Irish Officers in the British Forces, 1922-45

Steven O'Connor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137350862
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

Irish Officers in the British forces, 1922-45 looks at the reasons why young Irish people took the king's commission, including the family tradition, the school influence and the employment motive. It explores their subsequent experiences in the forces and the responses in independent Ireland to the continuation of this British military connection.

1

Who Became an Officer?

In 1922, just as the Irish Free State came into existence, the ‘Geddes axe’ subjected the British armed forces to drastic cuts in manpower and expenditure. After years of industrial-scale warfare the adjustment of British military organisation to postwar conditions would be a difficult one. During the First World War the British officer class had undergone an enormous expansion. Owing to high officer casualty rates and the need to rapidly build up the ‘New Armies’, the War Office was forced to abandon the recruitment of officers exclusively from the upper classes. In effect, the social and educational requirements for entry into Sandhurst and Woolwich were changed and consequently, by 1917, the parental backgrounds of entrants showed a marked decrease in gentlemen and military professionals, and a marked increase in businessmen, managers and civilian professionals, compared with pre-war intakes.¹ Moreover, by war’s end numerous battlefield commissions had been awarded to non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in recognition of their hard-earned experience and leadership qualities. This radical change in the social profile of British officers was not continued into the interwar period. Many senior British officers including Sir George Milne, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1926 to 1933, regarded the unprecedented war effort of 1914–18 as ‘abnormal’ and were keen to return to pre-war soldiering as quickly as possible.² Thus, the interwar years were characterised by a return to elitism in officer recruitment. This trend is reflected among Irish people who obtained commissions during this period: they generally came from better-off backgrounds as indicated by their exclusive education and fathers’ occupation. However, this began to change from the mid-1930s onwards, as Britain commenced rearmament and a growing influx of Irish migrants arrived in the country. These trends, combined with the introduction of more meritocratic officer selection processes after 1939, saw the Irish officer class make the transition from an interwar elite to a more socially diverse group.

The interwar period

In spite of the social widening of the British officer corps during the First World War, the gentlemanly concept of soldiering that had dominated the pre-war era, survived. During the interwar period the army resumed the recruitment of officers from the major public boarding schools, while expecting the lower middle class and working class to furnish the NCOs and other ranks. A social prejudice among senior authorities in the army dictated that public schools instilled their pupils with ‘character’, that is self-confidence, physical courage, perseverance and the team spirit, a training which they believed other secondary schools were either incapable of providing or their students were incapable of assimilating. Hence, over 80 per cent of the entrants to Sandhurst and Woolwich between the wars were from public schools – one third from ten major schools.³ While the number of commissions awarded to ex-rankers shrank from 41 per cent during the Great War to 5 per cent in the 1930s.⁴

When there was a dip in officer recruitment in the mid-1930s the War Office tried to improve access for candidates from more modest backgrounds, but the military members of the Army Council were sceptical: ‘it is important’, they asserted, ‘not to take any drastic measures to attract a new class of officer, whose entry in any considerable numbers would probably have the effect of curtailing the existing supply from the superior classes’.⁵ Thus, throughout this period there was a persistent financial bar to the underprivileged. By 1937 it was calculated that it cost £455 to put a cadet through training and once commissioned prohibitive living expenses meant that it was extremely difficult for officers to live off their pay; in an average line regiment it was estimated that a second lieutenant needed private means of between £60 and £100 per year.⁶ A similar situation existed in the other services: the expensive fees of the Royal Naval College, £200 per annum, ensured that only the most affluent could afford officer training. This suited the Admiralty’s prejudice against the lower classes who it believed would be unlikely to take responsibility or demonstrate initiative.⁷ The entrance exam of the Royal Air Force cadet college at Cranwell also favoured the public school curriculum, and consequently almost 40 per cent of its officer cadets between 1934 and 1939 came from 20 major public schools, in comparison to 14 per cent from grammar or high schools.⁸

From the database of 1,004 Irish officers, 387 officers or 39 per cent of the whole sample joined in the interwar period, and in social background they conformed to the overall British trend of retrenched elitism.⁹ While the education of 36.2 per cent of the interwar cohort is not clear, it is known that 57.7 per cent attended boarding schools (35.7 per cent in the Free State and 22.5 per cent in the UK), and only 5.6 per cent came from day schools. The majority of the officers came from urban areas and prosperous agricultural districts: Dublin accounted for almost 30 per cent, Cork 10.8 per cent, Tipperary 6.7 per cent and the remainder were mostly concentrated in the midlands and east coast counties. Among their family backgrounds there is also evidence of a closed elite: in the case of 231 officers the father’s profession is known and of these the military profession itself comprised 36.9 per cent, university professionals (for example medicine, law and engineering) made up 16.8 per cent, farmers 8.7 per cent while only 6.9 per cent were shopkeepers, salesmen or labourers and 5.6 per cent teachers, police inspectors or other civil servants.¹⁰ However, a return to elitism did not preclude significant Catholic participation: one third of the Irish interwar officers were Catholic. These officers conformed to the overall trend of being products of an exclusive background: in terms of father’s occupation, the most Catholics were to be found among sons of university professionals, followed closely by military officers with smaller numbers distributed across the other occupational groups.

