Yeomen of England Read online

  We remember the humans who died. Spare a

  thought too for those superb sentient horses.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book was intended originally as a collection of anecdotes from my Second World War regiment, the Northamptonshire Yeomanry. However, a brief survey of history revealed that there are so many fascinating aspects of the Yeomanry and the book seemed to fill up with wider and wider views of a unique formation.

  As far as the Northants history is concerned, I appreciated the courtesy of the Chairman of the Regimental Association, Ben Howkins, and also the president, Earl Spencer, in encouraging me to speak freely on the subject according to whatever information I might discover. A main support has been W.J. ‘Bill’ Hornsey, the indefatigable Hon. Secretary of the Association, who not only has furnished me with contacts and pictures but has himself amassed a wealth of information into which I could dip. We relied much on former members of the regiment who did much research over the years but sadly are no longer with us, including Captain Bill Bellamy, H. de L. Cazenove, George Jelley MBE, Vic Lawrence, Major A.E. ‘Sandy’ Saunders, Trooper Les ‘Spud’ Taylor as well as, happily still with us, Captain Tim Deakin, Reg Spittles and Tanky Turner. Many valuable facts and anecdotes were supplied by NY veterans quoted in the text.

  Great help and encouragement were offered by Yeomen of the present day, record offices, regimental museums and period enactors. Individual friends who were particularly helpful included Charles, Earl Spencer, Major B. Mollo, Major C. Roads, Captain D. Aiton, Captain J.T. David, Captain A. French, Captain C.A. Parr MBE, Lieutenant Liz Weston, Juliette Baxter, Paul Connell, Geoff Crump, Martin Dawson, Caroline Dwyer, Sarah Elsom, David Fletcher, Jon at Pembroke Museum, Mark Lewis, Paul Robinson, George Streatfeild, and Eleanor Winyard.

  It was most enjoyable working with Jo de Vries at The History Press, who is the most helpful and sympathetic of editors, together with her excellent collaborators. A special vote of thanks must go to my wife Jai. The research and writing of this book took place during our removal from Essex to West Sussex and involving the total renovation of our new abode. The author shamelessly quoted press deadlines whilst Jai undertook the marshalling of plumbers, builders and decorators, as well as showing dexterity and versatility with machetes, secateurs, screwdrivers and paint brushes.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Earl Spencer

  1 Horses for my Kingdom (1794–1815)

  2 Call out the Riot Squad! (1815–1899)

  3 Boer War or Bore War? (1899–1902)

  4 Forming the Fighting Force (1902–1914)

  5 Courses not fit for Horses (1914–1916)

  6 The Slaughter of the Horses (1917–1918)

  7 Punctured Pride (1919–1939)

  8 Two Lines of Defence (1939–1944)

  9 Armoured Steeds Hunt Tigers (1944–1946)

  10 Hands off the TA! (1947–2011)

  11 Unremitting Remembrance (2012 for posterity)

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  NY Association Hon. Secretary, W.J. ‘Bill’ Hornsey presents a memorial cup to the 2011 army cadet winner. (Northamptonshire Yeomanry Archives, NYA)

  FOREWORD

  BY EARL SPENCER

  The history of the Northamptonshire Yeomanry is distinguished, of course, with consistent bravery in battles fought abroad. But, as the name of the regiment reminds us, this is a local force – and, for me, it is particularly close to home, having so many links with my family, and with Althorp.

  George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (my great-great-great grandfather), founded the Yeomanry when Napoleon’s France was a terrifying threat to Britain. George John was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the Battle of the Nile, and was someone who knew about fighting men: he was arguably Nelson’s most prominent patron, giving him what we would term ‘fast-track promotion’.

  The 5th Earl Spencer also had a record of public service, serving in all of Gladstone’s Cabinets, and twice serving as Viceroy of Ireland. It was he who, a little over a century ago, resurrected the Northamptonshire Yeomanry. A Master of the Pytchley, the ‘Red Earl’ continued the regiment’s proud record of producing fine mounts for its men – many of these ‘war horses’ having learnt their skills pursuing foxes.

  My grandfather, Jack – the 7th Earl – was a passionate champion of all things Northamptonshire. Wounded and left for dead in the First World War, he brought various talents to his links with the Yeomanry, some of them not military – even designing the new guidon for the regiment.

