Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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inﬂuence on the report. He accepted the Treasury’s argument that ever-

growing defence programmes would lead to national bankruptcy and

believed that the country could not afford an army prepared for war on

the European conﬂict in addition to the navy and air force essential for

the security of the United Kingdom and the empire. Both Chatﬁeld and

Hankey thought that the role of the army should be conﬁned to the mili-

tary requirements of the empire. The inﬂuence of the Treasury on

Inskip’s interim report lay in persuading him and his advisers that the

defence forces being created by rearmament should not exceed what

could be maintained for a long period – since the purpose of rearmament

was to deter Germany, not to prepare for war at a given date – and stra-

tegic priorities were determined outside the Treasury.

Inskip’s interim

report stated that the cornerstone of imperial defence policy must be to

maintain the security of the United Kingdom, where the empire’s main

strength in terms of manpower and industrial capacity lay. It followed, he

said, that the ﬁrst and major effort should be directed to protection of the

United Kingdom against attack and to preserving the trade routes for

essential imports of food and raw materials. The third objective should be

maintenance of forces for the defence of British overseas territories

against attack by sea, land or air; this objective was less important than the

ﬁrst two, since so long as the United Kingdom was secure ‘we may hope in

time to repair any losses or defeats suffered elsewhere’. A fourth objec-

tive, which could be provided only after the other three had been met,

was cooperation in the defence of the territories ‘of any allies we may

have in war’.

These recommendations, accepted by the Cabinet, laid

down that the army’s annual estimates were to be drawn up on the

assumption that an expeditionary force would not be committed to a

European campaign at the beginning of a war.

Inskip’s second report of 8 February 1938, which ﬁxed the defence

department’s ﬁnancial rations, stated that the army was to be equipped for

‘an Eastern theatre’, which the War Ofﬁce interpreted as the defence of

Egypt against Italy. It was claimed that the change in the role and composi-

tion of the army’s ﬁeld units would make possible substantial reductions in

the provision of tanks and in reserves of ammunition compared with what

would be required for European operations.

The Treasury was not

content with this recommendation, however, one ofﬁcial commenting that

the army had been relieved of the requirement to ﬁght in Europe only for

the FO to conjure up a terrifying picture of an equally arduous African

campaign. At the suggestion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, now Sir

John Simon, the Cabinet decided that the army should be prepared ‘for

general purposes’ rather than a particular campaign. This decision

enabled the Treasury to hold up War Ofﬁce proposals that would exceed

what was required for a force of two infantry and one armoured division,

with equipment and reserves on a European scale, but for defensive pur-

poses only, plus two infantry divisions to be ready in 40 days and a further

82 G. Peden

two to be ready after four months after the outbreak of war.

It was not

until February 1939 that the Cabinet agreed to prepare the Regular Army

for a European campaign at the outset of war and not until April 1939 that

it decided that an enlarged Territorial Army should likewise be prepared to

follow 12 months later.

Michael Howard, in his seminal work, The Continental Commitment,

argued that the defence of empire led to the dissipation of British

strength.

However, it was the air force, preparing for war with Germany,

not Britain’s wider responsibilities, that diverted scarce industrial

resources from preparing the army for a continental commitment.

Britain’s forces round the empire tended to be the last to receive up-to-

date equipment. The blame for inadequacy of the empire’s defences

could also be laid at the door of the dominions, which carried on the

nineteenth-century practice of leaving the main burden of imperial

defence to the United Kingdom.

It can be argued that British rearmament could have proceeded much

faster had it not been held up down to 1938 by a policy, supported by the

Board of Trade as well as the Treasury, of not interfering with normal

trade. However, supporters of this view tend to come from the United

States, a country that, because of its rich endowment of natural resources,

has much less reason than the United Kingdom to worry about its balance

of payments, and therefore about the diversion of industrial output from

exports.

By April 1939, as the balance of payments deﬁcit on current

account increased and as the country’s gold reserves decreased, the Treas-

ury warned the COS that if they were under the impression that Britain

was as well able as in 1914 to conduct a long war, they were burying their

heads in the sand.

