Tommy This an' Tommy That: The military covenant

By Andrew Murrison

There is nothing new about the military covenant, a freshly minted term for something that's been around for as long as soldiering itself. 'Tommy' may have to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country. But what will his country do for him? Over centuries the covenant has been variously honoured and ignored. Confronted daily with flag-draped coffins, shameful stories of inadequate kit and shocking images of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan: what exactly are we doing to honour those who sacrifice all in the service of their country? In Tommy This an' Tommy That Andrew Murrison uses his perspective as a senior Service doctor and frontline politician to set the events of the past ten years in historical context. He charts the ways in which societal and political changes have impacted on the wellbeing of uniformed men and women, and the nation's changing sense of obligation towards the military. Crucially he asks what the future holds for the military covenant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Oct 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781849542555

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Tommy’s raw deal

The military covenant, as old as soldiering itself, was named in April 2000, but you would not have noticed. Buried deep in Army Doctrine Publication Volume 5, hardly a coffee table number, the description of the covenant had been agonisingly sculpted over a period of three years. It is tub-thumping stuff;

Soldiers will be called upon to make personal sacrifices – including the ultimate sacrifice – in the service of the Nation. In putting the needs of the Nation and the Army before their own, they forgo some of the rights enjoyed by those outside the Armed Forces. In return, British soldiers must always be able to expect fair treatment, to be valued and respected as individuals, and that they (and their families) will be sustained and rewarded by commensurate terms and conditions of service. In the same way the unique nature of military land operations means that the Army differs from all other institutions, and must be sustained and provided for accordingly by the Nation. The mutual obligation forms the Military Covenant between the Nation, the Army and each individual soldier; an unbreakable common bond of identity, loyalty and responsibility which has sustained the Army throughout its history. It has perhaps its greatest manifestation in the annual commemoration of Armistice Day, when the Nation keeps covenant with those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives in action.

‡

As a Wiltshire MP I know Wootton Bassett. It is pretty much like the small towns I represent and which typify the south-west quadrant of England. What has happened in Wootton Bassett since 2007 in many ways has come to characterise the modern military covenant.

In 2007 bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan began to be repatriated through Lyneham airbase to, though we need not dwell on it, the coroner’s post mortems held at the John Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.

Wootton Bassett, the repatriation of soldiers killed in Afghanistan © Getty

Along the route lies the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett and its unremarkable high street. It is the British equivalent of the stretch of Ontario’s MacDonald-Cartier Freeway, officially re-designated ‘The Highway of Heroes’ as, since April 2002, crowds have been gathering on overpasses to pay their respects to repatriated Canadian servicemen.

Spontaneity, quiet solemnity and the town’s insistence that it does not seek formal recognition are remarkable features of the Wootton Bassett phenomenon. The tribute grew from a dignified mark of respect by a handful of townspeople and the Wiltshire Royal British Legion encouraged by the local MP. The town’s leading lights played down the idea that it should be re-christened Royal Wootton Bassett although the accolade announced in March 2011 is certainly appropriate. It will stand as a memorial to the covenant between public and the fallen, edging 400 of which are likely to have passed through Wootton Bassett by the time that repatriations are switched to RAF Brize Norton in September.

There has been criticism that repatriations have become a media scrum, the focus for grief tourists to match the outpourings at another tragic and untimely death, that of the admirable Diana, Princess of Wales. The comparison is unfair. The mawkish, self-indulgent grief displayed in the main by people that owed no debt to and could claim no real connection with the glamorous People’s Princess was an unattractive manifestation of the cult of celebrity. In stark contrast, the military repatriations of the metaphorical boy next door, brought to dust whilst doing his duty, are an altogether buttoned-up affair. One word captures it – respect – and in that we have the essence of the military covenant.

The military covenant is woven into the political tapestry of the twenty-first century. Flag-draped coffins and press reports of shoddy, shaming conditions endured by servicemen encouraged the public to take a dim view of the discretionary wars that defined Tony Blair’s premiership and ultimately led to his downfall.

