemy, travel sickness.

  The end of November brought with it a family tragedy when George Gosling, Lettice’s brother-in-law, died after a short illness, leaving Helen with a young family.5 Lettice sprang into action to help where she could, while Dick found that he had been made an executor of the will, demanding his attention when he could least afford it. With a hectic period leading up to Christmas, it was with some relief shortly before the New Year that he was able to get three weeks’ leave, taking Lettice and the two older boys for their first winter sports holiday to Crans Montana in Switzerland. They stayed there for a fortnight, joined by a number of friends, and the whole family developed a great enthusiasm for skiing and sledding, so much so that they left their luges in the care of the hotel on the assumption that they would return the following year. They were not to know that it would be another seven years before they would put on skis again.

  It was probably just as well that Dick was acclimatized to snow as eight inches fell on the Berkshire Downs during one of the days of the Winter Exercise. He plunged back into the training programme, but there were now other distractions, not all of them military. As a cavalryman, he was an obvious choice to organize a number of activities in which the horse featured strongly, such as the Aldershot Polo Club and the Aldershot Horse Show, one of the largest in the country. He was also made chairman for the year of the Hurlingham Polo Association, the governing body for the sport in the United Kingdom. In March 1939 he decided to have another crack at the Grand Military Gold Cup, riding Twelfth Lancer, one of the numerous progeny of Annie Darling. The horse was an excellent jumper, but not as determined as his mother. Dick had a good ride, but pulled up two fences from the finish when it was clear that he would have no chance of a place. It was to be his last competitive steeplechase.

  The week of the Grand Military Meeting coincided with Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, after which the pace of preparation for war accelerated through spring and summer. In May Alexander went to France with Dill, now the GOC-in-C of Aldershot Command, and Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson, the GOC of 2 Division, for three days of meetings with their French opposite numbers, commenting on his return that the Maginot Line looked impregnable. At the end of that month Dick himself accompanied Alexander to France on a battlefield tour around Cambrai and Arras, where he had been wounded in 1917. There were no fewer than 60 senior officers on the tour, many of whom, including Alexander, had fought in the Guards Division at Bourlon Wood during the Battle of Cambrai and were able to lecture their colleagues on the subject. Back in the UK, exercises continued apace, including some for the whole of what would, in the event of war, become I Corps. For Dick much of the emphasis turned to mobilization, with reservists being recalled to the colours to bring all units up to full strength, whilst a plan was drawn up to get the whole division over to France within three weeks of a declaration of war.

  In August Lettice took the boys on a seaside holiday to Thorpeness in Suffolk, where Dick managed to get away for a long weekend. He was back in the office four days later, just before the announcement of the German – Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which convinced even the doubters that war was imminent. As the countdown began, Dick found himself spending long hours in the office finalizing the plans, sleeping there on a camp bed on many nights. When war came all his efforts paid off and mobilization went very smoothly, although Dick had to hold a special exercise to induct all the new divisional HQ personnel. Equipment shortages remained, particularly of vehicles, the division’s second line transport being largely requisitioned from civilian sources, former laundry vans mingling with the regulation army lorries.

  The Advance HQ left Aldershot on 12 September to make arrangements for the division’s arrival in France and its transportation to the assembly area. On 19 September Dick said the first of many wartime goodbyes to Lettice and drove down to Southampton, where the Main HQ embarked on the Ulster Monarch and crossed to Cherbourg. Travelling at the same time was 1 (Guards) Brigade, while 2 and 3 Brigades were in France by 25 September.

  The division concentrated initially around Laval, with the divisional HQ at Evron, moving thence to its permanent location at Bersée, between Douai and Lille. By the end of the first week of October, despite frequent accidents as the drivers sought
to cope with driving on the right and unfamiliarly cambered roads, the division had relieved a French division along the frontier with Belgium between Bachy and Camphin-en-Pévèle, just to the south of the Lille – Tournai road. It was what Dick described as ‘very ugly sugar beet country’. He wrote to Lettice that the divisional HQ was based in ‘a very nice chateau, but their water supply is running out, so we shall not get baths and the W.C.s are frightful.’6 Much of his time was spent accompanying Alexander on inspections of the division’s positions, which had been prepared to some extent by the French, with one line of widely spaced block houses and a rudimentary anti-tank ditch.

  During the autumn and winter of the ‘Phoney War’, the British Expeditionary Force, commanded by Gort and consisting initially of Dill’s I Corps and Brooke’s II Corps, with Ronald Adam’s III Corps arriving in early 1940, had one major priority, to improve these defences, engaging in a great deal of digging and the construction of innumerable concrete pill boxes. Large-scale exercises were impossible as the French were afraid that they would spoil the countryside. The original orders in the event of a German offensive were to advance into Belgium as far as the line of the River Escaut, but in November the French C-in-C, General Gamelin, proposed ‘Plan D’, whereby the Allies would take up positions even further forward on the River Dyle. Gort, although reluctant to do so, accepted this as an order from a superior officer, much to the dismay of Dill and Brooke, both of whom felt that abandoning prepared defences for a line which had not even been reconnoitred would lead to disaster – exactly what did happen. In planning for this Alexander and Dick were frustrated, as were all the British commanders and their staffs, by the impossibility of liaising with the Belgians, who were holding fast to their neutrality.