3. Stepping into their places: Britain’s transport experts and the expanding war, 1914–16

In August 1915, the Great Western Railway Magazine carried photographs and brief biographies of twenty-four of the company’s employees, each of whom had recently died while in the service of their nation. The men’s details illustrate the great diversity of work undertaken and the geographical sprawl of Britain’s largest pre-war railway companies. Porters, clerks, relayers, lamp men, carpenters, packers and labourers were among the two dozen men featured in the magazine, who had enlisted from such places as the company’s works at Swindon, its London terminus at Paddington, the engine shed at Newton Abbot and the engineering department at Plymouth. The locations of their deaths highlight how Britain’s commitments to the First World War had grown beyond France and Flanders in the first twelve months of the war. While Emmanuel Rowland died of pneumonia in Exeter, and Lance-Corporal F. Hammond was killed in action at Hill 60 near Ypres, both James Gully and Walter Lamacroft were lost on 12 May 1915 when HMS Goliath was torpedoed and sank at Cape Helles.¹ As the magazine went to print the 5th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment – whose recruits included many with pre-war attachments to the Great Western’s Swindon works – were overwhelmed by Turkish forces at Chunuk Bair. At least nineteen of those who died in the assault were railwaymen. The Great Western, Great Eastern and LNWR all lost former employees on the slopes of the Sari Bahr ridge. In the first year of the First World War the railwaymen of Britain found themselves at the forefront of Britain’s expanding war effort.²

Alongside their contributions to the fighting forces on various front lines, employees from some of Britain’s largest railway companies helped underwrite the organizational effort required to gear the nation towards the prosecution of a war effort on an unprecedented scale. The creation, maintenance and sustenance of a mass army capable of rivalling the conscripted forces of the other European powers presented Britain’s civil and military authorities with a series of colossal challenges, which revealed themselves gradually from the moment the decision to raise such a force was taken. ‘Issues of management and logistics’, claimed two British scholars, ‘were the primary concerns of senior commanders for the first three years of the war’. The army, they continued, underwent a ‘conceptual change’ that involved the mobilization of businessmen who brought ‘their knowledge of forecasting and economies of scale to military logistical supply’.³ This process is viewed almost exclusively through the prism of Sir Eric Geddes and the creation of the directorate-general of transportation in the autumn of 1916. Even Elizabeth Greenhalgh’s Victory through Coalition, which more than any previous history analysed the bureaucratic machinations behind the inter-allied management apparatus, devoted little more than two pages to the logistical complexities and frailties that afflicted the Franco-British coalition before the battle of the Somme.⁴

Yet prior to Geddes’s arrival on the western front, as this and the following chapters will demonstrate, the British army actively sought out and engaged with the skills and expertise possessed by Britain’s transport experts. Individuals and companies from across the country, the empire and beyond, were tasked with identifying solutions to the multiple conundrums posed by modern industrial warfare. Both at home and in the multiple theatres that emerged as the war spread from Europe, those who possessed technical and managerial experience in the railway industry found profitable employment in the production and distribution networks that underpinned the British war effort. However, the army’s initial attempts to utilize civilians to grapple with the implications of industrialized warfare were relatively small in scale and limited in scope. Furthermore, they were hamstrung by the constant presence of the two factors that inhibited the British army’s development before 1916: a continued belief in the impermanence of trench warfare and subsequent disinclination to prepare for a static war; and the French army’s reluctance to relinquish control over the shared transport infrastructure upon which the coalition’s forces depended.

Transport organization and the clash of arms

The War Office, like its compatriots across Europe, entered the First World War with no proposals for how to deal with the consequences of an indecisive opening engagement. ‘Whether the General Staffs really expected a war to end by Christmas’, argued David Stevenson, ‘all they planned in detail was the opening campaign’.⁵ The pre-war conversations between the French and British general staffs had resulted in an arrangement whereby the BEF’s transport requirements were to be ‘manned and controlled by the French’. The BEF’s hosts undertook to complete ‘the work of construction, repair, maintenance, traffic management and protection’ necessary to maintain the British troops on the western front.⁶ In a sign of the French army’s confident approach to the impending hostilities – and its assumption that the BEF was unlikely to substantially increase in size over the course of the war – the French also committed to provide for all the BEF’s transport needs after the allies had pushed the Germans back beyond the French-Belgian frontier. The terms of the coalition arrangement were such that the duties nominally assigned to a British director of railway transport (DRT) were almost entirely assigned to the French army. Consequently, the British officer earmarked for the position, Colonel John Twiss, remained in London when the BEF set sail. Only a small staff of liaison officers, the railway transport establishment, crossed the Channel to act as intermediaries between the BEF and the French railway authorities in early August 1914.⁷

The twenty-nine officers who constituted the initial railway transport establishment – twelve of whom were students at the staff college when war was declared – were thrown into action immediately. Captain R. H. D. Tompson, one of the staff college students, recorded in his diary the disappointment he felt at being given such a ‘poor job’. ‘It is very hard after all this sweat of getting to the Staff College’, he wrote on 6 August, ‘to find oneself in a rotten job like this’. Tompson, a veteran of the South African War, embarked on the LSWR ship SS Vera on 9 August, and went onshore at Le Havre at 6:30 a.m. the following morning. Before he embarked for France, the relationship between the British officers and the French railway authorities was clearly explained. The French were to control operations within the stations, and Tompson’s role was to ensure that disembarking troops complied with the instructions issued by the station staff. For each train that arrived at his allocated station of Vaux (and later Busigny), Tompson worked alongside the ‘excellent fellows’ of the commission de la gare to ensure the swift unloading of troops and equipment from the trains, their removal from the station’s surroundings and the preparation of the area to receive the next arrival. The work was incessant. The steady stream of trains meant that he could only snatch occasional periods of rest, and as the concentration period climaxed Tompson recorded that he ‘had not slept in three days and two whole nights’. By 24 August, when the BEF had just commenced its infamous retreat from Mons, Tompson’s boots had already worn through.⁸

The French authorities’ desire to retain control inside the railway stations near the concentration area was not matched by the ability to honour their agreement with the BEF at the coast. The pre-war arrangement at the ports was broken before the bulk of troops had begun to arrive. Before he set sail to take up his post, the IGC Sir Frederick Robb was dismayed to discover that the French ‘had not kept their promises about the dock employees, they can only furnish 1000 stevedores out of the 3000 [and] they propose not to work at night. I have had to be very firm about this, they have now promised to try and get some more’.⁹ This inauspicious beginning to the practical operations of the Franco-British coalition set a pattern that continued once the fighting commenced in earnest.

The outbreak of war sparked a colossal volume of traffic on the French railways. According to one American correspondent, ‘no fewer than 1,800,000 troops were gotten to the front, and each of these soldiers were handled three times, so that in reality 5,400,000 troops were delivered at the required points … while possibly 5,000,000 of the civil population were also travelling’ between 1 and 24 August.¹⁰ The mass of refugees provided a noteworthy concern for the allies’ supply officers. Around 100,000 people ‘threw themselves’ at any trains heading west from Laon in the final days of August, while at Busigny Tompson witnessed the ‘poor haunted creatures’ who choked the station in search of transport away from the front and complicated the movements of troops.¹¹ In the less sympathetic view of the QMG, Sir William Robertson, the refugees were ‘an awful nuisance, blocking our roads, and even our fire’ during the retreat from Mons. In a letter to the king’s private secretary he described ‘colonies of perhaps 200 or 300 families’, who in some cases had travelled from central Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. ‘The selection they have made of their belongings’, Robertson noted, ‘has amused me more than anything. It includes in some cases of a flock of about 1,000 sheep. Two or three wagons of what looks like straw or hay, but which really consist of furniture and clothing, hidden under the straw. Bicycles, mattresses, perambulators, boxes, cocks and hens, turkeys and so on’ comprised all the refugees had been able to remove in the face of the German advance.¹²

As QMG, it was Robertson’s responsibility to ensure that his troops were supplied with the items they required. Yet as the location of the front constantly shifted, the BEF’s administrative departments behind the lines could not be certain of the troops’ locations from day to day.¹³ By the time rendezvous points had been selected by GHQ and communicated to Robb’s headquarters on the lines of communications, there was no guarantee that British troops would be in position to receive the supplies once they had been shifted forwards. Closer to the front the quartermasters of individual formations struggled to maintain contact with their troops as the road network became increasingly congested with troops, guns, refugees and abandoned supplies.¹⁴ Lyndall Urwick recalled that ‘only once or twice during the retreat and the Battle of the Marne had our regimental transport caught up with us’. Consequently, the food Urwick and his comrades received on the retreat ‘had been uncertain but monotonous, consisting, when we got any, almost entirely of bully beef and biscuit’ or whatever the enterprising soldier could scrounge.¹⁵ With the distribution system insufficient to meet the needs of an army on the move, Robertson arranged for food and ammunition to be ‘dumped’ at busy crossroads for the men to take as they passed.¹⁶ Inevitably, he recalled, such a system led to ‘excessive waste’ and huge volumes were left behind. ‘But when the troops are fighting hard’, he reasoned, ‘one does not like to worry them too much about administrative matters. The chief thing is to beat the enemy’ rather than obsess over red-tape.¹⁷

The initial campaigns of the First World War underlined the inaccuracy of Lord Kitchener’s insistence that Sir John French’s command was ‘an entirely independent one’.¹⁸ The arrangements by which control of the railway network remained in the hands of Grand Quartier Général (GQG), and the relative strengths of the French and British forces, ensured that priority was consistently given to the demands of the former during the emergency of the war’s opening months. All orders for railway transport had to be made through the French railway authorities. Therefore, the BEF was entirely reliant upon their host’s willingness to run trains filled with British supplies.¹⁹ By the end of September Robertson grumbled that he had ‘always doubted the possibility of our obtaining much, if any, transport from French sources’.²⁰ Furthermore, GQG allotted the best railheads to French troops, which forced the BEF to rely on inferior facilities, and when French supply trains blocked the lines ahead of British railheads the BEF simply had to wait. As battle raged around Ypres on 23 October, Robertson observed with mounting frustration that the troops were struggling to obtain sufficient ammunition:

The French army was engaged heavily in a struggle for national survival alongside a small, untested force, perceived in Paris as hesitant and unreliable. Unsurprisingly, the BEF’s requests were persistently subordinated by GQG to the demands of their own troops and civilian population.

