HIS MAJESTY’S TERRITORIAL ARMY A descriptive account of the Yeomanry, Artillery, Engineers and Infantry with the Army Service and Medical Corps, comprising “The King’s Imperial Army of the Second Line”.

The Territorial Army was the brainchild of R.B.Haldane, the Liberal politician who is recognised by historians as Britain’s most effective and efficient War Minister. In the run-up to the Great War, military opinion formers such as Rudyard Kipling and Lord Roberts, became concerned that the regular British Army, with an establishment of just 100,000 men, then as now had become prone to ‘over stretch’. It was expected both to guard and garrison the far-flung British Empire – then comprising a quarter of the Globe – as well as being ready to deploy in Europe against the growing threat of German expansion. Unlike her European rivals, Britain had no tradition of conscription to make up this shortfall in numbers. Haldane’s innovative answer was the Territorial Army – a force of part-time ‘citizen soldiers’ who would retain their place in civilian life, but would train and serve alongside the regulars, and be ready to be instantly deployed in the increasingly likely event of war. The ‘Terriers’ more than proved their worth when the Great War broke out only seven years after Haldane had introduced them in 1907, bridging the gap between the destruction of the old regular Army in 1914 and the arrival of the volunteer New Armies on the Somme in mid-1916. This handsome four-volume descriptive account of the part-time soldiers by military writer Walter Richards, was published just before the Great War. It has the advantage of 32 full-page colour plate illustrations of uniforms by R. Caton Woodville, recognised as Britain’s foremost military uniform artist of the era.