Temporary gentlemen

Captain David Nelson who was commissioned from the ranks as a temporary gentleman in 1914, following actions for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross

Temporary gentlemen (sometimes abbreviated to TG) is a colloquial term referring to officers of the British Army who held temporary (or war-duration) commissions, particularly when such men came from outside the traditional "officer class".

Historically the officers of the British Army were drawn from the gentry and upper middle-classes and the expensive uniforms and social expectations placed on officers prevented those without a private income from joining. The outbreak of the First World War required a rapid expansion in the size of the army and a corresponding increase in the officer corps. During the war more than 265,000 additional officers were recruited, many on temporary commissions. Many of these were drawn from the lower middle and working classes. They came to be referred to as "temporary gentlemen" with the expectation being that they would revert to their former social standing after the war. At the end of the war, many were unwilling to return to their former positions on reduced salaries and there were too few managerial positions to provide full employment, resulting in considerable hardship. Many former temporary gentlemen became leading literary figures and temporary gentlemen featured in many inter-war stories, plays and films.

The term was revived in the Second World War, which saw a similar increase in the number of officers holding temporary commissions. A staggered demobilisation at the war's end helped alleviate some of the issues faced by their forebears. The term continued to see use for officers commissioned from those conscripted for National Service, which lasted until 1963. It has also been used as a translation for miliciano, a termed used to describe conscript officers in the Portuguese Army of the 1960s and 1970s.

First World War

A photograph showing the family of a typical pre-war officer. The father was a retired army lieutenant and four of the five sons were army or navy officers during the war (the youngest served as a private in the prestigious Honourable Artillery Company)

The term first came to prominence during the First World War to describe officers who received temporary (or war duration) commissions. It was sometimes abbreviated to "TG". The use of the term has been described as discriminatory, a mean-spirited reminder to the temporary officers that they were expected to resume their former positions after the war. It was considered offensive by most of those to which it was applied. The use of the term reduced once the new temporary officers had proved themselves capable on the battlefield, though some later adopted the term in an ironic fashion. Some temporary gentlemen used the term themselves to refer to those promoted from the ranks. The war poet Wilfred Owen (though he held a permanent commission) used this form of the term when he wrote a letter to his mother describing "temporary gentlemen ... glorified NCOs ... privates and sergeants in masquerade" and how he would "rather be among honest privates than these snobs".

Sometimes the opposite situation occurred when men who would seemingly have no problems fulfilling the requirements to hold a commission in peacetime chose instead to serve in the ranks during the war. This included the Earl of Crawford who, at the age of 45, served as a lance corporal and Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of the Morning Post who refused a commission in order to "do the thing fairly [and] take [his] place in the ranks" (he died as a sergeant in the London Regiment at the Battle of Le Transloy in 1916).

Outbreak of war

The pre-war British Army had long drawn its officers from the gentry and upper middle-classes, typically young men with public school (and sometimes university) education from families with long traditions of army or navy service. Many pre-war regular officers had served in their school and university Officers' Training Corps and so had effectively been training for their role since the age of thirteen. Officers of the time were expected to enjoy horse riding, hunting, polo and fine dining, the expense of which prevented those without a private means of income to supplement their salaries (such as lower-middle or working class men) from considering such a career. At the outbreak of the war there were 10,800 officers in the British Army with an additional 2,500 in the Special Reserve and 10,700 in the Territorial Force, a shortfall of 2,000 compared to theoretical full strength. During the next four years some 265,397 men became officers, mostly on temporary commissions - with the intention being that they would return to civilian life after the war was over.

George Thomas Dorrell was a pre-war non-commissioned officer who received a commission in 1914.

