April 17, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 40

“In The Field” – Churchill and Northey – Commanding the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers

Where do we get such people? From the heart of proud nations. They are always there. They are there today: Young, Men and Women, risking their lives all around this planet, in uniforms, in state departments, in the intelligence communilty, so we can be free. Don’t say how how tired you are. We’re going to have to find more.

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By Bill Nanny

Bill Nanny of Charlotte, North Carollina ([email protected]) is an avid reader of Queen Victoria’s “little wars,” a collector of British campaign medals, and a contributor to JOMSA, the Journal of The Orders and Medals Research Society. His collection includes the medals awarded to Lt. Col. Northey.


Over the years, cost-saving measures have seen many proud old British Army regiments amalgamated, including the Highland Light Infantry and Churchill’s Royal Scots Fusiliers, second oldest regiment of Scotland, formed in 1678.

The reading room at the Royal Highland Fusiliers Museum in Glasgow houses their records: neatly bound leather scrapbooks, photo albums of forgotten campaigns, dog-eared memoirs held together with twine and rubber bands and memory. In one such scrapbook, firmly pasted in position, is a handwritten letter from Winston S. Churchill to Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, dated 4 April 1916 and marked “6th Royal Scots Fusiliers…In the field”:
My dear Sir, I am gratified by the kindness of your letter & I can assure you that I shall always regard this period when I have had the honour to command a battalion of this prestigious regiment in the field, one of the most memorable in my life. Once more thanking you for your letters & its terms. Believe me, yours truly, Winston S Churchill.

As he wrote, Col. Churchill was six weeks away from relinquishing command of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. The regiment had suffered greatly the previous September at the Battle of Loos, a hoped-for Franco-British breakthrough of the German line. Now paired with the 7th Battalion RSF, it was to be rebuilt to full operating strength. The Colonel of the 7th Battalion was senior to Churchill, so he was granted command of the newly formed 6th/7th RSF. Churchill, anxious to get back to Parliament, was given his wish by this arrangement.

Counting a two-week leave to prepare and deliver a policy speech in the House of Commons, Churchill had spent 108 days in command of the 6th RSF. On April 28th he led his troops back into the front-line trenches for the last time, overseeing his sector of 1000 yards facing the German lines.

At the farewell lunch by Churchill to his officers on 6 May 1916, Major Andrew Dewar Gibb (author of With Winston Churchill at the Front under the pseudonym “Captain X”) noted: “I believe every man in the room felt Winston Churchill’s leaving us a real personal loss.”

Mutual regard between Churchill, his officers and men was not immediately apparent. Gibb wrote that relations were at first greatly strained. Churchill’s inaugural speech in early January did nothing to allay their doubts:
“Gentlemen, I am now your Commanding Officer. Those who support me I will look after. Those who go against me I will break.” These were not exactly words of inspiration for a ravaged, war-weary group.

Three quarters of the RSF’s officers had been killed or wounded, while the other ranks (privates up to senior NCOs) were reduced fifty percent during the Loos offensive. Labeled as a victory, the battle had captured a mile of German territory at a combined cost of over 60,000 French and British causalities, with 25,000 killed or missing.

Colonel Churchill was not like the beloved and respected Colonel Herbert Northey, whom he had replaced. Northey is not mentioned by name in Gibb’s or other personal accounts, but is referred to as “our Colonel” or “the Colonel.” But he left large boots to fill.

Churchill’s letters to his wife, mother and friends in those early days of command express concern as to the caliber of his Scottish soldiers: brave and intelligent, he said, though small in stature. They were not regular army stock but lowland Scots, volunteers who had responded to Lord Kitchener’s patriotic call to arms when war broke out in August 1914. The first 100,000 volunteers, labeled “K1” by the War Office, came from all parts of Britain, but it was Scotland which proportionally delivered more recruits, and would continue to do so as the war slogged on.

