Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

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      The concentric ripples of family and friendship made the relationship between Westminster and the war even more pervasive. Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister at the start of the war, had four sons. The eldest, Raymond, died with the Grenadiers on the Somme; Herbert served as a gunner officer on the Western Front, and the much-wounded Arthur commanded a brigade of the Royal Naval Division. Anthony, being born in 1902, was too young to serve. All three sons of Labour leader Arthur Henderson fought: the eldest was killed on the Somme, where he lies, with a brisk walk in the lee of Delville Wood between him and Raymond Asquith. Liberal politician Jack Seely, had served in the yeomanry in the Boer War, and been forced to resign as secretary of state for war over the Curragh affair in 1914. He commanded the Canadian Cavalry Brigade on the Western Front, and his son Frank, a second lieutenant in the Hampshires (the family lived on the Isle of Wight and this was the county regiment) was killed at Arras in 1917.

      Although the military demand for manpower in the Second World War was much smaller than in the First, twenty-three MPs died on war service, although this includes seven who perished in aircraft crashes, a retired lieutenant colonel who killed himself, fearing that an old wound might prevent his going on active service, and Private Patrick Munro, MP for Llandaff and Barry, who died on a Home Guard training exercise. Sir Arnold Wilson had served in the Indian Army before the First World War, had gone on to become a colonial administrator, and was elected Conservative MP for Hitchin in 1933. The New Statesman thought him ‘an admirer of Hitler’, but when war came he affirmed ‘I have no desire to shelter myself and live in safety behind the bodies of millions of our young men.’ He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as a pilot officer air gunner, and was killed at 56 over France in 1940. John Whiteley, elected MP for Buckingham in 1937, had served as a gunner officer in the First World War, and died as a brigadier when the aircraft carrying General Sikorsky crashed at Gibraltar in 1943. Peers and their children (for women were now conscripted) also served in large numbers, and relationships within the Westminster village meant that, just as had been the case in the First World War, there were intimate links between the two houses. The Hon Richard Wood, third son of the Earl of Halifax, lost both legs but went on to serve as a junior minister in four administrations, and was ennobled as Baron Holderness. He married the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Orlando ‘Flash’ Kellett, MP for Birmingham Aston, who had been a regular officer before joining the yeomanry: Kellett was killed commanding the Sherwood Rangers in North Africa in 1943.

      The cases of Edward Kellett and John Whitely underline the strength of military representation in the parliament of the inter-war years. In 1919, 12 per cent of new Conservative MPs had served in the forces. Between 1919 and 1939, ex-regular officers were, after lawyers, the second largest occupational group in the Commons. There were the very senior: Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston was elected Unionist MP for North Ayrshire in a October 1916 by-election while commanding a corps on the Somme. He left the army in 1919, and sat as an MP till 1935. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was elected Unionist MP for North Down in 1921, though he was murdered by Irish nationalists outside his London home the following year. And there were the more junior: Jack Cohen sat for Liverpool Fairfield in 1918–31, and lost both legs at Passchendaele. Ian Fraser, who sat for St Pancras North in 1924–9 and 1931–7, then for Lonsdale in 1940–58, had been commissioned into the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in time to be blinded on the Somme. He crowned a remarkable career by being ennobled as Baron Fraser of Lonsdale, Britain’s first life peer, in 1958.

      Most striking is the close connection between military service and high office. Winston Churchill had fought on the North-West Frontier, at Omdurman and in the Boer War before entering politics. In 1916, widely blamed for the Gallipoli fiasco, he rejoined the army (having maintained his military status by serving in the yeomanry), and was attached to the Grenadier Guards to learn the ways of trench warfare before commanding 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers in the Ploegsteert sector, south of Ypres, for the first five months of 1916.

      Churchill’s deputy from 1940 to 1945, and his successor after that year’s general election, was Labour leader Clement Attlee. He had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics when war broke out in 1914, and was immediately commissioned into the South Lancashire Regiment. In 1915 he commanded a company on Gallipoli, and probably owed his life to the fact that he was being treated for dysentery during some very heavy fighting. His company was one of those chosen to furnish the rearguard during the withdrawal from Suvla Bay in December, and he was the last but one man to leave. Attlee was wounded in Mesopotamia, so spent 1917 in Britain, and was then posted to the Western Front for the last six months of the war. In the inter-war years he styled himself ‘Major Attlee’, and his open, collegiate style of leadership reflected the skills needed to command a mixture of wartime volunteers and conscripts in a middle-of-the-road infantry regiment.

      Attlee was ousted by Churchill in 1951, and Churchill himself was succeeded in 1955 by Anthony Eden, a classic example of the well-connected officer (Durham landed-gentry, Eton and Oxford) who had a good war. He was commissioned into 21/King’s Royal Rifle Corps, proudly known as the Yeoman Rifles and raised by Charles, Earl of Feversham. The battalion was first committed to battle on the Somme on 15 September 1916; Feversham was killed that day. Eden won the Military Cross, became adjutant of his battalion and finally, aged just 21, became the youngest brigade major (chief of staff of a formation then comprising three infantry battalions) in the army. Styling himself Captain Eden he was elected to parliament in 1923. In 1939 he returned, briefly, to the army as a major. He served as foreign secretary from 1935 to 1938, when he resigned over appeasement. He held important posts during the war, lost one of his two sons in Burma, and again served as foreign secretary for part of Churchill’s second administration. By the time Eden became prime minister he was already past his best, and ended up resigning in 1957 as a result of the Suez affair. There is a strong case for blaming some of Eden’s misfortunes on the strains imposed by two years on the Western Front.

      Eden was succeeded by Harold Macmillan, who had served him as both foreign secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. A publisher’s son, Macmillan was at Oxford in 1914 and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He was first wounded at Loos in 1915 and had been wounded again by the time he was hit in the pelvis as the Guards Division attacked Guillemont on 15 September 1916. This was the same battle that killed Lieutenant Raymond Asquith and Lieutenant Colonel Guy Baring. Macmillan lay in No Man’s Land reading Aeschylus in Greek, and then spent the rest of the war undergoing a series of operations. Like Eden, he was marked by his experiences. He could not bear to return to Oxford to finish his degree, for he could never forget that of his first-year group at Balliol, only one other had survived the war.

      In 1924 he was elected, as Captain Macmillan, for the industrial constituency of Stockton. He lost his seat in 1929, but returned to the Commons in 1931. Like Eden he was scornful of appeasement and appeasers, and his easy but authoritative style made him a natural choice for high office when Churchill came to power. From 1942 to 1945 he was resident minister in the Mediterranean. He took over from Eden in 1957 and served till 1963, assuring the country that ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Macmillan’s concern for social reform, which put him towards the left of the Conservative party of his day, reflected his contact with ordinary folk in the trenches. ‘They have big hearts, these soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘and it is a very pathetic task to have to read all their letters home. Some of the older men, with wives and families who write every day, have in their style a wonderful simplicity which is almost great literature.’

      The pattern was broken by Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had contracted spinal tuberculosis in 1938. He was bedridden for the first two years of the war and unfit for service thereafter. Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister 1964–70 and 1964–6, had volunteered for service in 1939 but had, very sensibly in view of his first-class economic brain, been directed into the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Edward Heath, Conservative Prime Minister 1970–74, had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and soldiered on part-time with the Honourable Artillery Company after the war.

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