‘A great training school for the army’: Irish Officers and the School Influence

Abstract

During a period of liberal reform in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century the army formed a strong link with the public schools, in order to preserve the exclusive ‘gentlemanly’ status of the officer corps. This developed into a public school monopoly of officer recruitment, which continued into the interwar period in spite of the apparent democratisation of the officer corps during the First World War, when a large proportion of army officers were commissioned from the ranks.1 Thus, expectations of a new social order in postwar Britain were dashed and the country’s political and business elites continued to be recruited predominantly from families that could afford expensive public school education for their sons.2 This all changed during the Second World War. In September 1939 the main recruitment channels for the British army’s regimental officer corps, the ‘gentlemen cadet’ colleges at Sandhurst and Woolwich, were closed and in their stead was put the Officer Cadet Training Units (OCTUs). This new system was an attempt to make officer selection less elitist and more meritocratic: all wartime recruits would have to serve a period in the ranks and only those recommended by their commanding officer could go forward to the selection board. As we have already seen, these reforms produced a significant social-levelling effect on officer recruitment, although public schoolboys continued to be over-represented.3