Officers not gentlemen: officers commissioned from the ranks of the pre-First World War British regular army, 1903-1918
Journal: University of Birmingham Institutional Research Archive (University of Birmingham)
Year: 2017

The British army officer commissioned from the ranks had become a rare and politically contested phenomenon in the years leading up to the First World War. This research addresses a previously unexamined phenomenon; how the conflict saw almost 10,000 commissions awarded to soldiers from the ranks of the pre-war British Army, and over 7,000, of these were ‘permanent’, constituting 42 per cent of regular army commissions. This was deeply threatening to the identity of gentleman-officers that had e