The 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers was a “service” battalion, formed entirely by K1 recruits from Glasgow factories and the coal fields of Ayrshire, trained and led by seasoned, regular army officers and NCOs. Herbert Hamilton Northey, a career officer of the 2nd Battalion RSF, was picked to remain at the regiment’s depot at Ayr and to organize the training of this newest battalion.

It is interesting to parallel Northey’s and Churchill’s military careers, though early on, WSC was a uniformed war correspondent. Both men passed out of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst (only four years apart). In 1897-98, as lieutenants, both were present in the Punjab Frontier and the Tirah campaign against Afridi insurgents.*

Later, in the South African War, Northey like Churchill was captured by the Boers and interned as a POW. Churchill, working for the Morning Post, was caught after a commando attack on an armored troop train in whose defense he fought,—he had clearly been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Barely a month later, Lieutenant Northey and his company were surrounded by Boers at the Battle of Colenso and captured. Colenso was a disaster of senior command’s misjudgment of these Boer citizen soldiers, armed with Mauser rifles. And in the Great War just fifteen years later, the enemy would not be Dutch farmers or hill tribesmen, but a modern European army with unimaginable weaponry.

In John Buchan’s regimental history of the Royal Scots Fusiliers is a short account from Northey’s diary of being wounded in action. On 27 September 1915, the Battle of Loos was in its third day, the communication trenches filled with dead and dying. British troops advanced to and then retired from the captured German lines. Colonel Northey, as was routine then for senior officers, led his men across no-man’s land and was struck by a machine gun bullet through his left leg. His vivid account gives us a glimpse of the kind of fighting Churchill would see in their time:

I…stumbled on through communication trenches hopping as best I could for what seemed an interminable distance—the trenches being deep with mud and choked with dead and wounded men—and was eventually helped into a German dugout by a stretcher-bearer, who tied up my leg. I then imagine I must have fainted, probably because I had lost a lot of blood, and came to finding myself being pulled out of the dug-out by two stretcher-bearers, with a terrific din going on all around. This was the German counter-attacking, and I found I was between the German and British lines. I slowly and very painfully made my way along the German trenches towards our own lines—fighting going on all round and very much afraid of being collared by the enemy. At one point a stretcher was obtained, and the two stretcher-bearers tried to carry me over the open, but just as I was being lifted a shell came, a splinter of which blew the unfortunate stretcher-bearer’s brains all over me. The other stretcher-bearer then carried me away over the open on his back under a heavy fire some 150 yards….

Northey was transported to England, hospitalized and convalesced for almost nine months. In January 1916 he was appointed a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (CMG). He would later return to his old Battalion.

After Loos the 6th RSF were taken out of the line and moved to a reserve position behind the Ypres Salient, in watery, lice-and rat-infested trenches. Leaderless and stagnant, it floundered until January 1916 when Churchill took over. His character and inspiration transformed the downhearted and returned zeal to the brave Scots. Gibb wrote that “no more popular officer ever commanded troops. As a soldier he was hard working, persevering and tough…he lived soldiering; it lay near his heart.”

Did Northey and Churchill meet? Probably, at a historic reunion of the Regiment on 1 July 1919, their first postwar regimental dinner, with HRH The Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, who had been appointed Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment. Among the eighty guests was Churchill, who toasted the Prince and spoke of the “magnificent spirit that existed in the famous old Regiment, and how much that spirit meant, and would mean in the future.”

Included among those present was Lieutenant Colonel Northey, the man Churchill had replaced. An eyewitness wrote: “Old friends gripped hands very warmly, but with few words. There was a feeling of reunion and thankfulness, and the regret for those who had gone, and words did not come easily.” To believe the two commanders did not share a greeting is impossible. They had much in common.

Lieutenant Colonel H.H. Northey CMG retired on 17 October 1919. He died aged 67 on 14 January 1938—like Churchill, a soldier of the Empire.


* Little came of the Tirah operation. Churchill was attached to the Tirah Force for thirty days from 5 March to 4 April 1898, but by the time he got there, operations were virtually over and he was too late to see operational service. —PHC

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