page_title: Temporary gentlemen
section_title: Reception and integration into the army
hierarchical_section_title: Temporary gentlemen / First World War / Reception and integration into the army
caption_attribution_description: Cooee marchers from Gilgandra, World War I recruiting march the first of the WW1 Snowball marches
context_page_description: Temporary gentlemen is a term used to refer to officers of the British Army who held temporary 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 were expected to be gentlemen. 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.
context_section_description: 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 a shift towards the central and lower-middle classes.
  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).
  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"
caption: Civilian volunteers march to join the Australian Army
exif: {"Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.10.14", "Image DateTime": "2019:12:17 18:58:48", "Image ExifOffset": "136", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "256", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "194", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "6", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "262", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "14224", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB"}