The covenant was even implicated in Parliament’s fall from grace in the great expenses catharsis of 2009. It is said the mole who released MPs’ claims to the press was motivated by a perception of parliamentarians helping themselves, whilst Iraq veterans moonlighted as security men to afford safety kit that the government had failed to provide.³

I have used a line from Rudyard Kipling’s sardonic poem of 1890 as the title for my book and opened by reproducing Tommy in full. It seemed to me to hit the right note more than a century on. I have no idea if the bloke on the cover likes poetry, but there are plenty of bastardised versions of Kipling’s stanzas posted on the web apparently drafted by soldiers. Either way, I reckon in the tribulations of Tommy Atkins he would see mirrored his own.⁴

Being thrown out of a pub is Atkins’s opening grievance. This book highlights contemporary examples of, perfectly sober, soldiers being asked to leave licensed premises and, pace verse two, public places more generally. The slighting of Queen Victoria’s redcoat in the third verse will strike a chord with too many of Queen Elizabeth’s men whose horror stories have reached the press. The kit inadequacies we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, examined at some length in this account, hook up with verse three and poor living conditions aired in the final verse thunder down the years and have provided plenty of material for this book.

But the significance of Kipling’s verses four and five lies in Tommy’s perception of himself in relation to the public and what he hoped for in return for his labours. His expectations were modest and are echoed today in the enjoinder, implicit in the covenant, that the State should ensure, as far as it can, that military service does not put him at a disadvantage with respect to his civilian contemporaries.

The military covenant is not a contract. If it was no lawyer would let you sign it.

In return for putting rights on ice, risking life and limb and being required to kill on behalf of the State you get, in theory, the public’s empathy and respect and a promise that you and yours will be looked after by the chain of command and the government. Your obligations are absolute and apparently without limitation, theirs are relative and finite.

But for a decade of brutal expeditionary warfare there would have been no appetite for this book. I would not have written it. The dusty exposition of the military covenant hatched in an obscure turn of the century Army publication would have remained on a theoretical plane. It would have been grist for staff college essays, not tabloid headlines, and the term would never have entered common English usage.

But stuff happened. The butcher’s bill from two controversial, discretionary, wars directs us to appraise and update the evolving relationship that we have with our men-at-arms.

Covenant suggests a relationship between parties that cannot be laid down in prescriptive terms. It implies service that goes well beyond the bounds of civilian experience or expectation. Other occupational groups have a perfectly good claim to being special. Indeed, the chattering classes have begun to talk of an inclusive ‘public sector covenant’,⁵ a helpful expedient at a time of retrenchment. But only the Armed Forces are ‘a nation within a nation’,⁶ its men and women set apart in the things they do and the sacrifices they make.

Raw deal maybe, but throughout time the ‘servitude and grandeur of arms’⁷ has been met with the fluctuating beneficence of the nation – public, government and chain of command. I have attempted to plot this and the evolving societal mores that have underpinned it, particularly in the period of rapid change from the Crimea to the end of the Great War, before discussing in some detail the momentous events of the past decade. Finally, I am drawn to where the covenant might go as we contemplate the changing nature of warfare and the extent to which the uniqueness of military service on which it is based will endure.

Frederick Forsyth CBE

This is a supremely important covenant between this entire nation (government and people) and all those who have worn or do or will wear our uniform as a member of the Armed Forces.

All who do so have to swear an oath of loyalty. Even in these iconoclastic days the oath is profoundly meaningful to the overwhelming majority. The covenant is the nation’s reply, the counterpoint to their oath to us; it is ours to them.

It pledges that because they may have to fight, suffer and die for us, we will never overlook them in life and, in death, never forget them. It should be framed not in anaemic officialese but in English of Churchillian grandeur. And its pledge should be abided by, no matter what other financial indulgences may have to be forfeit.

At the moment neither condition is being abided by.

