Wiltshire and The Great War (eBook)

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Training for a Future War

Early Military Activity

Much of this book is about Salisbury Plain, the ‘Great Plain’, that bleak, undulating plateau dominating southern Wiltshire, crossed by few roads and populated only in its valleys. The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey, himself a Wiltshireman, commented that ‘the traveller ... wants here only a variety of objects to make his journey lesse tedious; for here ... is not a tree, or rarely a bush to shelter one from a shower’. On a warm, sunny day the Plain is exhilarating and offers good views, notably from its northern escarpment. On a wet day all of it is as grey as Stonehenge: the sky is ash-grey, the turf is green-grey, the chalk tracks are white-grey. It is wretched. Little wonder that heavily laden soldiers marching over it were wont to overestimate the miles travelled.

Ancient man favoured the Plain for its high ground, drier than the river valleys and providing vantage points from which to detect approaching enemies. (He was more astute than his twentieth-century descendants, who unwisely chose several sites close to rivers for Great War army camps and suffered the consequences during wet weather.) There he built earthwork castles or camps such as those at Bratton, Casterley and Yarnbury, buried his dead, and left the enigmas of Stonehenge and other monuments. The Romans chose the Wiltshire downs for their villages but the valleys for their villas. These were abandoned after they quit Britain, leaving their Saxon successors to establish the lowland villages that exist today. The high Plain was left to nature.

Enclosure acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries facilitated landscape planning and the planting of clumps and shelter-belts of beeches, but the Plain remained one of the largest tracts of desolate, isolated land in an increasingly populated southern England. In the early nineteenth century it was the preserve of sheep, with an estimated 500,000 of the Wiltshire Horn breed alone grazing there. By 1850 most had disappeared, leaving the Plain ready for new occupants – soldiers. In July 1855 the Warminster Miscellany referred to a ‘proposal for a general and permanent military encampment on Salisbury Plain’, but nothing more is recorded. (A correspondent to The Times in 1866 was to suggest ‘a general [military] camp ... once a year for a week or more, on ... say, Salisbury Plain’.) Until two years previously there had been no manoeuvres anywhere in the country, making Britain the only major European power not to have annual large-scale exercises. A temporary camp created at Aldershot during the Crimean War became permanent and evolved into the home of the British Army. This may have been conveniently close to London, but its open areas were not particularly spacious and there were too many nearby towns and villages to allow free movement of large numbers of troops. In fact, manoeuvres of any size were not held there until 1871.

Their success encouraged a repetition the next year but in a wider, less-populated, area in Wiltshire and Dorset bounded by Ringwood, Longbridge Deverill, Little Cheverell, Woodborough, Grateley and Salisbury, with the Plain in its centre. To facilitate the movement of troops over private land a special Act of Parliament was passed, as had been needed for the Aldershot exercises, but permission still had to be sought from owners and farmers. Thirty-two temporary camping-grounds were laid out, including Fighleldean Field, close to the future site of Netheravon Airfield, and at or near Codford, Durrington Field and Bulford, all destined to have large Army camps built on them in the next century. Beacon Hill, near Bulford, was the scene of a concluding review of 30,000 troops by the Prince of Wales.

By the early 1890s the British Army was finding the area around Aldershot too limited, with any extension being inhibited by housing development that was also pushing up the price of land. In 1892 the Military Lands Act enabled the Government to acquire ground for military purposes. The following year manoeuvres were held in Berkshire and a small part of Wiltshire to the east of the Chisledon–Ogbourne road, with a water supply for the troops being arranged near Manor House, Liddington. Three years later the War Department considered purchasing much of the Marlborough and western Berkshire Downs.* Then in January 1897 the Government announced that it intended to spend £450,000 on acquiring 40,000 acres of Salisbury Plain for manoeuvres, though at that time there were no plans to build permanent barracks. The first purchase was made on 3 August 1897 when land near West Lavington was acquired, and by the end of the year more than 13,600 acres had been bought. Though there was a need for cavalry to manoeuvre on open grassland, the area was also judged suitable for deploying large bodies of infantry and horse-drawn artillery. Its spaciousness would enable the creation of ranges, both for artillery and rifles; in 1897 there was none in England long enough to provide effective practice in firing the Lee-Enfield rifle introduced two years earlier.