1939–1956

The Treasury’s prediction that Britain would have difﬁculty ﬁnancing a

long war was borne out in the Second World War. The Treasury tried to

continue its coordinating role but found it difﬁcult to sustain exports or

to preserve gold and dollar reserves, even during the ‘Phoney War’, and

quite impossible once Churchill had become prime minister on 10 May

1940, determined to pursue victory at any cost. Under Churchill, the

Chancellor was, for a time, not even a member of the War Cabinet. The

Treasury’s task was to scrape together as many dollars as possible through

the sale of British overseas assets, or otherwise, until after Franklin D. Roo-

sevelt had won his third presidential election, in November 1940, and felt

that he could take the risk of pushing the Lend-Lease Act through Con-

gress in March 1941. Even thereafter, Britain had to pay for orders placed

before the Act was passed, and the Americans varied the extent to which

goods were supplied free under Lend-Lease, so as to ensure that Britain’s

gold and dollar reserves were kept low, thereby keeping Britain in a state

Treasury and defence of empire 83

of dependence. Moreover, Britain had to pay for supplies from the rest of

the world, including the empire and Commonwealth, which she did by

piling up debts known as sterling balances, which were to contribute to

sterling’s weakness after the war.

Keynes, who was advising the Chancel-

lor, pointed out in May 1945 that a large part of military expenditure

leading to this indebtedness had been unrelated to the war against

Germany, being for the purposes of ﬁghting Japan, policing the Middle

East or maintaining lines of communication. He warned that lack of

restraint on overseas expenditure was increasing Britain’s dependence

upon the United States to the point where an attempt to do without an

American aid after the war would necessitate ‘withdrawal, for the time

being, from the position of a ﬁrst-class Power in the outside world’.

After

the Lend-Lease Act was abruptly cancelled at the end of the war with

Japan in August, Keynes was sent to Washington to negotiate the Anglo-

American Loan Agreement, which gave Britain a brief breathing space but

did not prevent repeated balance-of-payments crises as Britain effected a

transition from a war economy.

Post-war chancellors tried to reduce Britain’s commitments to the

defence of empire to a level that would not impinge adversely on the

economy. In February 1946, Hugh Dalton circulated to the Cabinet a

memorandum, drafted by Keynes, in which it was estimated that, on

current trends, military expenditure outside Europe might cost anything

from £600 million to £750 million in the three years 1946–8, compared

with the American line of credit of £937 million, which was expected to

last the six years 1946–51. Keynes posed the question: ‘How do we propose

to reply to the Egyptian demand that we take our troops out of Egypt? Is it

appreciated that we are paying the cost of keeping them there by borrow-

ing it from Egypt?’

Dalton hoped that if his Cabinet colleagues accepted

that Britain lacked the resources to keep open the Mediterranean route in

time of war, they would also agree that troops need not be maintained in

the Suez Canal Zone or the rest of the Middle East. However, although

the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, talked of withdrawing to a line from

Lagos to Kenya, Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, strongly supported

the COS when they argued that Britain must remain a Mediterranean

power. During 1946 and the ﬁrst half of 1947, when the government’s

hopes of economic recovery focused on overcoming the shortage of indus-

trial and agricultural workers, Bevin obstinately resisted any reduction in

Britain’s armed forces or overseas commitments, and such was the

strength of his position in the Labour government that his view prevailed

until after a failed attempt at making sterling convertible in July 1947

highlighted the weakness of Britain’s position. In September, the

Cabinet’s Defence Committee agreed to a reduction in the strength of the

armed forces from 1,217,000 to 713,000 by March 1949, a step that was

said to involve ‘serious risks and political consequences’, although the

strength of the armed forces in mid-1939 had been only 480,000.

84 G. Peden

The Treasury’s attempts at reducing the resources devoted to defence

were reversed in 1950 as a result of the outbreak of the Korean War in

June that year. To the dismay of Treasury officials, Hugh Gaitskell, the

Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in favour of rearmament, to show the

United States that Britain was a reliable ally. He took the lead in persuad-

ing the Cabinet to accept in January 1951 a £4,700 million programme

for 1951/2 to 1953/4, although only six months earlier the Cabinet had

been told that £3,400 million over three years was the maximum physi-

cally possible without additional controls over the economy. Unfortu-

nately, expectations that American aid would overcome the

balance-of-payments constraint were disappointed, and a severe sterling

crisis followed in 1951–2, mainly as a result of the rise in import prices

that resulted from rearmament in other countries, principally the United

States. What rearmament did was to divert British industry from exports

just as the effects of renewed German competition began to be felt.