Some men were commissioned directly from the ranks in the early stages of the war, mainly senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and warrant officers from the regular army. These included VC winners Sergeant-Major George Thomas Dorrell and Sergeant David Nelson of the Royal Artillery who distinguished themselves at the Action at Néry on 1 September 1914. Men who took up this offer were discharged from the regular army and appointed to temporary commissions, a process that caused problems upon demobilisation when many wished to continue their service in the army. Some found themselves in financial difficulty as officers did not receive a separation entitlement which was granted to other ranks to provide for their families whilst away on service. As such many NCOs refused advancement on financial grounds and others had to be "forced to take commissions to their financial detriment". The issue was partly remedied later in the war with the introduction of grants to all officers below the rank of major and allowances paid for officer's children. By 1916 all subalterns received 7s 6d a day in pay, an initial £50 kit allowance, a 2s daily lodging allowance, 2s 6d daily field service allowance and free mess rations and travel. Some patriotic civilian employers continued to pay half wages whilst on active service such that some temporary gentlemen found themselves quite well off.

Former NCOs sometimes found the transition from holding authority over up to 1,000 men (as a regimental sergeant-major for example) to the more humble commands of a second lieutenant rather hard to stomach. Some former rankers received hostility from their men for knowing too much of army life and being difficult to fool. Not all officers promoted from the ranks were from the lower classes, many were ex-public school boys who had chosen to serve in the ranks or had missed out on commissions at the start of the war.

The rapidly raised Kitchener's Army of the early months of the war turned first to volunteer retired officers to fill their vacancies prior to looking elsewhere. Thus the majority of newly commissioned officers from this time were from the traditional classes with a spinkling of tradesmen, clerks and manufacturing workers, the latter particularly within the pals battalions. There was considerable favouritism shown towards those who had attended public or grammar schools with Officer Training Corps (OTCs). Indeed, even in this regard there was a bias towards the more well-known schools and not all former public school boys received a commission, many instead having to serve in the ranks. There may have been no intention to select officers on the basis of class, merely a preference for prior military service such as that provided by the OTC; with the majority of OTCs being based at the major public schools this led to a bias towards those who had studied there. Possibly because of this the officers of Kitchener's Army were, as a cohort, amongst the best educated to serve with the British Army during the war. The rapid commissioning of officers for Kitchener's Army caused some difficulties. There were cases of men holding commissions simultaneously with the army and the Royal Navy, having applied to both, and of men who had first enlisted as private soldiers being sought for desertion following their commissioning.

Future prime minister Harold Macmillan joined the army in Autumn 1914 as a second lieutenant in the 19th battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. However Macmillan came from a family of good social standing and he was soon able to secure a transfer to the more prestigious Grenadier Guards through the intervention of his mother. Though he himself was a temporary officer Macmillan used the term "temporary gentlemen" to refer to others; he later reused the term in his political career to refer to Lord Hailsham, who he considered unfit to succeed him as leader of the Conservative Party.

Rapid rise in temporary commissions

The 2nd Officer Cadet Battalion (Pembroke College, Cambridge) marching through the town

The heavy casualties suffered by the British Expeditionary Force saw the majority of the army's pre-war officers become casualties within the first year of the war. With the academies at Sandhurst and Woolwich incapable of providing sufficient replacements via the traditional route (with permanent regular commissions) the army was forced to change its recruitment process; it introduced the widescale issuing of temporary or "war duration" commissions on a more standardised merit-based approach. Most candidates would now be required to receive training in an officer cadet battalion under the guidance of experienced instructors before receiving their commission. Some of the more fashionable regiments continued to discriminate, attempting to maintain their social exclusivity by preferring Sandhurst graduates over those with temporary commissions.

The rapid increase in temporary commissions and the creation of officer cadet battalions allowed the widening of the recruitment pool to those who would not have been considered "officer material" before the war, including those from the lower middle class and even some from the working class. Many of the early temporary officers were former clerks whose standard of education was generally good and whose profession had a noted tendency towards social mobility. Ralph Hale Mottram, a pre-war bank clerk, described the experience of receiving an army commission in 1915: "never having wanted, or thought myself competent, to become even the most junior officer of a military formation, I had volunteered, first in the ranks and then, when I was told to do so, for a commission in the new great national army that won the war".

