First World War: Empire and Commonwealth Troops

Lord Cope of Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Lexden’s excellent Question mentions the First World War. My father—who fought in that terrible conflict—and his generation did not often talk about it, but when they did, they always called it the Great War. Of course, it was a world war. He volunteered in 1915 and, like more than 1 million others from all over the Empire, he served in the Royal Artillery.

In France and Belgium he was with a 9.2 inch Howitzer battery. You can see a 9.2 Howitzer in the Imperial War Museum and another carved full size in stone on the top of the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. It was a heavy gun and the shells weighed 290 pounds—a four-man lift, particularly if you were going to do it all day and all night. My father particularly valued the work of the West Indian soldiers who worked with him in the essential service of supplying ammunition to the guns—imagine the difficulties and dangers of bringing those shells right up to the front in the huge quantities required. More than 3 million 9.2 inch shells were fired during the war by British, Australian, Canadian and other—Indian, I think—artillery.

My father was wounded during the Third Battle of Ypres and after hospital in France—happily, in the casino at Le Touquet—he was sent to Palestine to join General Allenby’s successful army against the Turks. There again he served alongside many from Australia, New Zealand and India, as well as Arabs. Many of them had already served at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, at the cost of a huge number of lives.

In talking of the Indian troops who fought alongside us on the Western Front and elsewhere, I mention only Hodson’s Horse—now an armoured regiment in the Indian army—which, rightly, still celebrates annually its part in the important Battle of Cambrai in 1917. In total, 74,000 Indian soldiers died in that war and 11 won the Victoria Cross.

We should also recall the almost forgotten fighting in east and west Africa, particularly around the German colonies. I think the only media mention of any prominence was the excellent film “The African Queen”, which was set in Africa during the First World War. But there was much serious fighting of a more conventional kind involving the King’s African Rifles—over 30,000 strong—the Royal West African Frontier Force and others from South Africa and, again, India.

The Great War is rightly called a world war and Empire troops—Commonwealth troops, as we would now call them—played a large and vital role. We will remember them.