The consequent weakening of the overstretched British economy in the

1950s shows how rearmament – even with controls over the economy –

can reduce a country’s capacity to support the armed forces that it is

creating. The proportion of Britain’s gross domestic product devoted

to defence expenditure had risen from 5.8 per cent in 1949/50 to

8.7 per cent in 1952/3 and was still as high as 7.9 per cent in 1954/5 and

7.2 per cent in 1956/7; in 1938/9, it had been about 8 per cent.

The aftermath of rearmament was a painful period of adjustment for

the armed forces, as Treasury control was gradually reasserted and defence

departments had to cut back on their programmes. The Treasury was not

alone in thinking that the burden of overseas defence expenditure con-

tinued to be a source of weakness for the balance of payments.

Among

the economies was a withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone. The COS

themselves had come round to the view by 1952 that, without willing

Egyptian cooperation, the base there was more of a liability than an asset.

With R. A. Butler, chancellor of the exchequer, warning about Britain’s

fragile external ﬁnancial position, and the need to cut defence expendi-

ture, the Chiefs favoured running down the base and transferring some of

its functions to Cyprus.

An agreement to withdraw British troops from

Egypt was signed in October 1954, and the last men left in June 1956.

The Suez crisis, following the nationalization of the Canal by the

Egyptian dictator, Colonel Nasser, in July 1956, revealed the extent to

which the weakness of sterling could undermine the efforts of the armed

forces. Britain and France, acting in collusion with Israel, tried to topple

Nasser, starting with air attacks on 31 October, followed by the landing of

an Anglo-French expeditionary force at Port Said on 5 November.

However, the following day the United States used Britain’s need for

American support for sterling to insist on a ceaseﬁre, and Britain and

France were compelled to withdraw their forces in December. Treasury

ofﬁcials had warned the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, and the Prime

Treasury and defence of empire 85

Minister, Anthony Eden, in April that foreign conﬁdence in sterling was

so weak that pressure for devaluation might become irresistible at some

point between August and November. Inﬂationary pressures, and in

particular, demands for higher wages, were creating doubt about British

industry’s ability to compete in international markets, and the Suez crisis

added to the uncertainty. Macmillan was told more than once by Treas-

ury ofﬁcials in August and September that it was vital that Britain should

not act against Egypt without American support. On the basis of informal

talks that he had in America in September, Macmillan seems to have

believed that American support would be forthcoming, and when it was

not, he felt that he had no option but to advise the Cabinet to acquiesce

in American demands. British vulnerability to American pressure was

greater than it might have been, because Treasury ofﬁcials and the Bank

of England had been kept in the dark about the government’s intention

to invade Egypt and had consequently not approached the International

Monetary Fund (IMF) for a standby credit beforehand, as the French had

done. Moreover, Britain was due to make her annual repayment under

the Anglo-American Loan Agreement of 1945 in December. Without

American support, there was no prospect of a successful application to

the IMF for a credit to offset heavy selling of sterling and a consequent

fall in Britain’s gold and dollar reserves. The alternative would have been

to allow sterling to ﬂoat, but in an era of ﬁxed exchange rates, such

action would have been regarded as the equivalent of devaluation. There

had been a devaluation of sterling as recently as 1949, and another one

would probably have led to the break-up of the sterling area, which at the

time was regarded as an important bond holding most of the

Commonwealth together.

Conclusion

The principal function of the Treasury in relation to defence was to

warn ministers of the financial and, from 1915, the economic con-

sequences of proposals for increased expenditure. In 1937, the Inskip

report noted that:

In considering whether we can afford this or that programme, the

ﬁrst question asked is how much the programme will cost; and the

cost of the programme is then related to the sums which can be made

available from Exchequer resources, from taxation, or exceptionally

from the proceeds of loans. But the fact that the problem is con-

sidered in terms of money, must not be allowed to obscure the fact

that our real resources consist not of money, i.e., paper pounds, which

are nothing more than a symbol, but of our man power, and produc-

tive capacity, our power to maintain our credit, and the general

balance of our trade.

