BRITANNIA’S SHIELD:
Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and Late-Victorian Imperial Defence
Craig Stockings
Cambridge University Press, 2015, 348pp, $59.95
Professor Craig Stockings has
cast a bright light on the troubled career of Lieutenant-General Sir Edward
Hutton. Like a modern Cassandra, Hutton seemed condemned to produce well
thought out, practical, plans to improve Imperial defence (at least as regards
Britain and the self-governing colonies) while being unable to ensure their
implementation. Even today many of his ideas, particularly about infantry
mobility, have resonance.
As Stockings demonstrates, a
significant part of the problem was Hutton’s own personality. Hutton’s failures
were often for constitutional reasons that he respected in theory, but ignored
in practice. His difficult personal relationships with political leaders in the
colonies were a significant obstacle to achieving his objectives, while his
habit of appealing directly to the press, over the heads of his constitutional
masters, was not particularly helpful.
Hutton regularly warned his
British colleagues and superiors that the colonies could not be forced to
commit themselves to binding peacetime arrangements. He saw that while leaders
in the self-governing colonies were willing to seek volunteers in time of
crisis, they would not commit themselves at other times, without some control
over Imperial policy. However, he then pressed the governments he worked for to
move further than they were willing.
Hutton believed that a
system of ‘Cooperative Empire Defence’ could be based on an Empire-wide
volunteer militia force comprised largely of mounted infantry. This would
provide a deployable reserve that could be used wherever the Empire was
threatened. Stockings shows that Hutton’s emphasis on mounted infantry
developed at Staff College, was confirmed by command of a mounted infantry
company in South Africa in 1881, and polished in Egypt and during campaigns
against the Mahdists. In 1888, in one of his few clear successes, Hutton established
a mounted infantry school at Aldershot.
Stockings shows how Hutton
used his time as Commandant of the New South Wales forces to plan a force based
on a split between a static Garrison Force and a mobile Field Force. Economic
problems, and Hutton’s arrogance towards, and impatience with, the compromises
inherent in politics left his plan incomplete. Similar problems ensued during
Hutton’s periods in command in Canada, and commanding the new Australian Army
after Federation. The period in Canada was particularly difficult, as Hutton
attempted to reform a politicised militia.
However, Stockings shows
that even though his ‘master plan’ was never implemented in any of the forces
he commanded, those forces did benefit from improvements to training and organisation
that Hutton was able to put in place. The closest that Hutton came to
implementing his dream was as commander of the 1st Mounted Infantry Brigade in
South Africa. Stockings’ discussion of this period demonstrates again Hutton’s
inability to ‘cooperate to succeed’.
As well as falling out with
his colonial political masters, Hutton also antagonised his British superiors.
Stockings records that when the ‘Roberts Ring’ replaced the ‘Wolseley Ring’ in
the War Office, the writing was on the wall for both Hutton and his ideas. The
cavalrymen French and Haig later ensured that mounted infantry did not replace
the cavalry. Even the Australian light horse, given the role of mounted
infantry by Hutton in 1902, was converted to cavalry regiments from late 1917,
albeit some regiments were again converted to motor or machine gun regiments in
the late 1930s and early 1940s.
It would take another war
before mounted infantry (particularly in the British motor battalions, American
armoured infantry battalions, and Germany panzer grenadiers) became fully
accepted. Ironically Hutton’s old regiment, the 60th Rifles (King’s Royal Rifle
Corps), provided many of the motor battalions.
Hutton was at the centre of
the development of Imperial defence policy in the last decade of the 1800s and
the first few years of the 1900s. As Stockings demonstrates, however, while
Hutton’s theories were known in London, the actual course of events followed a
path based on the work of others. Reforms to the British Territorial Army implemented
after Hutton’s retirement were based on the work of others, though they
resembled his ideal scheme.
That did not stop Hutton
from claiming that he could see his ideas in many developments before and
during the First World War. Despite his failures, however, Hutton seems to have
been the most capable of the men discussed in Jim Wood’s book (Chiefs of the Australian Army, 1901-1914,
AMHP, 2006).
While the printing standard
is excellent, the editing is somewhat eccentric for a product of Cambridge
University Press. The words ‘a’ and ‘the’ seem to have been dropped on random
occasions and there are other quirks. Homonyms seem to have been used
incorrectly in a couple of places.
JOHN DONOVAN