Notes

3 Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner, No Expenses Spared (Bantam Press, 2009).

4 I am grateful to Bryn Parry for pointing out that my infantryman has his head down and is not covering his arcs which, apparently, is not good.

5 The Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, 10 March 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9420000/9420850.stm accessed 16 March 2011.

6 Alfred Comte de Vigny from Servitude et grandeur militaries. Translated by Roger Gard and published as Servitude and Grandeur of Arms (Penguin Books 1996).

7 Ibid.

CHAPTER TWO

That they may reap the fruit of their good deservings

There is nothing new about the military covenant.

The mongrels of the British Isles carry the genes of retired legionnaires pensioned into farms created under military tenure in return for two decades of service. The best part of two thousand years later, we find the standard engagement required for a service pension is remarkably similar: twenty-two years.

So the first expression of the covenant was intensely practical and rather dull – a pension.

Remittances, land grants and patronage for death, duty and disablement in military service are evident in the English historical record from Alfred onwards. Fighting being a feudal obligation, the ‘deal’ and any early covenant was struck informally and on a discretionary basis between soldier and his lord, the public being an irrelevance and the King as overlord impossibly remote. Otherwise there was the Medieval Big Society; the kindness of neighbours and the charity of religious houses.

Into the early modern period, beneficence for military service continued to be heavily influenced by patronage and caprice. There were billets in almshouses, sinecures, informal pensions and, occasionally, bounty exercised by royal warrant. In this way John Sclatter was granted an annuity of four marks for the loss of a hand at the battle of Wakefield and Rauf Vestynden had a pension of ten pounds from Edward IV ‘for the good and agreeable service which he did us in berying and holding our standard of the black bull at the battle of Sherborne’. Similarly we have the ‘petition of Jane Bolding to Queen Elizabeth to grant a pension to her husband Edward Bolding who was maimed and disabled whilst serving in Ireland under Mr Walter Rawley’.

Eventually royal bounty became a plague on the privy purse. The solution: statutory provision so the burden of veterans shifted to someone else. Consequently, in 1593 as her privy Councillors looked on, the talon of Elizabeth I, Gloriana, hero of Tilbury and scourge of Phillip II, scratched her assent to a welfare Bill. It was a double first – as a formal acknowledgement of the duty the State owed to those that had fought on its behalf and as the country’s first pensions bill. An Act for the Relief of Soldiers provided for a system of war pensions payable by statutory right:

For as much as it is agreeable with Christian Charity, Policy, and the honour of our Nation, that such as have since the twenty-fifth day of March Anno 1588, adventured their lives and lost their limbs or disabled their bodies or shall hereafter adventure their lives, lose their limbs or disable their bodies in the defence and service of Her Majesty and the State, should at their return be relieved and rewarded, to the end that they may reap the fruit of their good deserving, and others may be encouraged to perform the like endeavour.

There is much in this. Firstly, the imputation of Christian charity, for under Elizabeth rights were not absolute but always referenced to God, through the monarch as interlocutor since the Reformation. There is reference to honouring the nation, not the recipient, for it was better to give than to receive. The qualifying date was to be back-dated half a decade to the then New Year’s Day 1588 – a point in time seared into the emerging superpower’s consciousness as the year of the Armada. There is, however, no suggestion that the pension itself was backdated. Indeed, the Treasury has clung on to the no-retrospection principal for 400 years arguing that without it any improvement to provisions would be unaffordable. The only objective criteria in the Elizabethan pension scheme was rank which set upper limits on grants. In practice, the link to status endures since pensions and the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme are based on salary and loss of earning potential.

It is clear that the measure was not entirely altruistic from the hope expressed that the nascent attempt at welfare would encourage others to serve. The link between beneficence and recruiting endures. You can find it in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review.⁸

In 1601 the legislation was updated. ‘An Act for the necessary relief of Soldiers and Mariners’ made it clear that the Elizabethan military covenant included sailors, an important historical precedent that confounds those that have seen it recently as a land forces only affair and reinforced in the re-badging of the modern covenant as a tri-service arrangement in the 2010 Armed Forces Bill.