86 G. Peden

Twenty years later, the 1957 Defence White Paper stated:

Britain’s inﬂuence in the world depends ﬁrst and foremost on the

health of her internal economy and the success of her export trade.

Without these, military power cannot in the long run be supported. It

is therefore in the true interests of defence that the claims of military

expenditure should be considered in conjunction with the need to

maintain the country’s ﬁnancial and economic strength.

The Inskip report has not been well regarded by military historians

because it was overtaken by events. It was designed to plan defence expen-

diture in future years in a way that would ensure that the British economy

would not be undermined by the process of rearmament over ﬁve years or

by creating armed forces that would be too large to maintain in the long

term. It was not designed as a plan for war in 1939. The 1957 Defence

White Paper had its controversial aspects in relation to defence policy, but

few would doubt that the British economy was disadvantaged in the early

1950s from having to bear a greater proportion of its national product

devoted to defence than other European countries.

Long-run deterrence,

which was the aim of British defence policy in the 1950s, had to take

account of what defences the country could afford to sustain indeﬁnitely.

Treasury control was originally designed to ensure that the defence

departments were as economical as possible. From 1919, the Treasury

engaged in debate on what policy should be, and, although Treasury inter-

ventions must often have been intensely irritating to other departments,

the lack of an effective ministry of defence created a need for some body in

Whitehall to ensure that strategists were thinking clearly about priorities.

Notes

1 P. Burroughs, ‘Defence and imperial disunity’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford

History of the British Empire, vol. III, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999),

320–45, at 320, 327–8, 332–3.

2 A. Clayton, ‘ “Deceptive might”: imperial defence and security, 1900–1968’, in

J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol.

IV, The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 280–305, at 294.

3 See, for example, C. Barnett, Britain and Her Army (London, 1970), 421, and B.

Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1980), 39, 135–6.

4 B. M. Gough, ‘The RN and the British Empire’ and D. Killingray, ‘Imperial

defence’, in R. W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. V, His-

toriography (Oxford, 1999), 327–41 and 342–53.

5 What follows is based on G. C. Peden, ‘From cheap government to efﬁcient

government: the political economy of public expenditure in the UK,

1832–1914’, in D. Winch and P. K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British

Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), 351–78, and G. C. Peden, The

Treasury and British Public Policy, 1906–1959 (Oxford, 2000).

6 G. C. Peden, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and British rearmament against Germany’,

English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 29–47, at 30.

Treasury and defence of empire 87

7 See F. A. Johnson, Defence by Committee: The Origins and Early Development of the

British Committee of Imperial Defence, 1885–1959 (London, 1960); F. A. Johnson,

Defence by Ministry: The British Ministry of Defence 1944–1974 (New York, 1980).

8 E. Bridges, Treasury Control (London, 1950), 6.

9 L. E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Polit-

ical Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge, 1986).

10 P. K. O’Brien, ‘The costs and beneﬁts of British imperialism 1846–1914’, Past

and Present, 120 (1988), 163–200, at 193, 199.

11 P. Kennedy, ‘The costs and beneﬁts of British imperialism 1846–1914’, Past

and Present, 125 (1989), 186–92; A. Offer, ‘The British Empire, 1870–1914: a

waste of money?’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 46 (1993), 215–38.

12 J. T. Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval

Policy (London, 1993), 24–5.

13 J. F. Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone–Disraeli Era, 1866–1880

(Stanford, 1997), 6–8, 34–5.

14 Distribution and Mobilization of the Fleet (Cd. 2335), Parliamentary Papers (PP)

1905, vol. XLVIII, 176–81.

15 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 145–60.

16 E. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester, 1992); E. Spiers,

Haldane: An Army Reformer (Edinburgh, 1980).

17 Sir Seymour Fortescue, Looking Back (London, 1920), cited in T. C. Campbell,

‘Sound ﬁnance: Gladstone and British government ﬁnance, 1880–1895’, Ph.D.

(London, 2004), 193.

18 A. J. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in

the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (London, 1940), 491.

19 K. Burk, ‘The Treasury: from impotence to power’, in K. Burk (ed.), War and

the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914–1919 (London, 1982),

84–107.