The discussions surrounding the BEF’s transfer to Flanders ahead of the first Ypres battle neatly illustrate the reality of the Franco-British relationship in 1914. In late September Sir John conceived a plan to unite his forces and undertake a huge enveloping manoeuvre against the Germans concentrated on Lille. The plan would take ‘a week or nine days’ to execute, and if successful would put an end to the German invasion of France.²² Sir John wrote to his opposite number, the French commander-in-chief General Joseph Joffre, to forcefully request that British troops be moved north to put his ambitious plan into action. ‘Both from strategical reasons and tactical reasons’, Sir John argued, ‘it is desirable that the British Army should regain its position on the left of the line. There remains the question of when this move should take place. I submit that now is the time’.²³ In response, Joffre stated that he would ‘endeavour to satisfy this request’, but warned that ‘the movement of the British troops can only be carried out in succession’. Joffre’s letter went on to ‘assure Marshal French’ that ‘the greatest efforts’ would be made to concentrate the whole of the BEF in the northern sector of the front, but noted that to immediately comply with Sir John’s wishes would severely delay the French army’s intended operations. Consequently, the British troops moved not as a whole but in small groups, and they travelled according to a schedule devised at GQG rather than GHQ.²⁴

The BEF’s movement to Flanders and the onset – although not perceived as such at the time – of static warfare, provided Robertson and his colleagues with an opportunity to reflect on the efficacy of the transport arrangements on the western front. To maintain a regular supply to their forces, the British needed a thoroughly staffed traffic organization able to coordinate the BEF’s transport needs with those of the French. The first steps to providing such an organization had already been taken. Between 18 September and 1 October, the BEF’s railway transport establishment more than doubled thanks to the arrival of thirty-two new officers in France, while several officers with experience on the Indian railways – including Major Henry Freeland and Lieutenant-Colonel Valentine Murray – took up positions on the IGC’s staff to coordinate their activities. By 10 October the newly established traffic office, under Freeland’s command, had seventy-five men at its disposal to facilitate the BEF’s movements on the French railways.²⁵

Further forward, the BEF’s contribution to the construction and repair of railways was also dealt with. Colonel Twiss took up his duties as DRT on 16 September, and attended a meeting at GQG to discuss the subject of railway construction the following day. The 8th (Railway) Company, Royal Engineers, had been in France for a month. Since their arrival the company had laid a short length of siding in the port of Le Havre and shadowed the work of French railway engineers, but by mid September the company had achieved little of value to the allies. Indeed, such was the unit’s perceived redundancy that in late August a proposal had been floated that men without knowledge of specific railway trades should be withdrawn to replace losses among the front-line troops.²⁶ Following Twiss’s meeting at GQG the French agreed to modify the pre-war arrangements, and accepted the offer of British railway troops to assist with repairs on the Chemins de Fer du Nord – provided that the French retained overall control of the work undertaken. The 8th (Railway) Company was immediately set to work repairing the Pont de Metz, ‘a lofty brick bridge of two spans’ to the south-west of Amiens that had been destroyed by the Germans during their retreat from the Marne. Upon completion of the heavy timbering work required for the ‘semi-permanent repairs’ to the bridge the company headed to St Omer en Chaussée and Gamaches, where they worked alongside 300 employees of the Nord railway to install short connections that eliminated the need for engines to be reversed on single lines.²⁷

With the BEF’s available transport assets fully engaged in the task of keeping the troops supplied and the French army aware of their requirements, a comprehensive examination of the BEF’s supply arrangements could not be handled from within. Therefore, when Colonel Twiss and Lieutenant-Colonel Murray arrived at the IGC’s office to commence an investigation into the BEF’s transport organization, they were accompanied by a transport expert sent to France by Kitchener to oversee the task. Despite the rank, Brigadier-General Sir Édouard Percy Cranwill Girouard was not a serving officer in October 1914. However, his role cannot be considered equivalent to that of the purely civilian railway experts that contributed to the army’s operations later in the conflict. Girouard, a French-Canadian from Montreal, had acquired railway construction and operation experience – both in war and peace – across three continents. After graduation from the Royal Military College at Kingston he had spent two years on the engineering staff of the Canadian Pacific Railway, before he accepted a commission in the Royal Engineers to become the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich’s first traffic manager.²⁸

At Woolwich Girouard observed the ‘confusion and waste’ that emerged when competing departments attempted to exert influence over a shared transport system. Before his arrival no central administration existed to oversee traffic flows around the 824-acre site, and each factory had arranged their own train schedules on the arsenal’s narrow-gauge railway. Girouard took control of the rolling stock and motive power – thirty-six engines and 1,000 carriages, vans and trucks – and centralized all traffic requests within the arsenal. Under his authority, the narrow gauge became an integral component of operations at Woolwich, provided a ‘valuable link between office and shop, storehouse and magazine’, and even acted as a passenger service for the employees of various factories.²⁹

If Woolwich had taught Girouard that competitive behaviour between units that were working towards a shared goal had to be avoided – whether in the south-west of London or the north-east of France – his next role exposed him to the practical advantages to be gained from the use of railways for military purposes. In 1896 he was seconded to the Egyptian army, and was responsible for overseeing the construction of a railway across the Nubian Desert early the following year.³⁰ By July 1898 the ‘cholera-decimated’ engineers under his charge had extended the railway to Atbara, and the line was of sufficient quality to sustain Kitchener’s 22,000-strong force as it triumphed at Omdurman. According to Edward Spiers, ‘this remarkable victory in which 10,200 Mahdists had been killed, and possibly another 16,000 wounded in a morning, derived from the transformative effect of the Sudan Military Railway’.³¹ Girouard received the Distinguished Service Order for his efforts on the project and was appointed president of the Egyptian railway and telegraph administration. However, less than a year later his services were required in a theatre of war at the other end of Africa. Girouard became director of railways in South Africa following the outbreak of hostilities with the Boers in 1899.

The war in South Africa presented Girouard and his staff with a range of operational challenges. The British captured some 1,100 miles of damaged railways from the Boers and utilized thousands of miles of railway to supply an army of 250,000 troops.³² As director of railways he assembled a ‘special military staff’ to act as the sole channel of communications between the army and the technical railway personnel. The directorate provided a centralized organization for the management and maintenance of the network, and ensured that the overall efficiency of railway operations was not jeopardized by the localized concerns of commanders ignorant of the force’s overall transport priorities. Following the war, Girouard catalogued the lessons that had emerged from the British army’s largest undertaking prior to 1914. Alongside delivering a lecture, subsequently published in the Royal Engineers Journal, he wrote the first volume of History of the Railways during the War in South Africa, 1899–1902 in 1903.³³ The text was quickly recognized as a valuable educational resource for officers tasked with understanding the role of railways in modern warfare and, despite post-war fiscal retrenchment that precluded the publication of subsequent volumes in the series through official channels, the Royal Engineers chose to publish the works themselves.³⁴

The publication of Girouard’s histories emphasized their author’s mastery of the details and the high regard with which the army valued his expertise on railway matters.³⁵ His specialist background, coupled with his fluency in the French language, made him an obvious choice to undertake the transport investigation in October 1914. He met first with Sir Ronald Maxwell, who had taken over from Sir Frederick Robb as IGC on 19 September, before he travelled to Paris to discuss matters with the military commission responsible for running the Chemins de Fer du Nord and the French director of railways. Prior to his departure from France he met with Robertson at GHQ and visited the port of Boulogne to assess its suitability as an army base.³⁶ The report he submitted after his inspection outlined the French system of railway organization, and compared it both with the practice recommended in the pre-war British Field Service Regulations (FSR) and the system in place at the time of his visit. The French railways – quite apart from the efforts required to mobilize and concentrate the French army, transport the BEF inland from the ports and remove hundreds of thousands of civilians from the areas of France and Belgium under threat of German invasion – had been called upon to handle large numbers of locomotives and rolling stock removed from the Belgian railways and the supply of a multitude of entangled fighting units both in retreat and advance.³⁷ Robertson’s frustrations with the lack of priority afforded to the BEF’s needs notwithstanding, Girouard concluded that the French had managed their numerous tasks with a remarkable degree of success.³⁸ Their organization resembled Girouard’s system from the Royal Arsenal on a far larger scale, with control over the entire network located at GQG. The ability to direct railway operations from the principal information centre of the French army ensured that they both deployed their resources in response to the latest intelligence and could react to Joffre’s strategic designs immediately.

The French system of organization compared favourably to that laid down in FSR part two. The British divided responsibility for transport and supply between two officers. Maxwell, the IGC, maintained stocks at the bases and controlled traffic on the lines of communications from his headquarters at the BEF’s advanced base.³⁹ Robertson described Maxwell’s role as ‘something like the managing directors of Harrods’ Stores and Carter Paterson rolled into one’.⁴⁰ Robertson, the QMG, worked alongside Sir John French at GHQ and took charge of the administrative arrangements between Maxwell and the units at the front. Under the guidelines laid down before August 1914 the general staff was to identify priorities for movement, Robertson to issue instructions to the relevant units and Maxwell to coordinate the move.⁴¹ The system collapsed on contact with the enemy. Between 25 August and 1 September GHQ changed location five times. The frequency of GHQ’s movements afforded little opportunity for adequate communications to be established at each site, which made contact between Maxwell and Robertson almost impossible to sustain. Messages and orders from GHQ regularly failed to reach their destination or were wholly inapplicable to the prevailing circumstances by the time they arrived. As Captain Tompson reflected, ‘the situation altered so rapidly that railheads required to be settled finally only a few hours before the arrival of the daily supply trains’.⁴² With the communications system unable to maintain reliable connections between the base depots, GHQ and the front, Robertson advocated a temporary abandonment of the principles laid down in FSR part two. In its place Robertson favoured the guidelines recommended in FSR part one, which emphasized that the ‘man on the spot’ use his initiative when the circumstances compelled such an action. As Robertson was located at GHQ, the spot upon which the most up-to-date information on the dispositions of troops and the military situation as a whole was to be found, he argued that he was best placed to identify the BEF’s priorities and respond to urgent requests.⁴³

To discharge the duties he had taken on, Robertson sought out an expert in French railway practices who could coordinate the movements he ordered from GHQ. Major Marr Johnson, who had created the railway timetables for the WF scheme and worked alongside the French to develop the BEF’s concentration inland from the ports, was well equipped for the role. He was fully conversant with the technical aspects that governed French railway operations, and had been on the IGC’s staff since his arrival in France. Johnson arrived at GHQ – supposedly on a temporary basis – on 26 August, and began to act as an expert conduit between Robertson and the French authorities immediately. The sheer volume of railway questions that required his expert consideration meant that Johnson remained attached to Robertson’s staff, where he was engaged in a process of streamlining the BEF’s transport arrangements when Girouard’s examination took place.⁴⁴

The existence of a solitary British officer with expert knowledge of the French railways and their military applications contrasted sharply with the expertise available to the French army. Following the defeat of 1870–1, in which uncoordinated military command of the railways contributed to confusion and congestion on the lines, French efforts had been channelled into the establishment of a unified civil–military command system to operate the network during wartime.⁴⁵ As the French director of railways admitted to Maxwell in September 1914, the absence of a recognized command structure had ‘resulted in most serious failures in the working of our railways during the war of 1870’.⁴⁶ Orders and counter-orders had been issued direct to the civilian operating staff by the general staff, the administrative staff, individual departments and even the minister of war.⁴⁷ The French were keen to avoid a repeat, and established an administrative system that reduced the possibility of contradictory and conflicting orders being issued by local commanders unaware of the army’s wider requirements. Upon mobilization in 1914 the entire network came under the control of a single railway authority, which consisted of commissions made up of senior military officers and professional railwaymen with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their portion of the system. Each of the commissions existed in peacetime, and took over their designated section of the network upon mobilization.⁴⁸ Therefore, the staff on each line possessed an intimate knowledge of the system’s limitations, and were thoroughly aware of individual stations’ capacities. The combination of military and civilian expertise minimized the prospect of trains being despatched to stations incapable of handling them, and the location of the railway directorate at GQG ensured that orders were sent from the source best placed to take a holistic view of the situation.