The inspired 1601 provisions for the disabled of ‘Her Majesty’s just and honourable defensive wars’⁹ ensured that Elizabeth got the credit for being generous whilst local authorities raised the necessary funds. Significantly, the gratitude evident in the second Act, which in the event proved meagre, was in recognition of service in defensive wars. As England elbowed its way into the seventeenth century it required forces organised on a less ad hoc basis. But historically soldiers had been seen as a nuisance: an expensive short-term necessity at best and a thieving, murderous encumbrance most of the time. But for the moment, triumph over Spain and the feeling that England, not for the last time, stood alone against tyranny sugared the disposition of the State towards its men-at-arms.

For her ground-breaking legislation, the Virgin Queen becomes the first Hero of the Military Covenant (HMC).

Tudor England’s attitude to its military looks very different to that of enduring feudal systems on the Continent. The puncturing of the great nobility during the Wars of the Roses continued by the Kings Henry and the strength of a pushy new class of yeoman, socially tolerable professionals and merchants, moderated the distinction in England between the martial elite and the nascent middle class among which there was a surprising degree of interchange.

We’re all in this together – Elizabeth I addresses the troops at Tilbury © Getty images

Since England’s best defence was the sea and the Henrician Navy, the irregular yeomen force was seen as an adequate guarantor of the realm. With such a resource, why would England want a continental-style regular army of ruffians and licensed brigands? But there was still insurrection at home and the Scots to deal with and the preferred instrument was militia. So, when the northern Earls cut up rough and the Armada appeared on the horizon, the home guard fell in, scythes and billhooks at the ready. It was the closest England came to citizen-soldiering, soldiering among the people, until conscription in 1916.

‡

The quixotic attitude of the English towards the military was reflected in the 1689 English Bill of Rights. A standing army, it said, had been used against the common good by King James and his crew. It had no place in the new order without the explicit consent of Parliament. The Bill of Rights, as we now know, does not protect parliamentarians from being arraigned for fiddling their expenses. But it does require the regular reaffirmation of consent for a standing peacetime military. MPs trooping through the lobbies every five years act out a reflexive ambivalence towards the Armed Forces that is without parallel in the western world.

From the early modern period the attitude of the public, at least the part of it that mattered, towards sailors differed significantly from its position on soldiers. Ships fitted out for war were the country’s principal bulwark. Their companies did not constitute a threat in the way that a standing army appeared to and sailors have always been invested with a certain romance. From the start the Navy was more representative of society with aristocrats more inclined to seek commissions in the Army than in a service which, to avoid disaster, required training and technical ability and where opportunities for engaging in gentlemanly pursuits were limited. Ship husbandry required skilled men, an artisan class, which the Army did not. Merchantmen competed with royal service for masters and seamen and invariably offered better terms, a disadvantage addressed only partly by impressment. However, despite the reputation the Navy developed for severity and relatively poor conditions, sailors could expect better treatment at the hands of their officers than soldiers. Sir Francis Drake coined the term ‘all of one company’ and insisted that his officers ‘haul and draw with the mariner’.

Drake’s tradition endured. The Navy’s ‘Articles of War’ were passed in 1652, on the day previously known as Christmas, in response to the young republic’s besting by the Dutch fleet in the battle for control of the narrow seas. The Articles imposed a severe martial code on the Fleet but was aimed not at controlling the common man, on land the brunt of all disciplinary codes, but commanders who had proved unwilling to engage the enemy. Clearly the relationship between the State and its Navy, between public and sailors, and between officers and men differed significantly from the corresponding dynamics around England’s land forces.

Colonel Bob Stewart DSO MP

‘There are many kinds of sorrow in this World of love and hate but there is no keener sorrow than a soldier’s for his mate’ (Padre ‘Woodbine’ Wille in 1918).