By March 1900, 42,000 acres of the Plain had been bought for £560,000. Owners of some 26,000 acres sold their land voluntarily but others did so under compulsory purchase regulations. The area consisted of the Plain’s central and eastern sections, divided by the Avon Valley and its various villages. Initially the area north of Amesbury was allocated for artillery practice, with a site for a tented camp laid down at Lark Hill,* but the range area itself was progressively enlarged. The eastern section was used mainly for manoeuvres, cavalry exercises and rifle ranges. Over the years other land was bought, including in 1910–12 areas that extended the West Down artillery ranges westward, and in 1927 much of the western Plain. This portion, between Westbury, Warminster, Heytesbury, Tilshead and Lavington, was sometimes used by the Army before then, notably in 1910 and during the Great War.

A Military Manoeuvres Act passed in August 1897 allowed for the closure of roads (subject to notice and the consent of Justices of the Peace), compensation for damage to property and crops, and penalties for wilful and unlawful obstruction of manoeuvres. The Military Works Act of 1898 authorized £1.6 million to be spent on accommodating seven infantry and six field artillery battalions in barracks to be erected at Bulford and Tidworth.

The barracks were duly built and a number of sites established for tented camps in summer, where the only permanent structures might be a derelict farm building, an open-sided cookhouse or a water-pumping station. The garrisons of the two new barracks provided a permanent military presence, but each year dozens of regiments of Regular and part-time soldiers descended on the Plain, usually by train, for summer camps, exercises and manoeuvres. There would be little accurate anticipation of the sort of soldiering that was to be experienced in the Great War, but many of the technological developments of the new century would be tested on the Plain for their military usefulness.

Yearly Manoeuvres

The 1897 military exercises on Salisbury Plain were modest and not facilitated by the fact that as yet the Army had manoeuvring rights over only a small portion of land. The first arrivals on the Plain were a Royal Engineers company, which marked out a camping-ground near Bulford and arranged a water supply pumped through an iron pipe from Nine Mile Stream into troughs and tanks. Early in July the 4th Cavalry Brigade appeared, with the 1st Dragoon Guards riding from Norwich, followed by the Scots Greys from Hounslow and the 3rd Dragoon Guards from Woolwich.

The Morning Post thought the War Office had been ‘unbusinesslike’ in not approaching landowners beforehand about using their land – negotiations appeared to be still going on during the exercises – noting that tenant farmers and sheep-grazers could not be dispossessed at a moment’s notice. Shortly after the exercises started, one report said the area designated for them was 5 miles long by 1 mile wide, narrowing at one point to 300yd where a Mr Knowles refused to allow troops on his land. The many rabbit holes on Bulford Down made it impractical for horses and filling in these was to become a tiresome but necessary chore. Nevertheless, the cavalry was able to drill 3 miles to the north, on Haxton Down, and some at least of the last-minute negotiations with landowners appear to have succeeded, for exercises took place either side of the Amesbury–Andover road, with ‘invaders’ from Bulford attempting to collect imaginary supplies from Andover.

Training in earnest started on Salisbury Plain on 1 July 1898 with cavalry manoeuvres. The new military area was generally well liked, though some thought it unfortunate that it was divided by the Avon Valley, whose string of villages and hamlets restricted the movement of troops from one part to the other. In gaps in this string the Army established three river crossings; these were between Netheravon and Figheldean (pronounced ‘Filedean’), near Syrencot House and at Fifield. Though the Government was now the major landlord, the original tenants preserved rights until the following year, further limiting troop movements. One tale, perhaps apocryphal, was of a brigade commander who guarded his front with an out-of-bounds field of crops and his left flank with an untouchable barbed-wire fence! (By 1901 this problem had eased with the introduction of three schedules of Army land leased to farmers. Tenants of Schedule I land were allowed to farm it, with the Army...