The methodical structure of the French organization contrasted sharply with Girouard’s assessment of the BEF’s arrangements. Johnson’s transfer to GHQ symbolized the collapse of FSR part two’s guidelines, which were themselves an abandonment of the principles Girouard had advocated a decade earlier. Maxwell was unable to comply with the directive that all communications with the French railway authorities were to be made through the IGC’s office because the officer responsible for those communications no longer worked there.⁴⁹ However, Johnson’s relocation had not engendered a thorough re-examination of the BEF’s administrative structure. The various directorates concerned with supply and movement continued to be split between the IGC’s headquarters and GHQ. The director of works, for example, reported to Robertson. However, his office space was located at Maxwell’s base on the lines of communications.⁵⁰ Effective liaison between the two staffs, particularly given the unsatisfactory state of communications during the war of movement, had proven largely impracticable.

Following the tumult of defensive action, retreat, advance, offensive operation and movement around the front, Girouard’s investigation represented both the BEF’s first attempt to assess the applicability of pre-war regulations to wartime conditions and its first opportunity to replace reactive, ad hoc adjustments to the system with an effective, long-term solution. Girouard’s recommendations consisted of abandoning the guidelines laid down in FSR part two and replicating the French system of organization. He argued that the BEF had to establish coordination between the French and British railway staffs at all levels of authority, right up to the executive branch of the transport hierarchy, upon which the British point of view was absent.⁵¹ A modification on these lines, Girouard suggested, would provide the BEF with a forum within which it could influence the allies’ future transport policy. The French had begun to request that British troops be provided to repair lines behind the BEF in the event of a general advance, and Girouard deemed it highly desirable that any organization established to oversee the reconstruction and operation of the Belgian railways ‘should have a considerable [British] voice’.⁵²

Both Robertson and Maxwell had already recognized the need for greater liaison between the French and British staffs. Their attempts to provide better facilities for inter-allied contact included Twiss’s arrival in France and the increased establishment of railway transport officers on the lines of communications. However, Girouard believed that Twiss had ‘not [yet] been encouraged to take his proper place in the field and assume control’ of the BEF’s railway staff.⁵³ The former’s report codified the latter’s role as DRT in France. Twiss’s directorate became responsible for collecting the ‘various demands for railway transport’ that arose across the BEF, and for coordinating them ‘in the manner best suited to meet the organization of the British Army, while putting as little strain on the French railways, which were being worked under very high pressure’.⁵⁴ In the final five months of 1914 alone, the northern and eastern networks in France carried 12,000 supply trains for the French and British armies – far higher than the volume of peacetime traffic but, unsurprisingly, well below the traffic figures recorded as the war expanded in scale in subsequent years.⁵⁵ The success with which Twiss felt he had achieved harmonious relations with the French railway staff was summed up in a letter that he sent to his counterpart in June 1915. Twiss celebrated the ‘confidence and good feeling between your railway staff and mine … and may I also say my dear Colonel Le Hénaff, between you and me, [which] is a matter of the greatest satisfaction to me’.⁵⁶ Twiss’s retention of Marr Johnson – well known among the French staff – as assistant DRT undoubtedly contributed to the ‘good feeling’ that accompanied Franco-British collaboration on railway matters after October 1914.

The whereabouts of Twiss’s department also solved the question of which senior officer, Robertson or Maxwell, should take responsibility for traffic coordination on the western front. Maxwell, identified as the authority in the pre-war instructions, had proven unable to exercise effective control over the railways. It was impossible for Maxwell to retain responsibility for the coordination of traffic unless the supply departments were placed under his direct control, which meant their relocation from GHQ and an inevitable reduction in their access to the latest intelligence on the army’s requirements. These disadvantages produced agreement between Maxwell and Robertson that Girouard’s recommendations should be adhered to, the French hierarchy mirrored and the DRT accommodated at GHQ. Consequently, Robertson accepted overall responsibility for the coordination of the BEF’s traffic arrangements.⁵⁷

Maxwell and Robertson’s adaptability in October 1914 confirms Ian M. Brown’s argument that a working environment fostered by staff college training, pragmatism and professionalism existed within the BEF’s administrative echelons.⁵⁸ Robertson’s actions during the retreat from Mons were evidence of his belief that regulations and procedures were ‘hand-rails to guide decision-making rather than barriers to creativity’, while Maxwell’s admission that ‘the French system is likely to give the best results’ highlights the broadminded response to Girouard’s investigation from the officer most directly affected by the proposed changes.⁵⁹ However, Maxwell’s and Robertson’s approach was not universally accepted within the army, as the War Office’s responses to Girouard’s report demonstrate. The former IGC, Sir Frederick Robb, denounced Girouard’s proposals as ‘nothing new’ and criticized the ‘absurdity’ of holding one man responsible for all transport requirements in the theatre of war. Furthermore, while Robb noted correctly that the system Girouard had reviewed was not that recommended in the pre-war guidelines, he blamed the ‘co-efficient of human nature’ for the modifications to those instructions that had taken place between August and October 1914. The thinly veiled implication of Robb’s statement was that Robertson’s actions, rather than a genuine response to inadequate communications between the BEF’s administrative departments, had been an attempt to centralize authority under himself and reduce the IGC’s influence.⁶⁰ An even more condemnatory reaction to Girouard’s report emerged from the QMG of the forces, Sir John Cowans. In a note written three days after Girouard submitted his observations – and with the fighting for the town of Ypres increasing in intensity – Cowans argued that Girouard had ‘far exceeded his instructions. He was not told to produce a scheme for uprooting organizations deliberately laid down after deep deliberation … The Regulations have been issued and acted upon and it is no time in the middle of a campaign to tinker with them’. For Cowans, despite his personal misgivings about the ‘anomalies’ in the structure of the BEF’s original supply system, the short-term exigency of ensuring the troops engaged around Ypres remained fed and equipped superseded the rearrangement of rearward services decided upon before the war.⁶¹

The contents of Cowans’s note flatly contradict the commentary on Girouard’s report that appeared in a hagiographic biography of the former published after his death. Cowans’s biographers claimed that the report had been ‘shelved’ by the BEF, ‘most probably because the authorities in France were not ready for any change and because they … resented anything that looked even faintly like interference from home’.⁶² This statement is not borne out by the evidence, such as Sir John’s confirmation to Kitchener that the centralization of responsibility under the QMG was ‘working to the satisfaction of all concerned’ after a month,⁶³ or Robertson’s correspondence with Cowans following the reorganization. Far from exhibiting lingering resent over Girouard’s contribution, Robertson wrote to enquire whether the Canadian was going to return to France to address the many ‘important questions’ on the operation of the Belgian railways that required consideration.⁶⁴ French and Belgian representatives had already engaged in bilateral discussions and, in an echo of Girouard’s observations, Robertson underlined the need for the BEF to have a ‘voice’ in any formal agreements reached between their coalition partners. For reasons that have not been established, Colonel Henniker, rather than Girouard, was chosen to participate in what became known as the Calais commissions. However, as Robertson’s letter makes clear, the decision over Girouard’s non-participation was made in London rather than at GHQ.⁶⁵

Girouard’s report contained only one recommendation that the BEF could be accused of having ‘shelved’. To guarantee Britain’s possession of sufficient dock accommodation to offload the troops and supplies (and to store the latter) required to maintain the BEF over the winter and beyond, Girouard advised that the pre-war agreements with the French needed to be revisited.⁶⁶ In early December 1914 Maxwell amplified Girouard’s concerns in letters to Robertson, which voiced the IGC’s concern that the limit for traffic allotted to the BEF was about to be reached. He warned that only two additional infantry divisions and a cavalry division could be supplied through the existing port space allocated to the BEF, and urged GHQ to consider the establishment of a second line of communications and request immediate access to Dieppe.⁶⁷ However, in an early demonstration that the BEF was never the sole focus of British military attention during the war, Sir John was reluctant to commence negotiations with the French over port space until the outcome of developments ‘in the Eastern theatre of operations’ became clearer. Consequently, the matter was dropped for the rest of the year.⁶⁸

Sir John’s ‘wait and see’ approach exemplified a desire not to commence potentially longwinded negotiations over organizations, allocations and responsibilities that – should the fighting formations achieve success – may never be required. Throughout the First World War, as will be demonstrated further below, the allies had to balance the requirements of their immediate demands with preparations to ensure sufficient resources for the continuation of a war of indeterminate length. His views reflected a widespread tendency to regard the trench-bound stalemate of late 1914 as a temporary anomaly, and were founded on the hope that the BEF would soon be operating again on Belgian rather than French soil.

This optimistic outlook, combined with the French army’s continued desire to adhere to the pre-war agreement, thwarted a second attempt to re-evaluate the BEF’s transport arrangements in the war’s first six months. In December 1914 Kitchener summoned Eric Geddes, the railway organizer he had been impressed by a decade earlier in India, to a meeting at the War Office. In the Geddes family chronicle, written by Geddes’s younger brother Auckland, what happened next was presented as an example of the insular and protective military family closing ranks to avoid the criticisms of an expert from outside the profession. Auckland Geddes claimed that Kitchener wished to send Eric to France to ‘see what was wrong’ with the BEF’s transport services, but that the proposition was vetoed by Cowans:

It was not the first time that Geddes had been in contact with the War Office since the start of the conflict. In August 1914 he had approached the DOM, Brigadier-General Richard Montagu Stuart-Wortley, with the idea of raising a battalion of skilled railwaymen of all grades for service in France. Stuart-Wortley rebuffed the approach, and Geddes wrote later that he had been told ‘that the military railway personnel were competent to deal with the situation in France and that railway units were not wanted’. Doubtless coloured by that incident, Geddes reflected that Stuart-Wortley’s rejection of his offer was the result of the latter’s membership of a ‘military machine’ that was not prepared to accept civilian specialists in its ranks.⁷⁰ The legacy of this misunderstanding, as demonstrated by Geddes’s recollection of the event twelve years later, needlessly politicized the transportation mission in 1916 and infused Geddes’s memory of his second attempt to work alongside the army at Kitchener’s behest in December 1914.