For soldiers the military covenant especially means looking after their friends who have suffered or died. Every year in November at ceremonies up and down the land we hear the words, ‘We will remember them’. But we don’t unless we look after them properly – crucially when they are hurt or die for us.

We remember them also by looking after those they have left behind. For me that is at the core of the military covenant.

The Elizabethan war pension scheme was subject to the discretion of officials and dependent on a levy from parishes. Soldiers and sailors ‘hurt, maimed or grievously sick’ had to apply to county treasurers for a grant determined by ‘the nature of his hurt and the commendation of his service’. In other words a value judgement had to be made, not solely and objectively on the basis of a person’s disablement as is the case today, but subjectively according to the merit of the applicant’s service in the eyes of a local assessor.

The Cromwellian scheme introduced for the first time recognition of widows and orphans of soldiers who, of course, must have been ‘slain in the Parliament service’. Another first was the use of the term pension in legislation relating to those injured in the line of duty. Cromwell’s ordinances explain that the Commonwealth’s relief was driven by ‘pious and charitable consideration’. There is little sense of obligation to those that had suffered in the service of the Republic and more than a pinch of self-congratulation.

An empty Treasury meant that soldiers and their dependents were among the first to suffer. Parliament was regularly petitioned for settlement of arrears of pay and by the end of the Commonwealth period, Protectorate pensioners too were losing out through poor administration. So much so that, in the months that followed Oliver Cromwell’s death in September 1658, Lord Fairfax presented a petition to Parliament on behalf of four thousand maimed soldiers, widows and orphans. It was ‘Resolved, &c. That this Petition be referred to a Committee; to consider of it, and report their Opinion therein to the House.’¹⁰ But I could find nothing in the parliamentary record of the committee reporting back to the House and assume that, as now, referral to committee meant a kick into the long grass.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Elizabeth’s statutory beneficence was, for practical purposes, defunct. Veterans and their dependents were obliged to compete with the wider parish poor for whatever was going. The only extra for old soldiers and sailors was dispensed through hospitals established for them in Chelsea, Greenwich and Dublin. This meant admittance as an in-patient or persuading the Commissioners to dispense, in recognition of injury, illness, debility or long service and good conduct, a discretionary remittance as an ‘out-patient’.

To the rescue came William Windham, Secretary at War under Pitt the Younger and for War and the Colonies under Lord Grenville. This paragon is credited with restoring the statutory right to a pension for servicemen granted by Elizabeth I. He did this through ‘Windham’s Act’ of 1806. Great timing, a year after Trafalgar, as the minds of polite society focused on what stood between them and Napoleon Bonaparte. The long service and disability pensions he created:

were greatly to the prejudice of the public or to the advantage of the soldier according to the point of view from which the subject is considered.¹¹

In other words they were relatively generous and expensive. So much so that by 1828, with the cost to the public purse approaching £2 million, the Commons Committee on Public Expenditure was wheeled out to fillet Windham’s Act. Peacetime financial expediency meant future provision was to be by way of royal bounty exercised by warrant, the responsibility once again of the Commissioners of Chelsea Hospital. A common thread might be drawn by Service pensioners who have berated me over the switch in 2011 from the Retail to the cheaper Consumer Price Index as the basis for upgrading retirement incomes.

So, Army pensions became a bounty again, dispensed at the King’s pleasure. Parliament’s function was simply to raise the money. More happily, the Navy’s pension entitlement was regularised by statute, the Naval and Marine Pensions Act of 1865, and controlled by the Admiralty. The justification for the arrangement was that the Army looked to the King and not to Parliament. It appears as romantic nonsense, but dangerously so since in upholding the military covenant it placed the monarch in a potentially invidious position. Elizabeth I knew what she was doing.

William Windham without doubt follows Elizabeth I as a Hero of the Military Covenant. A brass plaque in his parish church at Felbrigg, Norfolk records his contribution succinctly:

As a Statesman, he laboured to exalt the courage, to improve the comforts, and ennoble the profession of a Soldier.