The temporary officers were often commissioned directly from civilian jobs with no prior military experience. The term "temporary gentlemen" evolved to describe their position: the traditional concept was that a gentleman was born into his social position and class, dying a gentleman no matter what befell him in life, and that also the holder of the King's Commission was "an officer and a gentleman". Thus it was rationalised that although those who held temporary commissions should be acknowledged as gentlemen by virtue of their rank this would only stand for as long as they held their commissions, hence becoming gentlemen on a temporary basis only. Upon the end of the war the expectation was that the temporary officers would be demobilised and return to their pre-war lives. Despite the rapid social change caused by the war the British Army maintained the ethos of 1914 throughout and expected all its officers to maintain a "gentlemanly" bearing and appearance. It would continue to do so until after the Second World War and some of the more socially elite regiments continued to maintain this attitude well into the Cold War era.

Requirement for non-commissioned service

Men of the 20th Officer Cadet Battalion (Aldershot), December 1917

There was a change in policy in 1916; in February of that year the War Office ruled that temporary commissions would only be granted to those men who had served for two years in the ranks or the Officer Training Corps. This policy led to an immediate increase in the number of temporary gentlemen drawn from the working class. By 1917 each division was required to provide 50 men per month that were deemed suitable officer candidates, as recommended by their commanding officers. The theory behind the scheme was summed up by a colonel of the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1918: "We don't want men of means as officers these days; we want men of experience ... - men who know this job and can lead others the way to go.". The policy did, however, have some disadvantages. Some commanders saw it as an opportunity to remove undesirable or unsuitable men from their units. It was also found that many NCOs were unwilling to leave their comrades to attend officer training, after which they would be posted to an unknown unit. Despite this at the end of the war it was found that more than half of all British officers who served had at least some service in the ranks or the Officer Training Corps prior to commissioning.

Reception and integration into the army

By the war's end, there were many men holding commissions who would never have been granted a Territorial Army commission, let alone a regular army commission in 1914. It has been estimated that only a quarter of all officers who served during the war were drawn from the traditional officer recruiting ground of the upper and upper-middle classes. The working class accounted for between 15 and 20% and of the officer corps and the remainder were drawn from the lower-middle class. Of the 144,000 officers demobilised at the war's end (the majority of whom would have held temporary commissions) it was found that 60% came from clerical, commercial, educational or professional lines of work. Indeed, it was found that every industry of the country had contributed at least one officer. In of study of 144,075 demobilised officers at the war's end 7,739 came from the railway industry, 1,016 were coal miners, 638 were fishermen, 266 were warehousemen or porters, 213 were bootmakers, 168 were navvies, 148 were carters and 20 were slate miners. Even when considering only the select few who had been awarded regular army commissions there was a notable shift towards the central and lower-middle classes.

The 5th Officer Cadet Battalion (Trinity College, Cambridge) at dinner

The change did not go unnoticed; British commander Douglas Haig's final dispatch from the front made note of several temporary gentlemen who had risen from humble origins including a number of clerks and policemen, two miners, a taxicab driver, an undercook, a railway signalman, a market gardener, a blacksmith's son, an iron moulder, an instructor in tailoring, an assistant gas engineer and a grocer's assistant. Future prime minister Clement Attlee, who served in the war as a major, stated that "I had a Lancashire miner who had been in Gallipoli with me and a lad who had been an errand-boy, but they were very good material. The latter was quite a rough lad. He was sent on an officers' course and, when asked to write a technical appreciation, said to the instructor 'Dost think Ah'm Douggy 'aig, lad?'" ["Do you think I'm Douglas Haig, lad?"]. Duff Cooper noted in July 1917 that the Officer Cadet Battalion of the Household Guards, in which he served, contained a shoemaker, a Yorkshire window dresser and a cockney bank clerk.

To ease their transition into officers the War Office issued several instructional pamphlets, authored by pre-war regular officers, outlining the behaviour expected of temporary officers and regular officers were posted into newly raised battalions to provide advice. Temporary gentlemen were encouraged to not feign interest in the traditional officers' pursuits of horse riding and polo or to imitate the manners and accents of the regular officers. Men who did so were held in low regard by both the regulars and their fellow temporary gentlemen. Temporary gentlemen were also advised not to smoke a pipe in public, drink too much or become either a "book worm or a bar loafer". Those temporary officers with a similar social and educational background to the regulars generally found it easier to gain acceptance.

