First World War: Personnel from the Indian Subcontinent

Viscount Slim Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Slim (CB)]

My Lords, it is with pride that I am able to speak to you today, because I was an officer in the Indian Army. We had quite a few here when I first came to your Lordships’ House, but we are withering away. I am old, but not old enough to have fought in the First World War. Lord Weatherill was probably the most famous officer of the Indian Army in World War II who has been among us. He had a great record of gallantry and service in a very wonderful Indian cavalry regiment in Burma.

My father was in the Indian Army too, as was the father of the noble Baroness, Lady Flather. He too fought in Mesopotamia, and also in Gallipoli. He was then in the British Army, but fought alongside a couple of battalions of the Indian Army. He was so impressed by their gallantry, by the way they fought and by the way in which they were commanded and organised that he said to himself, “If I get out of this mess, I shall transfer to the Indian Army.” And he did—for the next 30 years.

We have talked loosely and happily about the bravery of the Indian Army, but I would like to take you into a battalion of the Indian Army as it was then, and show you the various components. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, there was no conscription: every man was a volunteer. Some regiments were strictly of one warrior, martial tribe; others were mixed. There were about 14 or 15 Punjab regiments, and in those there were Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus and Christians, completely integrated. There is a lesson there, you know, for the good people of Bradford and elsewhere in our nation. Of course they lived, not separately, but alongside each other, because they all ate different types of food, but there was a mosque, a Hindu temple and a Sikh gurdwara, there was the nearest Christian church, and there was often a Buddhist temple. We used to go to each other’s—and that was really rather good. It was the first real sign of integration of the people in India in those days. The Indian Army led, and later the police in India did much the same.

There was a difference of content, in that we had two types of officer in the battalion—the King’s commissioned officer and the Viceroy’s commissioned officer. They were probably the most important part of the Indian Army. The average British battalion had probably 30 or 40 British officers. But in an Indian Army battalion we had only about a dozen, because underneath those 12 or so officers the Viceroy commissioned officer was also an officer: he had his own officers mess, soldiers saluted him, and he provided the stability and the junior leadership of the Indian Army battalion—a rather special sort of battalion.

I do not think that it is generally known that in peacetime, the British officer was not accepted in the Indian Army unless he passed very high up out of Sandhurst. My father was the Indian Army instructor at the Staff College next door to Sandhurst, and I remember all those hopefuls coming to him to be looked at to see whether they were up to the very high standard of British Army officer required. He took some, and I know that he rejected one or two. You certainly needed to pass out in the first 25 or 30 at Sandhurst to be accepted.

May I end on a story? The Duke of Wellington always said that he learnt his soldiering in India, and he was damn nearly beaten by the Marathas, who had been led by probably one of the greatest guerrilla leaders in history, a man called Shivaji. The Duke, like all of us, learnt a lot in India.