20 D. French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–1916 (London, 1986), 74, 116–22,

131; R. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (London,

1983), 305–11.

21 B. W. E. Alford, Britain and the World Economy since 1880 (London: Longman,

1996), 107–9; A. S. Milward, The Economic Effects of the World Ward on Britain

(London, 1970), 46.

22 Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 121–2, 168–9.

23 N. H. Gibbs, History of the Second World War: Grand Strategy, vol. I (London,

1976), 3–5.

24 The expression ‘whip hand’ is from S. Roskill, Naval Policy between the Wars, vol.

I (London, 1968), 215.

25 J. Ferris, The Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919–26 (Basingstoke, 1989),

15–30.

26 Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 172.

27 D. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: the RAF, 1919–1939 (Manchester,

1990).

28 J. Ferris, ‘Treasury control, the ten year rule and British service policies,

1919–1924’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 859–83, at 861, 871.

29 Churchill to Stanley Baldwin (prime minister), 15 December 1924, in M.

Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. V, Companion, part 1 (London, 1979), 303–7.

30 R. O’Neill, ‘Churchill, Japan, and British security in the Paciﬁc: 1904–1942’, in

R. Blake and W. R. Louis (eds), Churchill (Oxford, 1993), 275–89, at 278–9,

281, 285–6; G. C. Peden, ‘Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and the

defence of empire’, in J. B. Hattendorf and M. H. Murfett (eds), The Limita-

tions of Military Power: Essays presented to Professor Norman Gibbs on his Eightieth

Birthday (Basingstoke, 1990), 160–72 and 165–7.

88 G. Peden

31 Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 214–15.

32 J. Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire,

1919–1941 (Oxford, 1981), 103–21.

33 G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–1939 (Edinburgh, 1979).

34 K. Neilson, ‘The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, British Strategic

Foreign Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement’, English

Historical Review, 118 (2003), 651–84, at 653. This article helpfully reviews the

huge literature on the DRC.

35 Gibbs, History of the Second World War, 93–8.

36 Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics

1932–1939 (London, 1980).

37 DRC minutes, 30 January, and 16 and 26 February 1934, and DRC report,

paras. 28–9, 28 February 1934, CAB 16/109, The National Archives of the UK,

London (TNA).

38 DCM (32) 120, 20 June 1934, CAB 27/511; CP 193 (34), 16 July 1934, CAB

27/514, TNA.

39 M. Smith, British Air Strategy between the Wars (Oxford, 1984); Peden, British

Rearmament, 130–4, 151–78, 183.

40 DCM (32), 120, para. 15.

41 G. Bennett, ‘British policy in the Far East 1933–1936: Treasury and FO’,

Modern Asian Studies, 26 (1992), 545–68; G. Kennedy, Anglo-American Strategic

Relations and the Far East 1933–1939 (London, 2002), 123–5, 134, 136–8, 146–8,

173–7, 180–2.

42 C. M. Bell, The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (Basingstoke,

2000), 59–60, 77–90, 182–3; G. A. H. Gordon, British Seapower and Procurement

between the Wars: a Reappraisal of Rearmament (Basingstoke, 1988).

43 Peden, British Rearmament, 166. For example, the Admiralty had reserved space

for one capital ship at John Brown’s as early as March 1936, and permission to

start work was given in November that year, although the ship was one of those

authorised for the 1937/1938 ﬁnancial year; H. Peebles, Warshipbuilding on the

Clyde: Naval Orders and the Prosperity of the Clyde Shipbuilding Industry, 1889–1939

(Edinburgh, 1987), 146. The total displacement of the ﬁve King George V class

vessels was 175,000 tons; the Japanese Yamato class, at 65,000 tons each, were

the largest battleships ever built.

44 Bond, British Military Policy, 199–208.

45 Peden, British Rearmament, 40–2, 64–5, 122–3, 137–8.

46 ‘Defence Expenditure in Future Years’, CP 316 (37), CAB 24/273, TNA, paras.

41–4.

47 CP 24 (38), CAB 24/274, TNA.

48 Peden, British Rearmament, 143–4.

49 M. Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in

the Era of the Two World Wars (London, 1972), 100.

50 G. C. Peden, ‘The burden of imperial defence and the continental commit-

ment reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 405–23.