  In my twenty years overseeing the estate, I have frequently been reminded of the links between this historic place and its local regiment. It will be my great pleasure later this year to welcome those who have served in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry back, as my guests, to Althorp – ‘home’ for us all.

  The 9th Earl Spencer DL

  Patron

  The Northamptonshire Yeomanry

  CHAPTER ONE

  HORSES FOR MY KINGDOM

  (1794–1815)

  Where are the Yeomen –

  the Yeomen of England?

  … As foemen may curse them,

  No other land could nurse them. (Merrie England)

  ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ cried Richard III, according to Shakespeare. Another more modern playwright featured the ‘Mad King’, George III, and it was in George’s name the cry now went out, not for a single horse but for fifteen thousand: Britain was in mortal peril!

  A would-be invader stood at the gates. On Beachy Head and all around the coast the bonfires waited to blaze; bell-ringers had been briefed to send out the warning peal. In Parliament prophecies of doom prevailed as across the Channel an army was massing, landing ships were being built and plans to land on the south coast, in Wales, in Ireland, were being refined. The regular forces on hand to repel invaders were insufficient to the task; a Home Guard was needed.

  To make matters worse, an insidious doctrine, like an icy fog propelled by an easterly wind, was seeping in from the Continent. The people over there, a mere 20 miles distant, had dethroned their monarch, sent their aristocracy to the guillotine and established a reign of terror instigated by the ruthless dictator Robespierre, as cruel as Caligula or Nero. The politics proclaimed by the new regime encouraged the downfall of royal houses and the rule of the common people. Such an enticing philosophy might well rouse the poorest in Britain, as food prices rose and unemployment increased; as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. There was danger of internal strife, riots, a ‘break in and help yourself’ psychology. The country as a whole had no established police force, no riot squad; a Home Guard was needed! Volunteers – men, horses, swords and carbines.

  But this Home Guard was not to be a Dad’s Army as the more recent television caricature depicts. No arthritic grandfathers and callow youths; no civilian clothes hastily militarised by donning shabby armbands; no drill with broomsticks or antiquated guns; no makeshift vehicles; no unattractive, sagging battledress once uniforms had tardily arrived; no long delay before this enthusiastic but untrained rabble could be coerced into a well-drilled, if still rather motley force ready to face the enemy when the church bells rang, the beacons flared and the code word circulated. This Home Guard would instantly be flamboyantly uniformed, fully accoutred with lethal weapons, intricately drilled and furnished with towering, plumed helmets to scare the enemy or cow a rioting populace.

  The creation of this new force would not be done on the cheap. A receipt for the first forty uniforms for the Northampton Troop reveals the cost of putting a Yeoman into uniform from local funds in 1794. Each uniform was costed as follows:r />
  Coat and waistcoat

  £3. 3s.

  Leather breeches

  £1. 7s.

  Boots

  £1. 2s.

  Hat with bearskin, feather and cockade

  £1. 0s.

  Total

  £6. 12s. (or about £620 in current money)1

  So, in 1794, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger called for volunteers, both horsed and foot, fit and of military age, to assemble for service locally. It was to be a well-planned mobilisation, based on the county system and imposing clear and urgent objectives on the highest local authorities. The cavalry contingents would, he said, consist of ‘Gentlemen and Yeomanry’, and the incentive or coercion for men of high local standing would not be financial gain; indeed, they would be required to contribute lavishly. The compulsion would be the lesson offered by the high authorities across the Channel. They had failed in their trust and now had suffered political oblivion, cruel personal imprisonment and, for many, death.

  Northamptonshire Yeomanry officer, 1794, in green tunic with buff facings. (NYA)

  ‘Gentlemen’ was an easily comprehended term, but who were the ‘Yeomanry’? What indeed was a Yeoman? The idea of horsed volunteers was not new, as there had been earlier voluntary units, such as, in Northamptonshire, The King’s Carbiniers, or the Duke of Montagu’s Horse, raised in Kettering in an earlier war but later disbanded.