Many officer cadet battalions were based in more upper-class environments such as the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in an attempt to introduce the temporary officers to such a life and classes included lectures on army etiquette and table manners. Temporary gentlemen drawn from the middle classes were often surprised to be allocated a batman (an army orderly), coming from households that didn't have servants. Some of the temporary gentlemen were unable to adapt to service life: the introduction of temporary commissions saw a large increase in the number of officers court-martialled for indecency or scandalous conduct (an offence typically used to prosecute sexual misdemeanours or dishonouring cheques).

Civilian volunteers march to join the Australian Army

On the whole the temporary gentlemen seem to have been accepted by the regular army officers and performed adequately on the battlefield. Some temporary gentlemen experienced issues when posted to British East Africa as the askaris there perceived them as being "low-class masters" and inferior to the regular army officers. The experience of temporary gentlemen was different in the Australian Army which, being a small peacetime force, required that the majority of its wartime officers were former civilians or men promoted from the ranks.

There was a general consensus amongst those responsible for senior appointments, that temporary gentlemen were not suitable candidates for general officer positions. Indeed, almost all British First World War generals were drawn from the ranks of the pre-war regular army; together with few territorial force officers.

Inter-war period

Demobilisation

Officers of the 8th Battalion, King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) discuss plans for demobilisation in April 1919

By the end of 1920 over 200,000 officers had been demobilised, including most of the officers holding temporary commissions. There were challenges in reintegrating the temporary gentlemen into civilian life, particularly those who came from modest means. American sociologist Willard Waller noted that "particularly distressing is the situation of the 'ranker', the 'temporary gentleman', when he returns to civilian life. Many of these, of course, return to a higher status in civilian life than they occupied in the army, but many others never again rise as high, hold as much power, or touch as much money as during the war". Many of these men expected to retain their status of gentlemen after the war and sought occupations in line with this status. British government employment officials reported that even former officers with no secondary education expected a job with "a status comparable to that which they held as Officers; by which is meant, some status implying supervision and control over other men".

A government appointments department had been established in April 1918 to provide peacetime employment for former officers. In January 1919, with demobilisations proceeding at full pace, the controller-general Sir Stephenson Kent asked the government whether he should be looking to place men in civilian positions commensurate with their pre-war social standing or their wartime rank. The Cabinet minister Sir Eric Geddes replied that he should seek to provide them with employment in line with the more favourable of the two positions; despite objections from the boards of education and agriculture and Kent's own deputy, Brigadier Arthur Asquith. However, later objections from the Treasury over potential claims from other ranks for similar treatment and the fact that the level of education was being disregarded led to a reversal of this position. From this point onwards an officer would not be entitled to a certain post-war appointment based on rank alone. An appointments department official later noted that "the association between officer and gentleman had come about because gentlemen traditionally chose to become officers, not because being an officer carried the assurance of gentlemanly status. During the war hopes were raised which could only be fulfilled if the 'democracy' achieved in the officers' mess corresponded to the 'democracy' of postwar society. As it turned out, even the temporary officers who had always seen themselves as 'gentlemen' could have a hard time maintaining their position after the war".

Sir Eric Geddes

The government attempted to alleviate the issue by providing retraining in the fields of agriculture and business for demobilised officers and by providing a number of related grants and allowances. However, there was much displeasure amongst the former officers, particularly those who had to take large steps back down the social ladder. The Service Man journal recorded cases of former brigadiers acting as cooks in the Royal Irish Constabulary, colonels working as grocers and majors as salesmen. Other officers are known to have become storemen, railway porters, cab drivers and at least one became an organ grinder.

Hugh Pollard wrote in February 1919 that "everyone recognises that the warehouse clerk who has shown himself fit to be a colonel should not have to go back to his old job, because it is such obvious waste of a man of higher capacity . . . the nation must realise what magnificent material it has available in the non-regular officers of the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy, and it must wake up to the absolute necessity of making the best possible use of them when they revert to civil employment". When Ralph Mottram returned to his position as a junior bank clerk he stated that he found "the longed-for and dearly bought Peace was a profound disappointment".