Cowans was a fellow officer of the Rifle Brigade and close friend of Stuart-Wortley’s, and Geddes later suggested to Lloyd George that it was personal jealousy and professional ‘demarcation’ that curtailed any possible transportation mission in January 1915.⁷¹ Cowans’s biographers made no mention of the meeting in their celebratory account of the QMG’s career, perhaps as a result of Geddes’s subsequent contributions to the British war effort, while Peter Cline’s alternative proposal – that the North-Eastern Railway’s reluctance to release Geddes contributed to the scheme’s abandonment – appears unlikely.⁷² The North-Eastern’s chairman did write that the ‘board of the … railway were loath to dispense with Mr Geddes’s services, even for a short period’ when Lloyd George recruited Geddes for the Ministry of Munitions the following summer,⁷³ but the company conceded that its deputy general manager was ‘not very fully employed’ by the railway’s wartime operations. Under such circumstances, Alexander Kaye Butterworth observed, ‘when every man of ability should be utilised to the best advantage of the State, I feel it to be one’s duty to let those in authority know of any good men who are “spare”’.⁷⁴

Yet it would be unfair to portray the aborted transportation mission, and the earlier dismissal of Geddes’s offer of a specialist railway battalion, as purely the result of rhadamanthine military attitudes to civilian assistance in Whitehall. Cowans, for example, was a prominent early advocate of civil–military collaboration in the field of army sustenance. At Deptford Cattle Market, rented from the City of London Corporation for military use at the start of the war, Cowans ‘realised from the outset’ that the depots required ‘men with business, rather than military experience to run them and to maintain their efficiency once they were organised’. Each depot was managed by a businessman, supported by ‘junior officers with thorough knowledge of railway work, shipping, labour, accounting, etc., so that the whole of the work was carried out, as far as possible, on business lines’.⁷⁵ Furthermore, less than a month prior to the uncomfortable meeting between Kitchener, Geddes and Cowans, the latter had been instrumental in the recruitment of Commander Gerald Holland to create an inland water transport (IWT) department on the western front (see Chapter 5).

These examples illustrate that the British army was receptive to specialist, non-military advice in early 1915. However, the differences between the Deptford Cattle Market on the one hand, and the proposed Geddes mission on the other hand, were considerable. Deptford Cattle Market was a British base, located in the centre of London and free of any requirement to consider the wishes of Britain’s coalition partners. The French railway network remained firmly under the control of the French rail authorities, who had shown little inclination to materially alter the arrangements both nations had agreed to before the war. Under such circumstances – and considering Girouard’s recently completed investigation, the comparatively miniscule size of the BEF’s demands, the continued applicability of the pre-war agreement and the apathy of his subordinates towards the proposal – it is perhaps understandable that Kitchener did not consider another transportation mission to be a high priority at the start of 1915.

The allies’ failure to produce a substantial battlefield success, rather than military intransigence, was responsible for GHQ’s inability to act upon the most prominent of Girouard’s recommendations. The division of responsibility between the French and British forces for the repair and operation of the Belgian State Railways in the event of an allied advance consumed much of Girouard’s discussions with the French railway authorities. Girouard recognized that there was ‘little doubt that any retirement of the enemy [would] be accompanied by very grave damage to the railway lines and structures. Much damage’, he observed, had ‘already been effected both by the Belgian authorities and the enemy’. The Belgian public works department, responsible for repairs to the railway network in wartime, had ‘practically disappeared’, and the staff of the Belgian State Railways were scattered across occupied, allied and neutral European territory.⁷⁶ Therefore, Girouard argued, it was important that the coalition partners agreed their duties with regard to the repair and operation of the railway lines before they were liberated from German occupation (the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge were included in Girouard’s considerations for the same reason). For Girouard, the effective exploitation of the Belgian railways provided the most important reason why the British needed to possess a voice in inter-allied transport discussions. While those conversations remained hypothetical until the final months of the war, elsewhere Britain’s transport experts became embedded in the very real development of the nation’s expanding continental commitment.

Materials, manpower and the continental commitment

The anticipated German retirement failed to materialize in 1915. The western front’s relative stability during the year ensured that the BEF’s transport experiences were comparatively unremarkable. In the week commencing 10 March, 25,000 reinforcements were concentrated around Neuve Chapelle, while the roads behind the First Army were improved by working parties drawn from the 125th Rifles and the 34th Sikh Pioneers, Lahore Division. Wooden tramlines ‘greatly facilitated’ the accumulation of ammunition in readiness for the attack, as the average number of ammunition wagons sent forward rose from fifteen per day to fifty-five in the period 11–15 March.⁷⁷ At 7:30 a.m. on 10 March the artillery opened a thirty-five-minute bombardment that expended more munitions than the British had fired in the entirety of the South African War. Yet Colonel Henniker’s only comment on the preparations for the battle claimed that, from a transport perspective, they were ‘insignificant’; traffic around the battle zone was ‘heavy but not more than the railways could cope with’.⁷⁸

The French transport network had proven itself able to deliver to the BEF’s artillery firepower on a scale hitherto unprecedented in British military history. Yet as the subsequent fighting in Artois demonstrated, a colossal weight of fire at the outset of the attack was not enough to propel the attacking troops through the German positions into open country. Furthermore, the First Army’s munitions expenditure of 10 March could not be sustained without jeopardizing the stockpiles available to the rest of the BEF. The First Army had fired the equivalent of 132 rounds per 18-pounder field gun on 10 March. The rate of fire dropped to sixty-four rounds per gun the following day and to forty-nine rounds per gun on the 12th. By 16 March the BEF’s supplies of field gun ammunition were almost exhausted and, at a replenishment rate of just 7.5 rounds per gun per day, it took seventeen days to replace the stocks fired indecisively at Neuve Chapelle. The BEF was unable to maintain pressure on the enemy under such circumstances, a fact recognized by Sir John when he announced to Kitchener on 15 March that future offensives had been abandoned ‘until sufficient reserves are accumulated’.⁷⁹

The availability and deployment of munitions has been central to many debates on the quality of British generalship during the First World War.⁸⁰ The South African War had emphasized the ‘absolute necessity’ of a good supply of ammunition being made available ‘at the required place at the required time’, but it was between 1914 and 1918 that artillery became the ‘great destructive force’ in modern warfare.⁸¹ Artillery fire was responsible for perhaps 60 per cent of combatant casualties during the First World War, and for much of the devastation of the landscape over which the war was fought. Yet in 1915, for a variety of reasons, the available artillery was unlikely to hit German targets concealed from view. Consequently, the BEF required sufficient volumes of shells to effectively ‘drench’ a target area with fire in support of an infantry assault. Under such conditions the strictly limited ‘per diem’ allocation of shells reduced the likelihood that enemy positions could be suppressed by artillery activity.⁸² The call for ‘more shells’ and ‘more heavy howitzers’ from The Times’s military correspondent in May 1915 both exposed the paucity of pre-war preparations for a war of extended duration and over-simplified a complex technical and organizational challenge.⁸³ The heavy howitzers from which the shells were delivered to their ultimate recipients in the German lines were just the final step in a vast wartime production and distribution network.

The creation of the Ministry of Munitions signified an official recognition that the war had outgrown the War Office’s capacity to handle it. As the British army had been a comparatively small purchaser of arms before the war, the British arms industry was not adapted to the demands of a large army engaged in protracted operations.⁸⁴ Furthermore, the arms industry and associated sectors had not been subject to government protection at the outbreak of war. By mid 1915, as Britain’s industrial labour force participated in the so-called rush to the colours, the two government factories and sixteen private firms engaged on munitions work were short of 14,000 workers. Almost 24 per cent of male employees from the chemical and explosives industry, 19.5 per cent from the engineering trades, 18.8 per cent from the iron and steel industry and 16.8 per cent from small arms manufacturers had enlisted in the army by June 1915.⁸⁵ The new ministry commenced its work from a less than opportune position. However, within one month of taking up the newly created post of minister of munitions, David Lloyd George had appointed almost one hundred men of ‘first class business experience’ to execute the decisions made at the ministry’s headquarters in Whitehall Gardens.⁸⁶ Their principal goal was to coordinate the output of the nation’s factories, and to ensure that future battles on the western front were not hamstrung by insufficient firepower.

Eric Geddes was among the first railwaymen to apply his business skills to the challenge of munitions production, following what Lloyd George later referred to as ‘one of the luckiest discoveries in my life’.⁸⁷ According to the Geddes family chronicle, Lloyd George interviewed Geddes with a view to utilizing his talents in the newly formed ministry after he had received a glowing account of Geddes’s abilities from the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey (a director and former chairman of the North-Eastern Railway). Geddes admitted to knowing nothing about munitions production at his interview, but professed a ‘faculty for getting things done’. This conviction was supposedly enough for Lloyd George to make Geddes the head of a department in the nascent ministry.⁸⁸ However, as Keith Grieves has demonstrated, the accounts provided by Lloyd George and the Geddes family of the former’s ‘discovery’ of Eric Geddes were ‘largely fictional’.⁸⁹ In fact, Geddes was first interviewed by Christopher Addison, the ministry’s parliamentary secretary, as part of the ‘man-grabbing’ process that took place immediately after the ministry was established.⁹⁰ Addison’s first impression – that Geddes appeared to be ‘first rate’ – was supplemented by positive references forwarded to Lloyd George by Grey, Alexander Kaye Butterworth, Sir Hugh Bell, Sir Percy Girouard and the North-Eastern’s chairman, Lord Knaresborough.⁹¹

The positive reports Lloyd George received confirmed what Geddes’s pre-war career had demonstrated in detail. His referees described Geddes as a successful administrator of complex, large-scale organizations, a man of energy, efficiency and drive, and a manager with the capacity to think big and work outside the constraints of established routine.⁹² Geddes had successfully managed a vast, geographically dispersed workforce at the North-Eastern Railway, a proficiency that suited the national distribution of the ministry’s production facilities.

