Newspaper article about the Guards from 1952

Was given this page from The Sunday Express November 23 1952 by a WW1 Veteran Grenadier Guardsman.

Have done close ups of the page so hope you can read it.

 

Transcription:

The Sunday Express, November 23, 1952
The Guards: Last week’s Sunday Express Article Stirs the Nation
The Rout of Woodrow Wyatt

Writing in the Sunday Express last week, former Under-Secretary for War, Woodrow Wyatt, M.P., described the Brigade of Guards as “the last entrenched stronghold of privilege and snobbery in the British Army”. His comments have provoked a striking demonstration of the nation’s pride in the Guards.

From many hundreds of manuscripts the Sunday Express publishes these extracts, selecting for full-length prominence a sober rebuttal from a fellow M.P. who commanded a battalion of the Gordon Highlanders.

by Martin Lindsay, C.B.E., D.S.O., M.P.
What’s the truth about the Guards? There is, of course, no question that they deserve their great reputation.

We who served in the Infantry of the line had our own pride and loyalties. But we would always have expected a Guards battalion to do most things just that little bit better than ourselves.

And, for an operation, we had more confidence in a Guards unit than any we did not already know.

They were dependable. One felt all the braver for knowing this as soon as the guards began to fire.

Severe Test
Ask the Gunners and the Sappers or the men of the R.A.S.C., and R.A.M.C., who served in the two world wars. Which of them, after that experience, would wish to join any other unit.

No one would deny that they fighting qualities of the Guards are superb. But Mr. Wyatt asserts that these magnificent troops are commanded by officers whose efficiency is below that of other regiments.”

How could this be? For anyone with any experience of life knows that the standard of any organisation is set by those at its head. Good results can never be obtained without the best of leadership.

Under fire, the test is severe. At times, the difference between sticking it and running away is narrow as a thread. Some officers and N.C.Os are hit. One man loses his nerve. He cries: “This is murder. I’m getting out,” and he can take 50 others with him.

It is confidence and pride, with discipline and training, that carry troops through a stick action. Pride of regiment and confidence that they have been launched into the battle with a high degree of professional skill.

Knows His Job
Plainly it is nonsense to suggest that the Guards achieve what they do with sub-standard officers.

Everyone who knows the British Army will tell you that Guards offices are good. So it is that any body of troops welcomes the news that a Guards general or staff officer has been posted to them. For they can be sure he knows his job.

How do the Guards keep up the standard? More young men want to be commissioned in the Brigade than in other units. The colonels can afford to accept only those with very good reports.

It is the Line regiments which take the Guards’ rejects, not the other way round.

Cadets for regular commissions go through Sandhurst. The staff there will testify to the quality fo those destined for the Brigade.

National Service infantry, R.A.S.C., R.E.M.E, and R.A.O.C. cadets qualify at an O.C.T.U.

Those from the five Foot Guards regiments are, of course, in the minority. Yet of the present intact, four fo the five under officers are Guards cadets. It is no coincidence. For, on the whole, the Guards get the best.

Yet, Mr. Wyatt writes: “The qualifications for the Guards closed shop are a family association with a Guards regimented enough private means…”

As in other sought-after regiments only when it comes to choosing between two equally promising cadets is preference given to the one who had, say, a father or brother in the regiment.

The criticism that these officers need private means is about 15 years out of date. Guards regiments used to spend a great deal of time in London, which everyone knows is expensive.

The British public loves the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. But who, before the war, paused to think that the officers kept up those splendid uniforms each out of his own pocket? And that a heavy shower of rain mean a new scarlet tunic - £40.

Today six Guards battalions out of ten are on service abroad. Full dress uniform is provided from a regimental pool. Private means are no longer essential, and many Guards officers have none.

It is true that these officers all come from public schools.

Hard Knocks
The British public schools have no special claim to turn out good surgeons, lawyers, or engineers. But there are two professions for which they excel themselves - Colonial administrators and Service Officers.

Both these require two qualifications which these schools develop to a special degree: toughness and leadership.

The boy of 13 who is summoned before the prefects for a misdemeanour is toughened all right. At an early age he learns to take the hard knocks of life on the chin.

And when, a few years later, he shares in the responsibility of running the school he gains in self-confidence. So when he trains to be an officers he has at least already learned how to give an order.

The toughening process is continued through potential officers’ training. Those who write so glibly about “privilege” should visit the Guards Depot at Caterham. The young Guards cadet serves an infinitely more rigorous apprenticeship than any other.

