Abstract
Over 50,000 British Territorial soldiers—many pre-war citizen volunteers—served in India between 1914 and 1919, replacing British regular troops recalled to fight at Gallipoli and on the western front. In his chapter, Peter Stanley reveals a previously untold story, that of the experience of Territorials in India during the First World War, focusing on 1917. Many served in India for the entire war enforcing British rule, policing colonial dissent, and participating in operations on the north-west frontier and in the third Anglo-Afghan war. Stanley investigates both the effect of the service of the Territorials in India at one of the most crucial periods of the nationalist struggle and on the British citizen soldiers themselves who, for the duration of the war, became ‘temporary sahibs’.
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Notes
- 1.
Comment by Major-General Colin Donald in Nigel Woodyatt, ‘The Territorials (Infantry) in India, 1914–1920’, Royal United Services Institution Journal 67, no. 468, (1922): 730.
- 2.
Some sources claimed that three ‘Territorial’ battalions of the Rifle Brigade, the 18th, 23rd and 24th went to India. They did, but not as Territorials.
- 3.
Regimental History Committee, History of the Dorsetshire Regiment 1914–1919, Part II, (Dorchester: Henry Ling Ltd, 1932), 71.
- 4.
Edgar Wallace, Kitchener’s Army and the Territorial Forces: The Full Story of a Great Achievement (London: George Newness Ltd, 1915), 164.
- 5.
The 1/1st Brecknockshire Battalion suffered more deaths than any other battalion, losing some 80 men, with about a quarter dying in Mesopotamia in action or as prisoners of war, attached to other units. A further dozen died in the great influenza epidemic late in 1918: ‘Our Comrades Graves’, Box 17a ‘Brecknock Battalion, South Wales Borderers. Correspondence relating to the grave memorials in Aden and India during the Great War’, Museum of the Royal Regiment of Wales, Brecon.
- 6.
The best single account of the fighting in southern Arabia is Mark Connelly, ‘The British Campaign in Aden, 1914–1918’, Journal of the Centre for First World War Studies. 2:1 (2005): 65–96.
- 7.
Letter, 18 July 1915, William Hughes, 1/5th Buffs, Great Chart Soldiers and Sailors Fund, Book 5, Kent Archives and History Centre, Maidstone.
- 8.
Letter, nd, Douglas Skinner, 1/5th Buffs, Great Chart Soldiers and Sailors Fund, Book 5, Kent Archives and History Centre, Maidstone.
- 9.
‘A Territorial in India’, Punch, 15 September 1915, 226.
- 10.
Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India for 1918 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1920), 22.
- 11.
Letter, 21 March 1916, Geoffrey Coombs, 1/4th Buffs, EK/U127/2, Kent Archives and History Centre, Maidstone.
- 12.
Philip Gosse, Memoirs of a Camp Follower (London: Longmans Green, 1934), 284–85.
- 13.
Letter, 4 June 1915, Jim Mackie, 2/4th Somerset Light Infantry, in Answering the Call: Letters from the Somerset Light Infantry 1914–19, ed. John Mackie (Eggleston, UK: Raby Books, 2002), 75.
- 14.
Memoir, Henry Brain, 1/6th East Surrey, ESR/25/BRAIN/2, Surrey History Centre.
- 15.
Almost nothing of the garrison battalions’ service is recorded, however—no unit in India maintained a war diary, for instance, unless actually on active service.
- 16.
See Robert Maxwell, Villiers-Stuart at War (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1990).
- 17.
Although there is little secondary literature on the mechanisation of the Indian Army, the papers of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (the army’s first Director of Mechanical Transport) in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (London) documents the transition, and the involvement of the Territorials in it.
- 18.
Virtually all of the historic regiments created museums and archives, now variously in the custody of national or county archives or museums, or the museums of successor regiments, located in collections across Britain. All of them hold surprisingly large collections documenting the Territorials’ Indian service, even though neither their regimental histories nor those museums tell their story. (At most Indian territorials are represented by a handful of artefacts—a pith helmet, a colour patch or a souvenir swagger stick—in displays dealing overwhelmingly with the western front.) Notable in these collections are the large number of photograph albums relating to India, because Territorials had both leisure and often money, and many took a strong interest in India, its culture and people.
- 19.
Alban Bacon, The Wanderings of a Temporary Warrior (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1922).
- 20.
C.P. Mills, A Strange War: Burma, India & Afghanistan 1914–1919 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1988); Mackie, Answering the Call; Ann Noyes, ed., Engaged in War: the Letters of Stanley Goodland 1914–1919 (Guildford: Twiga Books, 1999), while in 2011 The Rifles published the journal kept by Fred Mundy, A Journal of the 1/4th Battalion Wiltshire Regiment 1914–1918 (Salisbury: Rifles, Wardrobe and Museum Trust, 2011).
- 21.
The best account of India’s wartime politics is Algernon Rumbold, Watershed in India 1914–1922 (London: The Athlone Press, 1979).
- 22.
The Report of the Commissioners appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee appointed by the Indian National Congress (Lahore, 1920) on the Amritsar protests, documented allegations of troops firing at villages and even killing individuals.
- 23.
See Nirad Chaudhuri, The Autobiography on an Unknown Indian (London: Macmillan, 1951), 316–17.
- 24.
I am pleased to record that the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra has allocated funds to enable a research assistant to explore Indian sources to establish how Indians, and especially nationalist activists, perceived Territorials and other British soldiers during the Great War.
- 25.
See Brian Robson, Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign in Waziristan 1919–1920 (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount, 2004).
- 26.
The Invicta III, No. 4 (1919), 26.
- 27.
Report of the Commissioners appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee appointed by the Indian National Congress, 121, 137, 115.
- 28.
Ibid., 124, 135–36, 143.
- 29.
Bacon, Wanderings of a Temporary Warrior; Woodyatt, ‘The Territorials’, 717–37; Mills, Strange War.
- 30.
The book, provisionally entitled Terriers in India, will be published by Helion & Co., probably in 2018.
Bibliography
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Mills, Christopher. A Strange War: Burma, India & Afghanistan 1914–1919. Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1988.
Mundy, Fred G. A Journal of the 1/4th Battalion Wiltshire Regiment 1914–1918. Salisbury: Rifles, Wardrobe and Museum Trust, 2011.
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Stanley, Peter. ‘Terriers’ in India: British Territorials 1914–19. Solihull: Helion & Co., 2018.
Wallace, Edgar. Kitchener’s Army and the Territorial Forces: The Full Story of a Great Achievement. London: George Newness Ltd, 1915.
Woodyatt, Nigel. ‘The Territorials (Infantry) in India, 1914–1920’. Royal United Services Institution Journal 67, no. 468, (1922): 717–37.
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Stanley, P. (2018). Temporary Sahibs: Terriers in India in 1917. In: Abbenhuis, M., Atkinson, N., Baird, K., Romano, G. (eds) The Myriad Legacies of 1917. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73685-3_8
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