Many temporary officers found their financial situation worsened by demobilisation. Whereas a typical junior officer's salary might have totalled £300 per annum many civilian jobs paid much less. The Minister of Labour Sir Robert Horne noted that half of all positions suitable for returning officers offered by his department were for salaries below £250. The government recognised this and issued advice to those being demobilised that "most young officers have been drawing a considerably higher rate of pay than the ordinary University graduate could ever hope to earn in the first few years after taking his degree" and they should not expect their pay to be matched by civilian employers. Some blame was attached to the civilian bosses who, in some cases, offered men employment based on 1914 rates of pay.

Demobilised officers were excluded from the unemployment payments granted to discharged other ranks and were often barred from making use of the labour exchanges and so if unable to find employment were in a worse position than if they had remained in the ranks. Many returning officers experienced considerable hardship, writier and ex-officer Richard Aldington claimed that by early 1919 thousands of demobilised officers were destitute and sleeping rough in Hyde Park. Around 50 separate charities and organisations were set up to assist former officers. The problem reached a peak in early 1920, when the peak of the demobilisation of officers from the British Army of the Rhine combined with the filling of most previous clerical vacancies by officers earlier discharged. The appointments department noted that by this time most former officers were now happy to take almost any employment offered.

Many found that the relative equality with the higher classes that they enjoyed in the trenches was not reflected in civilian life. Indeed, historian Reginald Pound argues that rather than heralding an era of egalitarianism the mixing of the lower-middle classes with the pre-war officer class only served to reinforce the class-consciousness of the Edwardian era. However, Jonathan Wild argues that whilst divisions remained the experience of temporary gentlemen did blur the lines between the social classes. He also states that returning officers from the lower classes were more assured and confident.

Return to status quo ante bellum

A mixed group of Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division police in Dublin in 1921

Most temporary officers were demoblised in 1918-1919, with some remaining until the Geddes Axe spending cuts of the 1920s. Many temporary gentlemen found that they could not afford to maintain their positions in the peacetime army which did not pay uniform or equipment allowances. Attempts were made after the war to open up the academy at Sandhurst to men outside the traditional officer class, following the recommendations of Richard Haldane's 1923 Officers' Training Committee. However the reforms were limited to asking county councils to provide scholarship funding (Sandhurst returned to charging tuition fees after the war), which saw limited success. Haldane's recommendation that officers be permitted to transfer into the regular army from the Territorial Army (which generally had a more diverse officer pool) was not implemented. There was some success with the Y Cadet Programme which ran between 1922 and 1930. This programme sought to ensure that 13.5% of regular army officers were commissioned from the ranks and 189 men benefitted from it. However the high cost of living faced by officers meant that most of these men chose to serve in the Army Service Corps (which had lower costs for socialising, uniforms and equipment). A second income remained a requirement for a regular army officer throughout the inter-war period. As such by the mid-1930s Sandhurst came to be dominated once more by former public school boys and the sons of serving officers; with only 5% of the intake from the other ranks.

Many demobilised temporary gentlemen found employment with the Special Reserve ("Black and Tans") or the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary in the inter-war years. Historian A. D. Harvey has described some of these men as "schoolboys who had become killers instead of going to university, working-class men who had been disorientated by promotion to the status of officers and gentlemen, fractured personalities whose maladjustments found temporary relief in the 1914-1918 war and whose outward stability depended on the psychic reassurance of a khaki tunic on their back and a Webley .455 at their hip", The constabulary took steps to remove such men from their rank and by the early 1920s the majority of these corps were formed from former officers of the lower middle classes, many of whom were veterans of Kitchener's Army who has served in the ranks prior to being commissioned.

Cultural impact

File:Robert Graves, Morrell.jpg

Robert Graves in 1920

During the war the press, particularly Punch, reported on the perceived social inadequacies of the temporary gentlemen. The conflict between regular officers and the temporary gentlemen was documented in the wartime memoirs of many officers. This included Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That and Siegfied Sassoon's series of fictionalised memoirs (Graves and Sassoon were members of the pre-war special reserve which drew from the traditional officer class) and that of temporary gentleman Edwin Campion Vaughan, whose lack of a public school education and pre-war position as a customs officer gave him a similar social standing to some of the men under his command. Henry Williamson's semi-autobiographical novel series A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight focuses on Phillip Maddison, a former clerk who receives a temporary commission during the war and is critical of the pre-war officers who look down on him. Mottram, who found he was expected to resume his junior position at the bank after the war, wrote The Spanish Farm trilogy about Stephen Domer, a bank clerk and temporary officer.