‡

The respectable working class avoided military service meaning that the Army became society’s sump, a holding pen for villains and those with something to run away from. These were Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’, to be side-stepped and given low priority in the affections of the nation and, as veterans, a thin scrape of the comforts metered out to the poor.

The Peace of Ryswick (1697) had offered Parliament, not for the first or last time, an irresistible opportunity to take a peace dividend. Consequently at the start of the War of Spanish Succession in 1701 the Army was wholly inadequate. A solution was crafted in the Recruiting Acts which offered a get out of gaol free card to those rotting in places like Bridewell and Newgate, digs that were just a short step from the gallows. In addition, magistrates were allowed to disappear inconvenient characters in a form of virtual conscription reserved for those labelled unemployed or without support. Society did not need to cut a deal with its dregs in uniform. No covenant with them.

Captain Malcolm Farrow OBE Royal Navy Forces Pension Society

The military covenant is the social contract between the nation and its Armed Forces. It exists because military service places unique and exceptional liabilities on members of the Armed Forces which are enforceable by law. Whilst many of the components of the covenant are therefore statutory, the covenant itself is the whole cultural expression of the status of the military within society. The idea is not new. In the reign of Elizabeth I there was the first recognition that soldiers and mariners deserved a pension for their unique service to the nation. That historical note is worth bringing to mind now that Armed Forces pensions are once again in the limelight, in the reign of Elizabeth II.

Notes

8 Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty. HMG October 2010.

9 An Act for the Necessary Relief of Soldiers and Mariners, 43 Elizabeth C.A.P III, 1601.

10 House of Commons Journal vol. 7 for 7 April 1659.

11 Charles Clode, Military Forces of the Crown (London: John Murray, 1869).

CHAPTER THREE

The Victorian covenant

Any popularity the Army might have enjoyed during the Bonaparte emergency evaporated as soon after Waterloo as it had after Blenheim. Romantically attached to a professional Navy for security, the country retreated behind its wooden walls and further from the continental model of citizen-soldiers. Any approximation to European soldiering had vanished with the village butts of the sixteenth century surfacing again only briefly and imperfectly during the Civil War. The dominant naval ‘Blue Water School’ of defence was to wobble just a bit during the mid-century French ascendency. This prompted the massively wasteful construction of land fortification and coastal garrisons, ‘Palmerston’s Follies’, from 1860 until the Prussians obligingly destroyed the French Army in 1870. However, nineteenth-century Britain’s Army was an expeditionary tool of the empire, rather than a continental-style guarantor of national borders. Importantly the Army was abroad, over the horizon and blissfully out of mind, in contrast to the large continental standing divisions that for citizens of European states would have been omnipresent as they waited for the next incursion by an adjacent power.

Distinctive political and societal traditions in countries so close together, Britain and France, grew quite different relationships between the citizen and the State. Both countries uphold freedom but see it achieved by the individual on the one hand and the collective on the other. Consequently, France since its revolution has been the exemplar of the big citizen-soldier state. In contrast British Victorian liberalism dove tailed nicely with the 1689 settlement to deliver a small professional army set apart from the society it served.

The military historian Hew Strachan points to ceremonial as evidence of the different way in which Armed Forces relate to the public in the UK and France.¹² The big event in Paris is Bastille Day, a joyful, inclusive, firework-fest of republicanism fusing Army and people. In London we have Trooping the Colour. To mark the sovereign’s official birthday, the Queen communes with her guardsmen, well-scrubbed subjects in big hats looking on.

The difference in the relationship between citizen, State and Army in France and the UK hit my dual-nationality cousin when among the eighteenth birthday greetings received at his Essex home were call-up papers from Paris. Three decades on the last major European power involved in conscripting its youth, Germany, has ended conscription although for reasons of expediency rather than ideology. Paradoxically, it has been the political right in Britain that has looked across the channel with