51 R. P. Shay, British Rearmament in the Thirties: Politics and Proﬁts (Princeton,

1977); J. Ruggiero, Neville Chamberlain: Pride, Prejudice, and Politics (Westport,

1999).

52 G. C. Peden, ‘A matter of timing: the economic background to British foreign

Policy, 1937–1939’, History, 69 (1984), 15–28, at 17. See also R. A. C. Parker,

‘The pound sterling, the American Treasury and British preparations for war,

1938–1939’, English Historical Review, 98 (1983), 261–79.

53 Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 303–7, 328–38.

54 D. E. Moggridge (ed.), Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. XXIV

(Basingstoke and Cambridge, 1979), 256–95, at 275.

Treasury and defence of empire 89

55 See A. Cairncross, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy 1945–51 (London,

1985).

56 Moggridge (ed.), Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. XXVII (1980),

465–81, at 480.

57 A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945–1951 (London, 1983), 239–45;

G. C. Peden, ‘Economic aspects of British perceptions of power on the eve of

the Cold War’, in J. Becker and F. Knipping (eds), Power in Europe? Great

Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in a Postwar World (Berlin, 1986), 237–61, at

250.

58 Cairncross, Years of Recovery (London, 1985), 214–25, 228–32.

59 L. Pliatzky, Getting and Spending: Public Expenditure, Employment and Inﬂation

(Oxford, 1984), 15; Peden, ‘Matter of timing’, 25.

60 A. Shonﬁeld, British Economic Policy since the War (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,

1958), 89–98, 102–7; S. Strange, Sterling and British Policy (Oxford, 1971), ch. 6.

61 M. Carver, British Defence Policy since 1945 (London, 1992), 28–9.

62 See L. Johnman, ‘Defending the pound: the economics of the Suez crisis’, in

T. Gorst, L. Johnman and W. S. Lucas (eds), Postwar Britain, 1945–1964: Themes

and Perspectives (London, 1989); D. B. Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez

Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1991); Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 446–7.

63 CP 316 (37), CAB 24/273, TNA.

64 Defence: Outline of Future Policy (Cmnd 124), PP 1956–57, vol. XXIII, 489–502,

para. 6.

65 NATO Information Service, NATO Facts and Figures (Brussels, 1976), 294.

90 G. Peden

5 The British Army and the empire,

1856–1956

David French

The British did not maintain a single army to defend their empire, they

maintained several. The roles of the forces raised in the Dominions will be

examined by Brian Farrell in a later chapter. This chapter will explore the

functions of the other land forces that the British raised – the British army

proper that was recruited exclusively in the United Kingdom, the

British–Indian army, the direct descendant of the army of the East India

Company, and the various much-smaller forces such as the Royal West

African Frontier Force (RWAFF) and the King’s African Riﬂes that the

British raised in their various colonies.

In the century between the end of the Crimean War and the Suez crisis,

these forces performed at least six major functions. They helped to break

down primary resistance to British rule, they represented British authority

by showing the ﬂag, they acted as a reserve force of last resort to assist the

civil power to maintain law and order, they garrisoned the numerous

naval bases and coaling stations, which formed the backbone of the Royal

Navy’s (RN) global reach, they acted as a deterrent to tribal incursions

and Russian aggression along the North West Frontier of India and, very

occasionally, they took part in global wars.

The modernisation of the British army did not begin after the Crimean

War. It was a process that started in the 1830s, for, as Hew Strachan and

others have shown, much of the evidence suggesting that the army had

fallen into torpor after Waterloo, and was rudely awoken by the Crimean

War, was biased. It was collected by radical politicians eager to ﬁnd a stick

with which to beat the system of aristocratic government, and they were not

too scrupulous about how they went about it.

But one perennial problem

that both pre-Crimean reformers and those who followed them in the late

1850s and early 1860s had not solved was how to recruit sufﬁcient rank and

ﬁle. Soldiers enlisted for a variety of reasons. Some had fallen out with

their family and friends and wanted to start a new life. Others wanted to

travel abroad. Some were attracted by the bright uniform. Many were

unemployed and hungry. But there were powerful countervailing forces

that discouraged men from coming forward. A soldier’s pay compared

badly with that of all but the worst-paid agricultural labourer.

Barracks