From July 1915 onwards Geddes acted as a trouble-shooter on Lloyd George’s behalf. He dealt first with the slow delivery of rifles, then moved on to the task of reducing congestion at Woolwich. In December 1915 he became head of the national filling factories and component distribution organization. Lloyd George’s aversion to questions of detail provided Geddes and the ministry’s other directors with executive freedom, which facilitated administrative innovation. Over the winter and spring of 1915–16 Geddes and the other ‘men of push and go’ that were drawn into the ministry’s operations infused the manufacture of munitions with the latest managerial methods: the so-called American practice of statistical analysis adapted from the North-Eastern Railway; the scientific management techniques popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor; and the motion studies developed by Frank and Lilian Gilbreth were all incorporated within the Ministry of Munitions’ approach.⁹³

The progressive, analytical managerial style that Geddes had been introduced to in the United States – and applied to the operations of the North-Eastern Railway for a decade before the war – combined with the pioneering methods of some of Britain’s leading industrial figures to raise the nation’s munitions output ahead of the battle of the Somme. Through a management technique Geddes referred to as ‘intelligent control’ – founded upon statistics devised by J. George Beharrell, which allowed the team to compare outputs, identify available capacities and create more accurate forecasts of production – the department established a more efficient method for the use of available labour supplies and raw materials.⁹⁴ Improvements in output were substantial, despite the complications involved in the production of modern armaments. A single 18-pounder shell contained sixty-four components; a complete round of 4.5-inch ammunition comprised fifty-seven individual pieces, all of which had to be drawn together, assembled, and despatched to the front in an organized, efficient flow.⁹⁵ By 1 June 1915 only 1,992,000 of the 5,573,000 shell bodies ordered by the War Office had been delivered. Yet by July 1916 ‘the weekly deliveries to the War Office averaged just over a million rounds … of which rather over 50 per cent were high explosive shell, as compared with a weekly average of 166,500 rounds in June 1915, of which only 23 per cent were high explosive’.⁹⁶ Geddes received a knighthood in recognition of his contribution to the vast improvement in munitions production that had taken place in the ministry’s first year of existence.

Geddes was by no means the only figure from the transport industry to influence the operations of the Ministry of Munitions. Nor were his pre-war compatriots employed by the ministry purely for their managerial qualities. Both Henry Fowler and Vincent Raven, the chief mechanical engineers of the Midland and North-Eastern railways respectively, brought technical expertise and supervisory abilities to various facets of munitions production. Fowler was initially appointed to direct the national projectile factories department, before becoming both deputy controller of shell manufacture and superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough in September 1916. He became assistant director-general of aircraft production in December 1917, and chaired the inter-allied conference on the standardization of aircraft components in 1918.⁹⁷ Raven initially joined Geddes in the organization of efforts at the Royal Arsenal, and acted as chief superintendent at Woolwich from December 1915. When the incumbent of the post, Brigadier-General Sir Hay Frederick Donaldson – himself a mechanical engineer who had worked for the LNWR, in Goa, on the Manchester Ship Canal and at London’s India Docks in a peripatetic career – went to the United States and Canada to arrange new sources of supply for the British forces, Raven took over his responsibilities. Following Donaldson’s death aboard HMS Hampshire in June 1916 (he had been selected to act as a technical advisor on Kitchener’s trip to Russia), Raven’s temporary appointment was made permanent.⁹⁸

Raven’s technical background and familiarity with the North-Eastern’s statistical methods made him a perfect fit for the task at Woolwich, which principally involved the coordination of 88,000 workers. In the House of Commons in December 1915, Lloyd George celebrated Raven’s contribution:

Both Raven and Fowler received knighthoods for their work in the higher administration of the ministry, and demonstrated the transferability of skills they had applied successfully to the management of large departments within their peacetime professions. As the Ministry of Munitions’ official history attests, they were accompanied throughout the nascent organization by railway servants from across the British railway industry.¹⁰⁰

Yet the contributions of Britain’s transport experts to the widening war were not made solely by the employees of British railway companies. Other men with valuable experience, such as Alfred Collinson and Follett Holt, were drawn into the munitions production effort from much farther afield. Collinson’s and Holt’s careers emphasize both the global dispersal of British expertise prior to the First World War and the extent of an international talent pool open to Britain’s political and military authorities during the conflict. Following a career that had begun on the Great Northern Railway in the late 1880s, the decade before 1914 saw Collinson acting as engineer-in-chief on the construction of several railways in China and as a consulting engineer to the Chinese Government Railways. Between 1914 and 1918 he was responsible for the inspection of munitions outside London, and travelled across the Atlantic to organize the munitions inspection process in the United States. Holt’s engineering career began in the LSWR’s locomotive superintendent’s office, and took in service in India and South America prior to his retirement in 1910. In April 1915 he became one of the first transport experts to acquire a position in the Ministry of Munitions, when he entered the shell production organization.¹⁰¹

Holt was by no means unique in possessing an attachment to munitions production that pre-dated Lloyd George’s famed recruitment of ‘men of push and go’. The pre-war relationship between the military and the railway companies facilitated contacts between the two groups, and helped place the skills and productive capacity of Britain’s transport experts at the War Office’s disposal from the very outset of the war. Sir George Gibb, Sir Percy Girouard and George Booth (a ship owner and director of the Bank of England), alongside representatives of the machine tools industry and private armaments firms, offered their services to the government in the conflict’s opening months.¹⁰² The royal ordnance factories were first to take advantage of the adaptability of the railway companies’ plant, when they requested the REC’s assistance in the manufacture of 4.5-inch howitzer carriages on 13 August 1914.¹⁰³ A second request followed in early September, as the higher-than-anticipated number of casualties created an urgent demand for ambulance stretchers. Eleven companies agreed to construct 12,250 stretchers between them (see Table 3.1), and the first deliveries were made as early as 12 September. A fortnight later twenty-two companies from across England, Scotland and Ireland agreed to produce 5,000 general service wagons for the Royal Artillery, a figure which ultimately rose to 9,300 wagons as the war progressed. The productive facilities available to the railway companies were the subject of further enquiries from the Royal Arsenal in October 1914, and by the end of the month the REC had recognized the necessity for a civil–military sub-committee to coordinate the ‘various requests made by or through the War Office to the railway companies to assist in the manufacture of war-like stores and equipment’.¹⁰⁴

Table 3.1. Railway companies’ manufactures of ambulance stretchers, September 1914.

Note: The Midland Railway increased production from 200 to 250 stretchers in the third week of the schedule.
Source: E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War; Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., 1921), ii. 584.

The creation of a large-scale industrial production system drew heavily upon the manufacturing capacity of the railway companies and the organizational abilities of their managers, whose professional careers were dominated by challenges that involved the coordination of dispersed but interlinked activities. Following the constitution of the railway war manufactures sub-committee all applications for work to be undertaken on behalf of the War Office, or its subcontractors, were submitted to the REC through one of two military members of the sub-committee: Captain Henry Mance, the pre-war liaison between the army and the railway companies; and Brigadier-General Herbert Guthrie Smith, the director of artillery. The railway members – who included the general managers of two railways, the chief mechanical engineers of four others and the Midland Railway’s carriage and wagon superintendent (see Table 3.2) – decided whether the railway companies could fulfil the request and devised a programme for completion when the project had been accepted. The sub-committee met for the first time on 2 November 1914. By the end of the year the great railway workshops at Derby and Swindon had erected and despatched twenty-three gun carriages for 8-inch howitzers. Further requests, for products that varied from water tanks, miners’ trucks and heavy-capacity wagons to picketing posts, artillery wheels and brake blocks arrived from the armed forces and private firms between November 1914 and April 1915. The railway companies also accepted responsibility for the manufacture of ‘two armoured trains for home defence, gun carriages and limbers, fittings for 60-pounder guns, sets of elevating gear, drop forgings, limber hooks, wagon hooks and flanges, [and] mountings for 6-pounder Nordenfeldt guns’. Each order was divided between as many as twenty-four companies, while four companies committed to work on behalf of the Admiralty in addition to their work on the construction of ambulance trains for use at home and overseas.¹⁰⁵

Yet for the secretary of state for war these efforts did not prove ambitious enough. Kitchener believed that further use could be made of the railway companies’ facilities. In response, the REC expanded the membership of the railway war manufactures sub-committee and inverted the procedure by which the companies’ workshops became involved in war-related production. The sub-committee was provided with a further representative from the War Office, Lieutenant-Colonel A. S. Redman, and augmented by an extra eleven members from railways across Britain. With further input from the Admiralty and – following its creation – the Ministry of Munitions, the sub-committee provided a link between the government, the railways and the manufacturers of Britain for the remainder of the war. From April 1915 the committee took a more active role in the allocation of work to the railway workshops. Rather than passively await enquiries from the War Office or armament firms, the sub-committee divided the country into six districts and despatched members to visit manufacturers in their area to ascertain what assistance the railways could offer in the realization of their government contracts.¹⁰⁶ After just one month the new procedures had generated a diverse range of demands for the railways’ plant. The first list of items requested of the railway companies ran to eleven pages. It included lethal items such as shells, bombs, steel forgings for guns and 6-pounder Hotchkiss guns alongside more mundane but morale-boosting equipment such as travelling kitchens, kettles and drinking cups. By November 1918 the railway companies had sub-contracted work from over one hundred firms, and the list of items produced at the railway workshops stretched to 121 pages.¹⁰⁷

Table 3.2. Members of the railway war manufactures sub-committee, October 1914 and April 1915.

The pre-war composition of the British railways played a crucial role in allowing the railway companies to respond to the army’s needs. The plethora of privately owned companies across the country meant that, ‘in important respects, the British railways were over-resourced and over-manned, with substantially more locomotives and twice the carriages per mile of Germany and three times that of France. This surplus capacity became invaluable in war time’.¹⁰⁸ British railway companies could afford to redirect their plant into the production of war-like stores to a degree unobtainable in France and Germany without profound implications for the efficiency of the railway network – every man employed on the manufacture of gun carriages was unavailable for the restoration of the passenger carriages or goods wagons that carried the regular and military traffic upon which the nation depended.