Many of the temporary gentlemen went on to become leading literary figures of the period. In addition to Mottram and Williamson, they included J. B. Priestley, Cecil Roberts, Gerald Bullett and R. C. Sherriff. H. F. Maltby's 1919 play A Temporary Gentleman focussed on Walter Hope, a junior warehouse clerk who was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps. The character fails to adjust to the post-war reality, being too "swollen-headed" to return to his pre-war job; the story was made into a film in 1920. Maltby wrote his play based on his experience as a 35-year-old artillery NCO where he saw officers that "were so obviously lower-middle class and suburban and gave themselves such airs and graces. I wondered what would happen to them when the war was over. I could see a terrible debunking before them". The poet Richard Aldington, considered the characterisation of Hope as too simplistic for a time when thousands of ex-officers were unemployed, sleeping rough and willing to take whatever work they could. Aldington himself wrote The Case of Lieutenant Hall, a fictional short story about a temporary officer who commits suicide after seeing Maltby's play.

The plight of the post-war temporary gentleman was summed up by Orwell in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air in which the protagonist, George Bowling, an insurance salesman and former temporary officer recalls that "we'd suddenly changed from gentlemen holding His Majesty's Commission into miserable out-of-works whom nobody wanted". Ernest Raymond's The Old Tree Blossomed features Stephen Gallimor as a clerk who leaves behind his former life to become a temporary gentleman. In D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover the working-class gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, is stated to have served as a lieutenant during the war. His ambiguous position as a temporary gentleman is remarked upon by his lover, the upper-class Lady Chatterley, when she says "he might almost be a gentleman".

Second World War and later

British officers at a transit camp in Singapore awaiting demobilisation

At the start of the Second World War there were only 14,000 regular army officers and 19,000 Territorial Army officers. The rapid expansion of the British Army over the following six years required a corresponding rise in the number of officers and by 1945 more than 250,000 new officers had received commissions. Before 1939 it had been possible to receive a commission in a unit only with the recommendation of its commanding officer and of the general commanding the division. As such recruitment tended to come from the traditional officer classes. Efforts had been made by the Liberal Secretary State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1938 to "democratise" the army by reducing living expense and introducing scholarships; though this failed to make much of an impact. The Labour Party noted at the time that "the present Army system… under which officer commissions are almost wholly reserved for the sons of the well-to-do is out of date in a democratic country".

The system was gradually reformed; after the reintroduction of conscription a General Service Corps scheme was set up to assess all new army entrants for suitability for a commission. However, it determined that only 6% of those conscripted were deemed suitable so recruitment from the lower classes was not significantly increased. The army replaced the pre-war recommendation system with the Command Interview Boards in 1941. These boards were criticised for being too focused on the traditional officer class and for promoting unsuitable men - leading to high failure rates at the Officer Cadet Training Units. Frederick Hubert Vinden reformed the system, introducing more fair-minded War Office Selection Board in which officer candidates were interviewed by trained psychiatrists and psychologists. These were not specifically set-up to diversify recruitment into the lower classes (though this effect was noted), but to generally improve the quality of recruitment. Despite the reforms, by the war's end it was found that some 34% of all officers commissioned still came from the public schools.

At the end of the war the British government purposely staggered the demobilisation of conscripts and temporary officers both because of continuing military garrison requirements across the world and to reduce the impact on the labour market in the United Kingdom. Temporary officers retained under this policy noted they were "frustrated by a life of boredom, seemingly needless military discipline (at a time of peace), waste, inactivity, and muddle". When they did return the law required that their former employers offer them their old jobs back; many chose not to accept these offers, having achieved greater responsibility and confidence through their military service. Some that chose to return found themselves disappointed; a Royal Marines officer complained that he was treated like an "office boy" and a Royal Artillery officer, who had commanded a gunnery school, found that he was relegated to making tea in a rural Oxfordshire bank.

