Temporary gentlemen

[5][6][nb 2] The profession was therefore only open to the wealthy; it was popularly chosen for the younger sons of the gentry and aristocracy, who would not inherit the family estates and who could sell their commissions upon retirement (provided they did not die, were not promoted to general rank or cashiered for poor behaviour).

[8] Such men were considered gentlemen, a term encompassing the upper portion of the British class system, inheriting this status from their fathers and holding it for life no matter their behaviour.

[11] Officers also had to purchase their own uniforms and equipment, which cost at least £200 in the infantry and £600–1,000 in the cavalry, and, depending on regimental practice, pay subscriptions to provide coaches, bands, theatre tickets, wine cellars and packs of hunting hounds.

[12][nb 7] Efforts were made to reform the profession in the early Edwardian era but were stymied by resistance from serving officers and a reluctance by the government to provide funding for subsidies to those without the means to maintain the lifestyle.

This included David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford who, at the age of 45, served as a lance corporal, and Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of The Morning Post, who refused a commission to "do the thing fairly [and] take [his] place in the ranks".

[30][nb 9] A newly commissioned officer on active service could therefore earn upwards of £210 per year, on top of which some civilian employers also continued to pay their former employees half wages.

[57] Of the 144,000 officers demobilised at the war's end (the majority of whom held temporary commissions) it was found that 60 per cent came from clerical, commercial, educational or professional lines of work.

[46][60] Future prime minister Clement Attlee, who served in the war as a temporary officer and reached the rank of major, stated that "I had a Lancashire miner who had been in Gallipoli with me and a lad who had been an errand-boy, but they were very good material.

[61] Duff Cooper, a future politician and diplomat, noted in July 1917 that the officer cadet battalion of the Household Brigade, in which he served, contained a shoemaker, a Yorkshire window dresser and a cockney bank clerk.

Some temporary gentlemen experienced difficulties when posted to British East Africa, as the askaris there viewed them as "low-class masters" inferior to regular army officers.

A pre-war regular, Sergeant J. F. Lucy of the Royal Irish Rifles, noted that "the New Army leaders, a large number of whom were practical businessmen with no time for obsolete customs ... [showed] an unexpected flair for fighting, brought critical and well-trained minds to bear on every aspect of the war, and won not our respect, but our admiration".

Geddes suggested he should seek to provide them with employment in line with the more favourable of the two positions, despite objections from the boards of education and agriculture and Kent's own deputy, Brigadier-General Arthur Asquith.

[83] The government attempted to assist demobilised officers to find new work by providing training in the fields of agriculture and business and by establishing several related grants and allowances.

[58] The Service Man journal recorded cases of former brigadier-generals acting as cooks in the Royal Irish Constabulary, colonels working as grocers and majors as salesmen.

[85] The Territorial Force intelligence officer and author Hugh Pollard wrote in February 1919 that "everyone recognises that the warehouse clerk who has shown himself fit to be a colonel should not have to go back to his old job, because it is such obvious waste of a man of higher capacity ... the nation must realise what magnificent material it has available in the non-regular officers of the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy, and it must wake up to the absolute necessity of making the best possible use of them when they revert to civil employment".

[nb 11] The Minister of Labour Sir Robert Horne noted that half of the vacancies the appointments department offered to demobilised officers paid a salary of less than £250 per year and many were less than £150.

[91] With the war economy being quickly wound down and government expenditures cut, economic output fell rapidly and the country was entering recession by the middle of the year.

[25] With the return of expensive social habits many temporary gentlemen in this period found that they could not afford to maintain their positions in the peacetime army, which did not pay uniform or equipment allowances.

[100][96] Some demobilised temporary gentlemen found employment with the Special Reserve ("Black and Tans") or the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary in the inter-war years.

This included Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon's series of fictionalised memoirs (Graves and Sassoon were members of the pre-war special reserve which drew from the traditional officer class) and that of temporary gentleman Edwin Campion Vaughan, whose lack of a public school education and pre-war position as a customs officer gave him a similar social standing to some of the men under his command.

[51] Henry Williamson's semi-autobiographical novel series A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight focuses on Phillip Maddison, a former clerk who receives a temporary commission during the war and is critical of the pre-war officers who look down on him.

[97] In Sherriff's classic 1929 fictional play Journey's End, set in a company commander's dugout in March 1918, one of the four officers, Second Lieutenant Trotter, is a man of lower social class promoted from the ranks.

[109] Efforts had been made by the Liberal Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1938 to "democratise" the army by reducing living expenses and introducing scholarships but this failed to make much of an impact.

The Labour Party noted at the time that "the present Army system ... under which officer commissions are almost wholly reserved for the sons of the well-to-do is out of date in a democratic country".

[114] Notable examples of working men to receive commissions included a lieutenant who was a former blast furnace labourer, a captain who was a road sweeper and lieutenant-colonels who were clerks, railway porters and bus conductors.

[111] At the end of the war the British government purposely staggered the demobilisation of conscripts and temporary officers both because of continuing military garrison requirements across the world and to reduce the impact on the labour market in the United Kingdom.

[122] The government's Resettlement Advice Service attempted to assist demobilised soldiers to find employment or training and the appointments department of the Ministry of Labour helped match senior officers to executive vacancies in industry.

[127] Some temporary gentlemen banded together in military-style organisations such as the far-right British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women or the anti-fascist 43 Group or joined the new Israel Defense Forces.

[127] The term temporary gentlemen survived after the war to refer to those National Service men who were commissioned as officers but fell out of use with the return of the British Army to a purely volunteer force in 1963.

[142] The Second World War caused a change in recruitment, a larger number of new officers were needed and positions were filled by temporary gentlemen commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.