The application of civilian expertise to the conundrum of munitions production greatly increased the BEF’s capacity to wage intensive warfare. By 1 July 1916 the BEF possessed 714 heavy guns, more than double the 324 that had been in France on 1 January that year. By the time the battle of the Somme had ground to an inconclusive end in November the number of heavies in France had risen to 1,127. As the new divisions of Kitchener’s army continued to pour into France – and correspondingly increased the number of trains required to service the force’s appetite for food, ammunition and other supplies – the formerly insignificant logistical challenges posed by the presence of British troops on the continental mainland assumed imposing proportions. For the daily provisions of the new army divisions alone the French railway network was tasked to accommodate an extra 59.5 divisionally packed supply trains per week.¹⁰⁹

The demand that the French railway authorities provide sufficient transport capacity to supply the enlarged BEF in addition to its own army’s needs further exposed the inadequacy of the pre-war arrangements agreed between the coalition partners. As early as November 1914 the 10th (Railway) Company and three special reserve companies were despatched to France to join the 8th (Railway) Company on railway construction and repair duties. However, events around Ypres meant that the companies were immediately employed on defensive rather than railway works until March 1915.¹¹⁰ The War Office, unlike in August 1914 when presented with Geddes’s proposal for the recruitment of a skilled railway battalion, perceived that five companies were insufficient for the volume of work likely to be generated by the fighting in 1915 – particularly should the much hoped for advance into Belgium take place. They requested that the REC recruit a large force of construction and railway operating troops, to provide a pool of skilled labour for the army’s use. The REC’s railway recruitment sub-committee was established under the stewardship of William Forbes, general manager of the LBSCR and the ERSC’s commandant. Forbes was assisted by Francis Dent, general manager of the SECR, and Arthur Watson, general manager of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Dent took responsibility for the recruitment of railway operating personnel – the chrysalis of the Railway Operating Division (ROD) – and initially also interviewed all applicants for commissions and non-commissioned officers’ roles within the new construction and operating companies. He recommended men for those positions based upon their ‘railway qualifications’, while Watson identified men suitable for enlistment as railway traffic officers. Forbes was responsible for enlisting the construction personnel that comprised the first four companies to be despatched to France, among whom were to be found platelayers, carpenters, timbermen, blacksmiths and telegraphists.¹¹¹

The railway recruitment sub-committee’s activities were complicated both by the pre-existing number of army reservists employed by the railway companies and the uncoordinated nature of British military recruitment at the beginning of the war. Within eleven days of the outbreak of hostilities 27,600 railway servants had left their peacetime occupations for service with the armed forces as reservists, territorials or volunteers. The War Office swiftly realized the importance of efficiently operated railways to the sustenance of Britain’s war effort, and issued instructions to recruiting agents not to enlist railwaymen without the written approval of the man’s head of department. However, by 23 February 1915 around 17 per cent of the companies’ pre-war male staff had signed up. The haemorrhage of men was slowed, but not entirely stopped, by the introduction of ‘badging’ in July 1915. By then, significant numbers of men who might have been more effectively employed in railway-related activities later in the war had already been recruited for the fighting formations.¹¹² The enlistment of skilled railwaymen elsewhere in the forces notwithstanding, the first railway construction company arrived in France just before Christmas 1914, and was engaged on the unloading of stores and the construction of sidings at Arques.¹¹³ They were joined by ten further companies by the summer of 1915, and their duties included doubling the Hazebrouck–Poperinghe line, the construction of a new line between Candas and Acheux, the building of a railway store at Audruicq and the laying of sidings at Abbeville, Calais and Blargies. By December 1915 British construction companies had laid 105 miles of track on the western front, and by the end of the war forty-five companies had been raised from among the employees of British or dominion railways.¹¹⁴

Recruitment for the companies initially followed the blueprint provided by the ‘Pals battalions’, with individual railways raising complete sections that allowed their employees to serve together. In 1914 Canada possessed a far higher proportion of workers who were suitable for railway construction companies than did Britain, as increased migration into the prairie west had stimulated the expansion of Canada’s railway network in the 1900s. The first two railway construction companies from Canada were formed of ‘500 picked men from the construction forces of the Canadian Pacific Railway’, who arrived in France as the Canadian Overseas Railway Construction Corps in August 1915. They were the nucleus of a corps that eventually attained a strength of 16,000 men on the western front.¹¹⁵

The arrival of the Canadians in France was emblematic of the British empire’s deepening commitment to the transport infrastructure on the western front, and emphasized Britain’s access to global supplies of suitable manpower. The appointment of Lieutenant-Colonel William Waghorn as chief railway construction engineer in the spring of 1915 underlined both the transnational reach of the BEF’s call for suitable officers and the extent to which pre-war imperial service imbued men with the skills required to prosecute an industrial war. Waghorn had entered the Royal Engineers at the age of twenty, and seen engineering service in India and South Africa before he became acting manager of the North-Western Railway in India in June 1910. By 1914 he had established himself as one of the leading experts in the construction and operation of railways in the army – and, indeed, the empire – and as he was on leave in England when war was declared he was immediately appointed to the role of deputy DRT.¹¹⁶ When Waghorn took on the role of chief railway construction engineer the majority of his subordinates were drawn from Argentina and Brazil. In South America, as in Canada, ample opportunities for ambitious railway builders to develop their careers had existed before the outbreak of war.¹¹⁷

Britain’s transport experts and the global war

The arrival of skilled men from the Americas and Asia into the major European theatre of war in 1915 demonstrated Britain’s growing military commitment to the western front. In contrast, the deployment of the first railway construction companies raised in Britain – drawn from the ranks of the LNWR and Great Western’s huge workforces – illustrates how Britain’s military focus had widened since August 1914. The 115th and 116th railway construction companies arrived in Egypt between December 1915 and March 1916, where they were employed to strengthen Britain’s military position in the Middle East against the Ottoman empire.¹¹⁸ The British had acted to secure their interests in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of the war, and soon turned their attentions to the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal. Egypt’s location, climate, and resources made it an ideal centre for the concentration and training of troops from India and Australasia, while the canal formed a ‘vital artery for war and merchant ships’. At least 376 transport ships, carrying 163,700 troops, passed through the canal between August and December 1914. Its continued accessibility to allied tonnage saved time and fuel, and allowed Britain to bring the weight of its global empire to bear on the fighting.¹¹⁹

Egypt, although legally part of the Ottoman empire, was heavily under British influence when Sultan Mehmed V declared ‘holy war’ on 11 November 1914. The higher tax officials and senior officers of the police and army were British, and the country had been under British administration since 1882. Commercial life in Egypt was also dominated by the British – alongside French, Italian and Greek expatriates – and the Suez Canal Company and the Egyptian State Railways were run by French and British officers respectively.¹²⁰ The three senior managers of the Egyptian State Railways were all retired Royal Engineers. Major Sir George Macauley (general manager), Major R. B. D. Blakeney (deputy general manager), and Captain C. M. Hall (traffic manager) represent further examples of the diaspora of British engineering knowledge in the pre-war period, which played a significant role in the creation and maintenance of the imperial trading network. The peacetime experience acquired by such individuals became invaluable to the sustenance of the empire’s global supply system after 1914. Macauley was appointed director of railways in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), with Blakeney and Hall named among his deputies.¹²¹

Cooperation between the military and civil authorities was, as in Europe, of ‘utmost value’ to British operations in Egypt. By the end of 1914 the pre-war garrison of 5,000 soldiers had been replaced by a force of 70,000 men drawn from India, Australia and New Zealand. The rapid expansion of Britain’s military presence in Egypt outpaced the construction of accommodation and highlighted the poor state of communications in the canal’s vicinity. There were no metalled roads alongside the canal and only a single-track railway linked it to the main line terminus at Zagazig. The railway company built sufficient sidings and stations to supply eight defence posts along the length of the canal during the autumn of 1914, and provided the Royal Engineers with temporary officers to supervise the works required to improve the canal’s defences. When the much-anticipated Turkish attack upon the canal was finally launched on the night of 2–3 February 1915 it was repulsed, and the assaulting troops withdrew having lost over 1,000 men. The Ottoman forces retreated to Beersheba and made no further organized attacks upon the canal during the war. Consequently, the British developed Egypt as a base for the expeditions to Gallipoli and Salonika during 1915 with only minor disruptions from Turkish raiding parties.¹²²

The expansion of Egypt’s capacity as a training area and base for military operations drew heavily upon the resources and expertise of its foreign-run institutions. As Kristian Coates Ulrichsen noted, the EEF ‘recognized and acted upon the need to introduce civilian expertise into military matters’ long before Sir Eric Geddes’s feted transport mission in August 1916.¹²³ After some hesitation the Suez Canal Company placed its engineering resources and a range of craft at the army’s disposal, and in December 1915 a civilian-operated IWT organization was inaugurated to supplement the railway network. The public works ministry provided the EEF with ninety-seven tugs, steam barges, and lighters, 260 sailing craft, and all the canal and river craft of its inspection fleet. They were used for the distribution of road metal, coal, tools and machinery to the troops engaged on construction work around the canal.¹²⁴ The renewed threat of a Turkish attack on the canal in 1916 – following the allied evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula – acted as a catalyst for increased engineering activity in Egypt over the winter months. A five-mile-long light railway constructed by the 116th Railway Company comprised just a fraction of the ninety miles of track laid to service the defensive positions built six to seven miles east of the canal during this period.

The Egyptian State Railways were integral to the infrastructure improvements on the eastern shore of the canal. The company provided most of the labour and resources utilized in the ‘forward railway policy’ implemented by the EEF,¹²⁵ including 15,000 local labourers deployed in support of the two British railway construction companies in the country. The Egyptian State Railways doubled the line between Zagazig and Ismailia, laid out large stations for camps in the Nile Delta and on the canal and erected new sidings from the mainline to the banks of the canal. Further north the company oversaw ‘a considerable programme of improvements’ to the single line along the canal from Port Said, which included the development of existing sidings, the addition of nearly eight-and-a-half miles of branch lines, passing loops, extensions to the dock facilities and eight stations at camp sites. The doubling of the line between Zagazig and Ismailia alone consumed almost one hundred miles of track, and the commencement of a further line east into Sinai in February 1916 left the company with no reserve stocks for maintenance.¹²⁶ The situation became increasingly critical once the EEF decided to advance on Palestine after the battle of Romani in August. However, following a slow, methodical progression across the desert, by December 1916 the railway from Qantara was of sufficient quality to maintain a force of 200,000 men on the Palestinian border.¹²⁷ Both the size of the force and the length of the line expanded further in the second half of the conflict.