  What distinguished a Yeoman from any other kind of individual of military age? A simple definition was ‘a person who could bring a horse to battle and ride the horse’. Thus was adapted a term with a long history. Legally, in the 1700s it was ‘a person qualified by possessing free land of forty shillings annual rental value [£160 today] to serve on juries, and vote for knights of the shire’. Way back before 1400 the Yeoman was only ‘a common menial attendant’. In Chaucer’s Middle English period a ‘Yoman’ could simply be a young man. To search back through the ages to Old Frisian, pre-Anglo-Saxon, the origin of the word may have been ‘Gauman’, with Gau meaning a village. By 1794 he would be ‘any small farmer or countryman above the grade of labourer’. In terms of the Yeomanry regiments now to be established, townspeople of trader or craftsman standard could also be enrolled if they brought a horse and could stay on its back. Thus a shopkeeper from Kettering could ride boot to boot with a smallholder from Luddington-in-the-Brook. A Northampton brewer could drill with a blacksmith from Brafield-on-the-Green. A Daventry schoolmaster could break bread with a miller from Bugbrooke.

  Given twenty-first-century complaints about the inefficiency of the mail or the problems of travel or the dead hand of bureaucracy, the 1794 mobilisation was an amazing example of urgency, commitment and objectivity. On 14 March 1794, Secretary of State Lord Westmorland wrote to all lord lieutenants outlining a plan to raise voluntary cavalry. On 7 April the Militia Bill was given its third reading in Parliament, covering both infantry and cavalry, and all lord lieutenants were instructed to put the plan into action forthwith. By 10 April things began to take shape.

  In Northamptonshire the Lord Lieutenant, the 8th Earl of Northampton, was absent at that moment but three deputy lieutenants (DL) requested that the High Sheriff, Richard Booth, call a meeting. This took place in the County Hall on 10 April to discuss a local plan already circulated by Sir William Dolben, DL, a well-known man of action on the national scene. In 1788 he had been the author and prime mover of the act to regulate conditions on board slave ships, which would be enforced by the Royal Navy and was an early step in the abolition of slavery.2

  The draft plan was read and contained proposals to raise Yeomanry troops of from fifty to eighty men per troop ‘for the Purpose of the local Defence of the particular Places where they may be raised’; a person raising two troops was to become a major, four troops a lieutenant colonel and six troops a colonel; the ‘Horses to be furnished by the Gentry or Yeomanry who compose the Corps’; to recruit pioneers to assist the horsemen; that the troops also be available ‘for the Suppression of Riots and Tumult’; ‘that a Subscription be opened to defray the Expense of carrying into Effect such Measures’; that a committee ‘may be established in Consequence of these Resolutions’; and that the said committee do meet immediately in the Record Room. The resolutions were moved by Earl Spencer, seconded by Mr W.R. Cartwright and passed unanimously.

  Indeed, on 10 April the new committee sat with Earl Spencer in the chair and appointed treasurers and a secretary. It also worked out a rota by which sub-committees should be formed, and recruiting begun of troops in nine towns, including Peterborough which was then in the Northamptonshire electoral district, all to be concluded by the 29th instant. A list of thirty-nine subscribers was formed who offered sums from 5 guineas upward. The list was headed by Earl Spencer who committed £500 (now about £47,000) and the total of that initial ‘collection’ was £3,217 5s (about £300,000 today). The committee minutes ended with the note that the recruits ‘be substantial Householders who shall engage to bring a Horse to be approved by the Commanding officer of the Troop’. The various troops would become the Northamptonshire ‘Corps of Gentleman and Yeomanry’, and later the Yeomanry Regiment.

  If Sir William Dolben could be described as a man of action on the national scene, then it would apply even more so to George John, 2nd Earl Spencer. He was the outstanding First Lord of the Admiralty who had successfully dealt with historic naval mutinies which had erupted due to bad working conditions. Over the heads of more senior admirals he promoted the relatively young Horatio Nelson to command of the Mediterranean Fleet and therefore contributed greatly to Trafalgar and final victory in the long Napoleonic Wars, while overseeing earlier naval victories. George John had many and varied interests, including the creation one of the largest libraries in the world with 40,000 books at Althorp House. He also founded the Roxburghe Club, still the pre-eminent international association of bibliophiles.