Many temporary officers could not find alternative work or retraining. Some attempted to recreate their military experience by banding together to form "veterans colonies" - communities of former soldiers organised on military lines or becoming involved in organised crime. The term temporary gentlemen found some continued use after the war to refer to those National Service men who were commissioned as officers but has fallen out of use with the transition of the British Army to a purely volunteer force (National Service ended in 1963).

Use of the term in the Portuguese Army

A Portuguese miliciano ensign (left), with a senior corporal and sergeant in Guinea-Bissau, 1965

The term milicianos was used in reference to conscript officers in the Portuguese Army of the 1960s and 1970s and has been translated as "temporary gentlemen". The Portuguese at this time were involved in a number of wars in their colonies including the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence. During these wars there was considerable friction between the milicianos and the regular army officers. The regulars described the milicianos as "just doctors or lawyers in uniform and stated that "when they were meant to patrol, they simply crawled into a bunker". One miliciano lieutenant stated "In Guinea the anti-war feeling was very strong among the milicianos. Bissau was a beastly place. We had a very common saying: 'I'm fed up with this place! I'm fed up with them [the regular officers]! Get me out of here!' This feeling was reciprocated by the professional officers. The milicianos felt that they were being used to do the dirty work".

Tensions were exacerbated by a series of decrees made by defence minister, Horácio de Sá Viana Rebelo in June 1973. These allowed milicianos to convert their temporary commissions into permanent regular army commissions via a two-semester course at the national military academy and to count conscript service time for seniority purposes. Seniority was very important in the Portuguese Army of this period with almost all promotions based on this alone, without regard to individual merit. The new decrees upset many regular officers who found themselves leapfrogged by junior former-conscript officers, there were reportedly cases of former miliciano captains being promoted to the rank of colonel ahead of regular army lieutenant-colonels. The discontent of regular officers was one of the causes of the 25 April 1974 Carnation Revolution in which the regular armed forces overthrew the civilian dictatorship government.

Bibliography

• Beckett, Ian F. (1985), A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War, Manchester University Press, ISBN 0719017378
• Bowman, Timothy (April 2009), "Officering Kitchener's Armies: A Case Study of the 36th (Ulster) Division", War in History, 16 (2): 189–212, doi:10.1177/0968344508100989, S2CID 159724707
• Davis, Frank; Maddocks, Graham (1995), Bloody Red Tabs - General Officer Casualties of the Great War, 1914-1918, London: Leo Cooper
• Holmes, Richard (2011), Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors, ISBN 9780007225699
• James, Lawrence (2006), The Middle Class, Lonfon: Hachette, ISBN 978-0-748-12536-4
• Lewis-Stempel, John (2010), Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War, London: Orion, ISBN 978-0-297-86007-5
• Leeson, D.M. (2011), The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-959899-1
• Petter, Martin (March 1994), "'Temporary Gentlemen' in the Aftermath of the Great War: Rank, Status and the Ex-Officer Problem", The Historical Journal, 37 (1): 127–152, doi:10.1017/S0018246X00014734
• Porch, Douglas (1977), The Portuguese Armed Forces and the Revolution, Stanford: Hoover Institution, ISBN 0-85664-391-2
• Root, Laura (1 January 2006), ""Temporary Gentlemen" on the Western Front: Class Consciousness and the British Army Officer, 1914-1918", The Osprey Journal of Ideas and Inquiry Collections, All Volumes (2001-2008) (76), retrieved 1 December 2012
• Thorpe, D.R. (2010), Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, London: Random House, ISBN 9780701177485
• White, Alice (2016), From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street: The Tavistock Group, 1939-1948, University of Kent
• Wild, Jonathan (January 2007), "'A Merciful, Heaven-Sent Release'?: The Clerk and the First World War in British Literary Culture", Cultural and Social History, 4 (1): 73–94, doi:10.1080/14780038.2007.11425738, S2CID 147151436