Whereas the British possessed a free hand to undertake construction and improvements to the transport infrastructure in Egypt, circumstances in southern Europe bore closer resemblance to those in France. Forces from both Britain and France participated in the operations that took place following the landing of troops at Salonika. However, in western Europe the chain of command and the limits of British authority had been established and agreed upon during the pre-war conversations between the French and British general staffs. No such agreements existed to guide the transport organization in Macedonia, and to complicate matters still further both nations’ forces disembarked on the soil of a third party. In the words of the Royal Engineers’ history of the campaign,

As Asquith pointed out in a heated exchange with France’s political and military leaders in June 1916, ‘the British Government … had sent their troops [to Salonika] reluctantly at the request of Greece, at the insistence of France, and had always tried to get them away’.¹²⁹ The expedition to assist Serbia was viewed in Britain as a ‘useless dissipation of effort and resources’, a conviction founded upon Britain’s role as the principal provider of shipping for the expedition and unmodified by the Greek railway authorities’ ‘uncooperative attitude’ towards the British Salonika Force’s (BSF) advance from the coast.¹³⁰

Salonika was far from an ideal location for the disembarkation of a modern army and its accoutrements, and the Admiralty strongly disputed French claims that 2,000 tons per day could be landed once suitable piers had been constructed. Only three full-depth berths existed at the port, and the facilities required for the unloading and removal of stores from the water were virtually absent. These difficulties were reflected in the Admiralty’s estimation that the capacity of the port was just 500 tons per day, a quarter of the French assessment.¹³¹ The infrastructure to support the movement of men and materials inland was equally poor. The BSF possessed 350 lorries, but there were few roads upon which to use them. Locomotives and rolling stock were scarce and in bad repair. Even before the first troops arrived, on 1 October a small party of officers had landed at Salonika with the intention of establishing contact with the Greek authorities. Led by Colonel Maurice Sowerby of the Sudan Government Railways, the party proved unable to provide their hosts with information on the BSF’s requirements for four days. The Royal Engineers’ history records the officers’ reception as having been ‘so frigid and obstructive, not to say hostile’, that Sowerby was advised by the War Office to ‘go to ground until the situation became clearer’. Relations gradually thawed as the allied presence around the town grew, and the British railway staff eventually managed to ‘cajole the Greeks into providing the absolute minimum’ of the force’s railway requirements.¹³² The BSF, unlike their Egyptian counterpart, was unable to make effective use of the transport expertise provided to it by an imperial railway. In December 1915 Sowerby headed back to North Africa, where he made a valuable contribution to the construction of the EEF’s railway line to El Arish.¹³³

Just as Sir John French had found his desired railway movements superseded by the demands of the French army on the western front, the BSF was assigned a lower priority than the French forces in Salonika when it came to the allocation of transport in Macedonia. On 4 November 1915 the movement of elements of the 10th Division to Doiran was postponed for a week as the French demanded use of the trains. When the departure of the troops was rescheduled for 12 November, it was again aborted as no trucks were available. Journeys originally arranged for 6 November were not completed until nine days later.¹³⁴ The arrival of the 117th Railway Construction Company in the first week of February 1916 permitted the construction of new sidings in the base depots and passing places on the single-track railway that headed north from the port, but civilian traffic took top priority and the local railway staff permitted only one or two military trains to run each day. The Greek authorities remained in control of the railways between the port and the Serbian frontier until June 1916, when the French commanding officer General Maurice Sarrail appointed a Franco-British administration to take over operations.¹³⁵ Like the Gallipoli campaign before it, the Macedonian sideshow was incapable of replacing the western front as the British army’s primary theatre of operations. However, unlike around the Dardanelles, French pressure to maintain an allied presence at Salonika ensured that British troops remained stationed in the theatre for the rest of the war.

Conclusion

Britain’s position at the heart of a global empire profoundly influenced its approach to the First World War’s expansion. The acquisition, development and maintenance of imperial possessions in Asia and Africa had provided the Royal Engineers with ample opportunities to augment their theoretical training with practical experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Conditions in India had demanded the construction of roads and offered soldiers the chance to build railways before the war, while the Egyptian and Sudanese state railways provided the wartime army with a pool of experts capable of working comfortably under both civilian and military conditions. Beyond the theatres of war vast railway construction and civil engineering projects across the globe created demands for a pool of skilled engineers, which the British war effort took advantage of both at home and abroad.

Sir George Macauley and Follett Holt exemplified both the global experience acquired by Britain’s transport experts before 1914 and the diversity of applications found for such expertise within the expanding British war effort. Macauley, a Royal Engineers officer, had resigned his commission after service in the Sudan to take up the posts of general manager on the Sudan Military Railway and subsequently the Egyptian State Railways prior to the war.¹³⁶ His knowledge of the Egyptian railways made him the obvious candidate to take charge of the EEF’s railway requirements. Holt entered the Ministry of Munitions at the end of a career that had seen him work on the London and South-Western, the Indian State, the Buenos Aires and Rosario, the Great Western of Brazil and the Entre Ríos railways. He was joined at the ministry by established engineers from the British railway industry, such as the Midland’s Henry Fowler and the North-Eastern’s Vincent Raven, and by managerial figures like Eric Geddes. Together with their compatriots on myriad REC sub-committees, these men laid the groundwork for the material-intensive war fought by the British army in the second half of the war.

At home and in Egypt, where Britain possessed a free hand, Britain’s transport experts exerted a substantial influence over the empire’s approach to the First World War from the very outset. Macauley and his colleagues from the Egyptian State Railways coordinated transport operations and constructed significant lengths of railway on behalf of the troops stationed either side of the Suez Canal. Elsewhere, Britain’s position within an international coalition restricted the extent to which the army could immediately make use of the empire’s transport experts. The BEF and BSF, in France and Salonika respectively, lacked the freedom of action enjoyed by the EEF. Control of the ports and railways in the former remained firmly in the hands of the French authorities, while inter-allied relationships in Macedonia were complicated by the concerns and priorities of a neutral – and by no means friendly – host nation.

The shadow of the Franco-British pre-war arrangements and the enticing prospect of an imminent return to manoeuvre warfare loomed large over organizational developments on the western front. In France the BEF could not call upon the services of an experienced, civil–military transportation service, liberated from the requirement to consider the needs of a strong-willed and fiercely independent ally. While the BEF’s expansion was encouraged by the French military authorities, it was not mirrored by a corresponding growth in the facilities and authority offered to the British. As Valentine Murray later reflected on the BEF’s predicament:

The stability of the line in front of the BEF made the lines of communications more recognizably civilian in appearance. The supply task that faced the British command equated to the provision of a small, rapidly growing town, rather than the supply of a small, rapidly growing and moving town.¹³⁸ As such, trench warfare created a situation for which Britain’s transport experts’ civilian occupations provided excellent apprenticeships. As the following chapters demonstrate, the BEF’s position as the junior partner in the land-based coalition in France and Flanders constrained the exploitation of British transport expertise in the war’s principal theatre between 1914 and 1916. However, that did not prevent the BEF from accessing and engaging with the employees of some of Britain’s largest companies as it sought to perfect its continental commitment.

______________

¹ ‘G.W.R. men who have lost their lives in the war’, Great Western Railway Magazine, Aug. 1915, pp. 206–7.

² J. Higgins, Great War Railwaymen: Britain’s Railway Company Workers at War 1914–1918 (London, 2014), pp. 100–1.

³ D. Todman and G. Sheffield, ‘Command and control in the British army on the western front’, in Command and Control on the Western Front: the British Army’s Experience, 1914–18, ed. G. Sheffield and D. Todman (Staplehurst, 2004), pp. 1–11, at p. 6.

⁴ E. Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 33–5.

⁵ D. Stevenson, ‘War by timetable? The railway race before 1914’, Past & Present, clxii (1999), 163–94, at p. 166; I. M. Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London, 1998), pp. 75–6.

⁶ TNA, WO 33/686, instructions for the IGC, part II, section 1, 1914; A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), p. 13.

⁷ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 16–17.

⁸ All quotations in this passage are taken from BLSC, Tompson papers, LIDDLE/WW1/GS/1612, diary entries, 6–24 Aug. 1914.

⁹ IWM, Wilson papers, HHW 2/73/49, Robb to Wilson, 10 Aug. 1914.

¹⁰ ‘France saved by her railroad men’, Railway Gazette, 16 July 1915, p. 58.

¹¹ J. H. F. Le Hénaff and H. Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français et la guerre (Paris, 1922), p. 37; BLSC, Tompson papers, LIDDLE/WW1/GS/1612, diary entries, 24 and 25 Aug. 1914.

¹² Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA), papers of Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, 7/1/1 Robertson to Wigram, 1 Sept. 1914.

¹³ Brown, British Logistics, p. 61.

¹⁴ A. Whitty, A Quartermaster at the Front: the Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Allen Whitty, Worcestershire Regiment, 1914–1919, ed. E. Astill (Eastbourne, 2011), pp. 22–31; H. A. Stewart, From Mons to Loos: Being the Diary of a Supply Officer (Edinburgh, 1916), pp. 54–72.

¹⁵ GARC, Urwick papers, 8/4, apprenticeship to management, pp. 34, 47; 8/3/2, management pilgrimage, p. 3; F. Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (London, 1933), p. 27.

¹⁶ J. Spencer, ‘“The big brain in the army”: Sir William Robertson as quartermaster-general’, in Stemming the Tide: Officers and Leadership in the British Expeditionary Force 1914, ed. S. Jones (Solihull, 2013), pp. 89–107, at p. 97. Urwick recalled the scene at one roadside dump where, had it not been for the posting of guards with fixed bayonets, the Royal Irish Rifles ‘would have looted the lot’. See GARC, Urwick papers, 8/4, apprenticeship to management, p. 37.

¹⁷ TNA, WO 95/27, branches and services: quarter-master general, Robertson to Maxwell, 23 Oct. 1914; W. R. Robertson, From Private to Field-Marshal (London, 1921), pp. 208–10.

¹⁸ W. Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–18 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 15–16.

¹⁹ TNA, WO 95/3949, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, Robertson to Maxwell, 24 Oct. 1914.

²⁰ TNA, WO 95/3949, IGC war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 29 Sept. 1914.

²¹ TNA, WO 95/27, QMG war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 23 Oct. 1914. Emphasis in original.

²² S. Badsey, ‘Sir John French and command of the BEF’, in Stemming the Tide: Officers and Leadership in the British Expeditionary Force 1914, ed. S. Jones (Solihull, 2013), pp. 27– 50, at p. 48.

²³ IWM, Wilson papers, HHW 2/73/62, note (signed by Sir John French), 29 Sept. 1914. Emphasis in original.

²⁴ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/85, Joffre to French, 5 Oct. 1914; TNA, WO 95/27, QMG war diary, Railway transport for the British army, 12 Oct. 1914; Le Hénaff and Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français, p. 223; Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, p. 19. See Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 73 for a schedule of the rail movements involved in the transfer of British troops from the Aisne, and Indian divisions from Marseille, to the northern flank of the French army.

²⁵ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 41.

²⁶ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 53–4.

²⁷ TNA, WO 95/4052, lines of communication troops. 8 Railway Company Royal Engineers, diary entries, 28 Aug. to 21 Oct. 1914.

