The 167th (1st London) Brigade was an infantry formation of the British Territorial Army that saw active service in both the First and Second World Wars.

It was the first Territorial formation to go overseas in 1914, garrisoned Malta, and then served with the 56th (London) Infantry Division on the Western Front.

The Volunteer Force of part-time soldiers was created following an invasion scare in 1859, and its constituent units were progressively aligned with the Regular British Army during the later 19th Century.

The Stanhope Memorandum of December 1888 introduced a Mobilisation Scheme for Volunteer units, which would assemble in their own brigades at key points in case of war.

[8] However, between November 1914 and April 1915, most of the battalions of the division were sent overseas[9] either to reinforce the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front or to overseas postings such as Malta (in the case of the 1/1st London Brigade) so as to relieve to Regular Army troops for service in France and Belgium and so, as a result, the 1st London Division was broken up.

[11] The brigade served for the rest of the First World War in the trenches of the Western Front in Belgium and France, fighting a diversionary attack, alongside 46th (North Midland) Division, on the Gommecourt salient, to distract German attention away from the Somme offensive a few miles south in July 1916.

Like most of the rest of the British Army after the events of Dunkirk, the division spent most of its time in an anti-invasion role training to repel an expected German invasion.

[32] In November 1941 the brigade was sent to Suffolk and in July 1942 was preparing for a move overseas[33] and was inspected by General Sir Bernard Paget, at that time Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, and also His Majesty King George VI.

[34] The 56th Division, now composed largely of a mixture of Territorials, Regulars and wartime volunteers, left the United Kingdom on 25 August 1942, moving to Iraq and, together with 5th Infantry Division, became part of III Corps under the British Tenth Army, came over underall control of Persia and Iraq Command.

[36] The division came under command of X Corps, part of the British Eighth Army, and saw only comparatively minimal service in the Tunisia Campaign, which ended in mid-May 1943 with the surrender of over 230,000 German and Italian soldiers, a number equal to Stalingrad the year before, who would later become prisoners of war.

Throughout the fighting the brigade, supported by A Squadron of the Royal Scots Greys, had suffered heavy casualties (roughly 360 per battalion)[38] and, after being relieved by other units, secured the Salerno beachhead and later advanced up the spine of Italy, crossing the Volturno Line and later fought at Monte Camino and crossed the Garigliano river in January 1944.

[39] In January 1944, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill envisioned an attempt to outflank the Winter Line, by way of an amphibious assault near Anzio, to capture Rome, the current objective which was being fought for in the Battle of Monte Cassino.

By the time they were relieved, casualties in the brigade, and the rest of 56th Division, by now very weak, had been so severe that one unit, the 7th Battalion, Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, were reduced to 60 all ranks, less than a company, from an initial strength of almost 1,000 officers and men.

All that remained of Y Company was merely a single officer and 10 other ranks, after being heavily attacked by German infantry and Tiger tanks, which had fought against the battalion at Salerno.

Almost as soon as it arrived the brigade, now under Eighth Army command, found itself fighting on the Gothic Line, throughout the summer, in Operation Olive (where Eighth Army suffered 14,000 casualties, at the rate of nearly 1,000 a day[46]) at the Battle of Gemmano, where the brigade and division suffered particularly heavy casualties.

Due to these heavy losses suffered by the division (nearly 6,000)[47] in August and September and a severe lack of British infantry replacements in the Mediterranean theatre (although large numbers of anti-aircraft gunners were being retrained as infantry, they had only began their conversion in August and would not available until, at the earliest, October),[48] the 8th Royal Fusiliers and 7th Ox and Bucks were both reduced to cadres and transferred to the 168th (London) Brigade,[36] which was being disbanded, with the surplus personnel of the 8th Royal Fusiliers transferring to the 9th Battalion[36] and most of the men of 7th Ox and Bucks transferring to fill gaps in the 2/5th, 2/6th and 2/7th battalions of the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey) of the 169th (Queen's) Brigade.