Britannia's Shield

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