The sample suggests that Irish officer recruitment started from a relatively low base in the early-1920s with smaller numbers taking commissions compared to the late-1920s. One possible explanation for this is that the traditional officer-producing classes were responding to the recruitment drive by the newly organised army of the Irish Free State during the Civil War period. Certainly, the National army recruited many experienced ex-officers who had served in the wartime British forces, such as former Connaught Ranger William Bruen, Farrell Tully of the Irish Guards and George Hodnett, a Western front veteran who joined the Irish army’s legal section in 1921 and served as deputy Judge Advocate General from 1924 to 1955.¹¹ Indeed, Jane Leonard claims that 600 British officers and NCOs joined the National army after the 1921 truce, while Peter Cottrell has estimated that during the Civil War 20 per cent of the army’s officers (700 officers) and 50 per cent of its soldiers had previously served in the British army, including Victoria Cross winners like Martin Doyle and Henry Kelly.¹² However, the majority of the new state’s officer corps seems to have come from within the nationalist movement, and elite Catholic schools like Belvedere and Clongowes also contributed some officers, particularly in specialist areas such as the medical and legal services.¹³ Moreover, among ex-British officers in the National army were many Catholic nationalists who had answered Redmond’s call for recruits in 1914 and obtained commissions in the British army. While Protestants joined the regular and reserve Irish defence forces during the ‘Emergency’ period, there is no evidence to suggest that during the Civil War any significant number from the Anglo-Irish elite took commissions in the Irish army.¹⁴ Rather, it would seem that the punishing losses suffered by this community in the Great War might have discouraged some families from sending their sons to the British army. A recent study has found that 25 per cent of the young men from Irish landed families who served in the British forces during the Great War were killed and as Nicholas Perry points out, this figure is higher than for any other social group in Ireland and is about the same as for Old Etonians in Britain.¹⁵

Significantly, Irish recruitment started to increase during the 1930s, at a time when military careers were losing their appeal among the upper classes in Britain. By 1937 the British army was experiencing yearly recruitment shortfalls of 100 officers (15 per cent of its annual requirement). This has been partly blamed on a negative perception of the army in post-1918 civilian society due to an extensive pacifist movement in Britain, but there were also many objections on a practical level: some teachers warned their pupils that their intellectual abilities would be wasted in the army, that the cost of joining the army was too high and the pay too low. For others regimental soldiering in peacetime seemed dull and the extremely slow rate of promotion in the lower commissioned ranks was a disincentive to ambitious young men.¹⁶ Yet, Irish officer recruitment took an upward trend for most of the 1930s: the sample suggests that recruitment numbers more than doubled in 1933, 1936 and 1938.¹⁷ There was no single, straightforward cause for this but several contributory factors.

For some officers, like Anthony Wingfield and Dermot Boyle who came from prosperous Anglo-Irish landowning families, their paths were somewhat predetermined by the need to uphold the family’s social status by entering a ‘gentleman’s profession’, such as substantial farming, the church or the armed forces, as their forefathers had done.¹⁸ Another group, commonly described as ‘shabby gentility’ and made up mostly of Protestants, were the sons of younger sons of landowners, who generally followed their fathers in pursuing a permanent military career. They tended to have the social standing derived from a landed background, while possessing only modest financial means. Several of these men in the sample became officers because their families could not afford a university education, whereas their family military tradition and connections could smooth a path through a public school, a cadet college and into a regiment (see Chapter 3).¹⁹ Yet the spikes in recruitment in 1933, 1936 and 1938 suggest that many were also responding to general economic conditions. On the one hand, it would seem that there were fewer job prospects for the sons of the upper middle class in an Ireland affected by the depression and the self-imposed ‘Economic War’ with Britain (begun in 1932). While on the other hand, the commencement of British rearmament from 1934 presented permanent and pensionable job opportunities for those so minded. This interpretation would tally with the overall trend in Irish migration during the 1930s.

Although no official figures on migration to Britain are available since no frontier control existed between the two countries until the outbreak of war, alternative measurements have proved effective. By examining the average annual rate of migration for the intercensal period 1926–36, the government’s Commission on Emigration was able to eliminate the ‘overseas’ migrants (that is, those moving to the US, Australia and so on) and thereby attain a residual figure for migration elsewhere (mainly to Britain), which indicated that migration elsewhere was growing at the expense of the overseas flow. This was attributed to the difficulties in the American labour market during the Great Depression. A further study by R.S. Walshaw was able to estimate Irish migration to Britain between 1924 and 1937 using data on passenger movements. This suggests that, similar to Irish officer recruitment, the number of migrants began to steadily increase from 1934 onwards with the beginnings of the British economic recovery and the worsening of the Irish situation, spiking at over 30,000 in 1936. Therefore, it is clear that from the mid-1930s onwards Britain became the preferred destination of Irish migrants.²⁰ The perception of a growing exodus from Ireland of young people, particularly from the middle classes, is confirmed by Air Marshal Harold Maguire. He joined the RAF in 1933 and in 1935 he wrote to a friend thanking them for a copy of the weekly Irish Times ‘which hasn’t changed a line in ten years! Still it gives me an idea of things which is all I need. I see the odd familiar name now and again, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Who Became an Officer?
• 2 ‘I was born into an Army family’: Irish Officers and the Family Tradition
• 3 ‘A great training school for the army’: Irish Officers and the School Influence
• 4 ‘We were an unwanted surplus’: Irish Medical Emigration and the British Forces
• 5 ‘We were all Paddys’: the Irish Experience of the British Forces
• 6 ‘The irreconcilable attitude is apparently confined to the purely political sphere’: Responses in Independent Ireland to an Irish Military Tradition
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Building a Database of Irish Officers in the British Forces
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index