  George John, 2nd Earl Spencer founded the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in 1794. (Courtesy of Charles, 9th Earl Spencer)

  The 2nd Earl Spencer was also a fox-hunting man. There had been a pack of hounds at Althorp for a century and a half, which he continued, and with other enthusiasts he helped to develop the Pytchley Club, later the Pytchley Hunt, which rode over neighbouring areas including the Althorp estate. Fox hunts were responsible for the improvement and training of members’ horses to the extent that they would become a prime source for providing suitable horses, both in the Napoleonic Wars and throughout the First World War. The Northamptonshire Yeomanry over the years would include both masters and hunt staff with their admirable mounts.

  The importance of the horses to Yeomanry regiments and the concern which officers felt for their steeds are well illustrated in only the third meeting of the Northamptonshire Yeomanry (NY) Committee, which was held at Earl Spencer’s London house on 2 June 1794. Concern was expressed for their fine hunters as it was thought that the regulation military saddle ‘may hurt the horse’s back’. The committee therefore approved the sum of £1 5s each for the men to obtain their own more flexible saddles. The attachments, such as girths, stirrups and holsters, would be provided by the regiment.

  Meanwhile, by 9 May 1794 the War Office had confirmed officers’ commissions. Colonel Spencer was personally raising the Northampton Troop, his lieutenant colonel, Earl Fitzwilliam, recruiting at Peterborough, Major W.R. Cartwright forming Brackley, and sundry captains at Daventry, Kettering, Oundle and Towcester. As early as 17 May more than 200 volunteers on horseback attended an initial rally commanded by Earl Spencer, before drinks at the Peacock Inn, setting up a pleasurable precedent. Within a few days Earl Fitzwilliam carried out a first inspection of the Peterborough Troop, consisting of sixty men on horseback, after which refreshment was sought at the Angel Inn. That evening a ball was given by the Gentlemen of the Troop for the ladies of the city and this was ‘very genteely attended’.

  One great attraction in recruitment was the colourful, even gaudy design of the uniform of a troop or a regiment,
and poets were already at work writing patriotic songs. On 4 June a Brackley troop had been enrolled and met for their first ‘military evolutions’, surely one of the earliest exercises by Yeomanry. Afterwards they retired to the Crown Inn where, after loyal toasts, they sang in ‘the most convivial and harmonious manner’ about their uniform, although whether it was already available to wear, and whether they would ever wield broadswords, is rather doubtful. No doubt over their beers they bellowed:

  British Yeomen, valiant Yeomen, brave Yeomen for ever

  Green coats faced with black and in each hat a feather

  Their waistcoats are buff and their trousers are leather

  With broadswords and pistols and hearts without fear

  Great Jove must be pleased when these Yeomen appear.

  The 1794 roll of the Northampton Troop, under Earl Spencer as colonel, shows a captain, a cornet (junior lieutenant), a quartermaster (QM) and two sergeants plus eighty Yeomen, while the Brackley troop under Major W.R. Cartwright, had a lieutenant, a cornet and forty-two Yeomen. There were a number of fathers and sons or brothers enlisted together, such as John and Samuel Pell of Overstone and John H. Pell, of Sywell; S.H. and John Butterfield at Brackley; William and John Lathbury; Henry and John Webb; and various Waltons, Marriotts and Butlins. Two worthies by the name of Aris, a surname well known in the 1940s through Jack Aris, 1NY, a corporal cook and great character at more recent Association reunions.

  The colour and design of tunics and hats was left to the individual commanders as units sprang up all over Britain. On 31 May Earl Spencer received a letter from Lord Carnarvon asking for advice, as his Lordship was forming the Yeomanry in Wiltshire. The Wiltshires, who would become the senior Yeomanry regiment by dint of continuous service, came into being on 4 June 1794 at a meeting in the Bear Inn, Devizes, at the call of Richard Long, High Sheriff of Wiltshire. Troops sprang up around the coast, particularly at towns in Kent, although the entire coastal population felt menaced. Had not the Spanish Armada sailed right around the British Isles? In Pembrokeshire, the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Milford, recruited the nucleus of a regiment; in Ayrshire the Earl of Cassillis formed a troop; inland, other counties also responded, with Captain John Somers-Cocks forming the Worcestershire’s first troop at the Unicorn Inn in Worcester, favouring a spectacular Hussars tunic of bright red with white facings. An elaborate Hussar design was also selected in Oxfordshire. It was rather later, and possibly with an eye more on civil disobedience than foreign invasion, that the first London troop appeared in Uxbridge.3