One one occasion this year three of them, including a young earl, received ten on the backside from their squad sergeant’s cane.

“Privilege” indeed! These young men would die of shame before making a complaint.

The supreme test of troops is how they conduct themselves in defeat. In the retreat to DUNKIRK in 1940 and the shambles of NORWAY, many regiments fought well. But others, with memories of men casting away their arms would prefer to forget that period.

Through all those desperate days the discipline of the Guards shone like a beacon. Seven rearguard actions across BELGIUM and FRANCE did not stop a Grenadier battalion from blanching its equipment - and it is said that one man who failed to do so was put under arrest at DOVER!

In Formation
The Coldstreams marched into the inferno of DUNKIRK in formation.

The defence of ARRAS by the Welsh Guards after others had broken, is a glorious story. So is the stand of the Irish Guards near Narvik commanded by the junior captain after all those senior to him had been killed.

The three Services are rightly proud of their corps d’elites: the Royal Navy of its ? Ships, the R.A.F. of the Pathfinder Force, and the Army of its Brigade of Guards.

And no one will resent an attack upon their officers more than the men who have themselves served in those magnificent regiments - the Household Cavalry, the Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Irish and Welsh Guards.

 

Transcription:

The Sunday Express, November 23, 1952
The Guards: Last week’s Sunday Express Article Stirs the Nation


From: Nigel Fisher, M.C., M.P
(Mr. Fisher served with the Welsh Guards throughout the war; landed with the Guards Division in Normandy, 1944 ; commanded the first unit to enter BRUSSELS.)
In six years I never saw a Guards officer sit down to eat his meal without first seeing that all his men had been adequately fed.

However long and arduous the day’s fighting may have been, I never once saw an officer lie down to sleep until his men were settled.



From: Mr. P. M. GRASSI, 2 Leopold Road, Brighton.
In the late war, of the two battalions of Grenadiers in which my son was privileged to serve, no fewer than 51 officer were killed outright.



From: Major Henry Legge-Bourke, M.P.
(Major Legge-Bourke was commissioned in 1934. He served with his regiment - the Blues - in the Middle East. Was on H.Q. of 7th Armoured Division during the Battle of El Alamein.)

One advantage from having served in the Household Brigade is that nothing that anyone is every likely to say about you afterwards behind your back can be ruder than what the Regimental Adjutant will already have said to your face while you were serving.

So - the “ammo” let off in last Sunday’s Express sounded to some of us very like “blank” - damp blank!



From: Dr. W. H. Valentine, 39 London Road, Newark-on-Trent.
(Dr. Valentine served in close association with the Guards thoughout the 1939-45 war. He is a lieutenant-colonel (honorary) of the Royal Army Medical Corps.)

I saw magnificent discipline during the long, hard fighting back to DUNKIRK.

The Guards finally marched along the mole at DUNKIRK, with rifles and full equipment. I felt improperly dressed, having somewhere lost my gas cape. Their conduct was, of course, to be expected, but it was in no small way due to the system of officering which Woodrow Wyatt criticises.

The men thought very highly of their officers. Loved would not be too strong a word. When necessary they would die with them.



From: Mr. A. N. Evans, 231 Coulsdon Road, Caterham, Surrey.
(Mr. Evans had 24 years’ service in the Welsh Guards.)

Nepotism is rife even in the lower income groups. I have personal guilt in this matter and must submit myself to a degree of self-criticism. I must admit that my son, a Guardsman, who was killed in Burma, had been permitted, because his father and grandfather had each served on a 21-year engagement in the Brigade, to follow in their footsteps.

His family had been privileged to serve over a period of 50 years. And I accuse scores of other families in the Brigade of similar reactionary loyalty and ideals of service.



From: the Hon. Terence Prettie, H.Q., C.C.G., Duesseldorf, Germany.
In one Guards battalion here exactly three out of the 23 officers have had a father or uncle, let alone a grandfather, in that regiment. In another Guards battalion the number is 11. That makes a total of 14 out of 46.



From Mr. Mark Philips, Holcombe House, Painswick, Glos.
(Mr. Philips served in the Coldstream Guards during the war.)

I have served as a private and corporal in one of Britain’s finest line regiments, as subaltern and captain in the Coldstream Guards, as weaver in a textile mill, as junior salesman in a warehouse, and now as personnel manager in an engineering factory.

In all these positions, with ONE exception, I have found snobbery in some shape or forum. The exception? In the Brigade of Guards.

 

Had to look up Woodrow Wyatt.
I see he was an officer in the Suffolks.

Woodrow Wyatt - Wikipedia