²⁸ R. P. T. Davenport-Hines, ‘Girouard, Sir Édouard Percy Cranwill’, in Dictionary of Business Biography: a Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders Active in Britain in the Period 1860–1980, ed. D. J. Jeremy (5 vols., London, 1984), ii. 570–4; J. Flint, ‘Girouard, Sir (Édouard) Percy Cranwill (1867–1932)’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33415> [accessed 14 Sept. 2014]; O. F. G. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal: its Background, Origin and Subsequent History (2 vols., Oxford, 1963), ii. 878, 1292; M. Smithers, The Royal Arsenal Railways: the Rise and Fall of a Military Railway Network (Barnsley, 2016).

²⁹ Hogg, The Royal Arsenal, pp. 878, 1309–10.

³⁰ W. Baker Brown, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), iv. 256–66; J. N. Westwood, Railways at War (London, 1980), p. 94.

³¹ E. M. Spiers, Engines for Empire: the Victorian Army and its Use of Railways (Manchester, 2015), pp. 96–111.

³² For a brief overview of the British army’s operation of railways in the South African war, see C. M. Watson, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers (11 vols., Chatham, 1914), iii. 104–8.

³³ É. P. C. Girouard, History of the Railways during the War in South Africa, 1899–1902 (London, 1903); É. P. C. Girouard, ‘Railways in war’, Royal Engineers Journal, ii (1905), 16–27.

³⁴ ‘Detailed history of the railways in the South African War, 1899–1902’, Royal Engineers Journal, i (1905), 133–5.

³⁵ A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Canada in Africa: Sir Percy Girouard, neglected colonial governor’, African Affairs, lxxxiii (1984), 207–39, at p. 237.

³⁶ TNA, WO 32/5144, report on rail transport arrangements for British army on the continent by General Sir E. Girouard, Girouard to Cowans, 24 Oct. 1914.

³⁷ Le Hénaff and Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français, pp. 31–52.

³⁸ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, pp. 1–2.

³⁹ TNA, WO 33/686, instructions for the IGC, Part II, sections 5–6.

⁴⁰ Robertson, From Private, p. 199. Carter Paterson was a road haulage firm that sold many vehicles and horses to the War Office in 1914.

⁴¹ R. G. Miller, ‘The logistics of the British Expeditionary Force: 4 August to 5 September 1914’, Military Affairs, xliii (1979), 133–8, at p. 133.

⁴² BLSC, Tompson papers, LIDDLE/WW1/GS/1612, short account of the introduction of an ‘advanced regulating station’ into the French traffic system and the subsequent control (British) of the railhead area, p. 1.

⁴³ TNA, WO 95/3950, Headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, French to Kitchener, 20 Nov. 1914; Spencer, ‘“The big brain in the army”’, pp. 95–6.

⁴⁴ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/83, Robertson to Maxwell, 3 Oct. 1914; TNA, WO 95/27, QMG war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 21 Oct. 1914; Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 26–8. The difficulties experienced at Maxwell’s headquarters by Johnson’s prolonged absence are discussed in Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 39–41.

⁴⁵ F. P. Jacqmin, Les chemins de fer pendant la guerre de 1870–1871: leçons faites en 1872 à l’École des Ponts-et-Chaussées (2nd edn., Paris, 1874), pp. 55–87.

⁴⁶ The directeur des chemins de fer to Maxwell, 19 Sept. 1914, quoted in Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 5.

⁴⁷ Girouard, ‘Railways in war’, pp. 17–18.

⁴⁸ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/F/18/2/8, Geddes to Lloyd George, 8 Aug. 1918.

⁴⁹ TNA, WO 33/686, instructions for the IGC, Part II, section 6; WO 32/5144, Girouard report, pp. 6–8.

⁵⁰ Brown, British Logistics, pp. 48–55; J. E. Edmonds, History of the Great War: Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1914 (2 vols., London, 1928), i. 415–16.

⁵¹ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, pp. 5–6, 12.

⁵² TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, p. 12; Girouard to Cowans, 24 Oct. 1914.

⁵³ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, pp. 6–7.

⁵⁴ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch of the staff: and directorates controlled, British armies in France and Flanders 1914–1918: Report, p. 15.

⁵⁵ Le Hénaff and Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français, p. 63. In 1915 the figure rose to 65,000, or 180 trains per day. In 1916 it rose still further, to 84,500 (an average of 231 per day). The figure decreased in 1917 to 72,000 trains before it rose again in the first half of 1918 to 45,000 trains.

⁵⁶ TNA, WO 95/64, branches and services: director of railway transport, Twiss to Le Hénaff, 19 June 1915.

⁵⁷ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, Maxwell to Robertson, 23 Oct. 1914; WO 95/3949, IGC war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 24 Oct. 1914.

⁵⁸ Brown, British Logistics, p. 61.

⁵⁹ Spencer, ‘“The big brain in the army”’, p. 106; TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, Maxwell to Robertson, 23 Oct. 1914.

⁶⁰ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, note by Major-General Sir F. S. Robb on Sir Percy Girouard’s proposals, n.d., pp. 1–3.

⁶¹ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, note on memo. by Sir P. Girouard, 27 Oct. 1914.

⁶² D. Chapman-Huston and O. Rutter, General Sir John Cowans, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.: the Quartermaster-General of the Great War (2 vols., London, 1924), ii. 102.

⁶³ TNA, WO 95/3950, IGC war diary, French to Kitchener, 20 Nov. 1914.

⁶⁴ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/24, Robertson to Cowans, 28 Nov. 1914.

⁶⁵ Henniker recorded the outcome of the commission’s deliberations in his volume of the official history. See Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 93–101.

⁶⁶ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, p. 15.

⁶⁷ TNA, WO 95/3951, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, Maxwell to Robertson, 1 and 5 Dec. 1914.

⁶⁸ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 3 Dec. 1914; Brown, British Logistics, p. 76.

⁶⁹ A. C. Geddes, The Forging of a Family: a Family Story Studied in its Genetical, Cultural and Spiritual Aspects and a Testament of Personal Belief Founded Thereon (London, 1952), p. 222.

⁷⁰ Geddes’s introduction in J. Shakespear, A Record of the 17th and 32nd Service Battalions Northumberland Fusiliers, N.E.R. Pioneers, 1914–1919, ed. H. Shenton Cole (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1926), p. xiii.

⁷¹ TNA, MUN 9/35, Geddes. A handwritten, undated note in this file suggests that Kitchener’s project fell through when the QMG’s department claimed responsibility over railway organization in France; K. Grieves, ‘The transportation mission to GHQ, 1916’, in ‘Look to Your Front!’ Studies in the First World War by the British Commission for Military History, ed. B. Bond et al. (Staplehurst, 1999), pp. 63–78, at p. 71.

⁷² Chapman-Huston and Rutter, Sir John Cowans; P. K. Cline, ‘Eric Geddes and the “experiment” with businessmen in government, 1915–22’, in Essays in Anti-Labour History, ed. K. D. Brown (London, 1974), pp. 74–104, at p. 77.

⁷³ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/D/1/2/6, Knaresborough to Lloyd George, 5 June 1915.

⁷⁴ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/D/1/2/1, Butterworth to Lloyd George, 27 May 1915.

⁷⁵ Chapman-Huston and Rutter, Sir John Cowans, ii. 55.

⁷⁶ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, p. 10.

⁷⁷ J. E. Edmonds and G. C. Wynne, History of the Great War: Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1915 (2 vols., 1927), i. 82–3.

⁷⁸ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 118.

⁷⁹ D. French, ‘The military background to the “shell crisis” of May 1915’, Journal of Strategic Studies, ii (1979), 192–205, at p. 200; Edmonds and Wynne, History of the Great War, i. 149–50.

⁸⁰ See, e.g., J. B. A. Bailey, The First World War and the Birth of the Modern Style of Warfare (Camberley, 1996); R. Prior and T. Wilson, Command on the Western Front: the Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914–18 (Oxford, 1991); P. Harris and S. Marble, ‘The “step-by-step” approach: British military thought and operational method on the western front, 1915–1917’, War in History, xv (2008), 17–42.

⁸¹ R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele: the Untold Story (New Haven, Conn., 1996), p. 17.

⁸² See Prior and Wilson, Command on the Western Front, pp. 36–43 for a discussion of the technical framework within which the BEF’s artillery operated in 1915.

⁸³ ‘Shells and the great battle’, The Times, 14 May 1915, p. 9.

⁸⁴ H. Strachan, The First World War: To Arms (Oxford, 2001), p. 1066.

⁸⁵ Strachan, To Arms, p. 1071; P. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: the Raising of Britain’s New Armies, 1914–1916 (Manchester, 1988), p. 111.

⁸⁶ D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London, 1938), i. 254.

⁸⁷ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/F/18/4/36, Lloyd George to Geddes, 24 Feb. 1922.

⁸⁸ Geddes, The Forging of a Family, p. 223; K. Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989), p. 12; TNA, MUN 9/35, ‘Sir Eric Geddes’, undated note.

⁸⁹ K. Grieves, ‘Improvising the British war effort: Eric Geddes and Lloyd George, 1915– 18’, War & Society, vii (1989), 40–55, at p. 40.

⁹⁰ C. Addison, British Workshops and the War (London, 1917), p. 5; R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 (London, 1978), pp. 38–55.

⁹¹ Cline, ‘Eric Geddes and the “experiment”’, p. 78; Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, pp. 12–13; PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/D/1/2/1, Butterworth to Lloyd George, 27 May 1915; LG/D/1/2/2, Bell to Lloyd George, 30 May 1915; LG/D/1/2/6, Knaresborough to Lloyd George, 5 June 1915.

⁹² Adams, Arms and the Wizard, pp. 45–8.

⁹³ History of the Ministry of Munitions: General Organisation for Munitions Supply (12 vols., London, 1922), ii. 19; C. Wrigley, ‘The Ministry of Munitions: an innovatory department’, in War and the State: the Transformation of British Government, 1914–1919, ed. K. Burk (London, 1982), pp. 32–56.

⁹⁴ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/D/3/1/6, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 March 1916.

⁹⁵ Grieves, ‘Improvising the British war effort’, p. 44; I. F. Marcosson, The Business of War (New York, 1918), pp. 269–70.

⁹⁶ General Organisation for Munitions Supply, pp. 29, 30.

⁹⁷ General Organisation for Munitions Supply, p. 265; G. W. Carpenter, ‘Fowler, Sir Henry (1870–1938)’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37427> [accessed 29 Sept. 2017].

⁹⁸ General Organisation for Munitions Supply, p. 272; A. Everett, Visionary Pragmatist: Sir Vincent Raven: North Eastern Railway Locomotive Engineer (Stroud, 2006), pp. 131–5; J. Pollock, Kitchener (London, 2002), p. 479.

⁹⁹ Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., lxxvii (20 Dec. 1915), col. 105.

¹⁰⁰ See the list of some of the principal officers employed in the Ministry of Munitions during the war in General Organisation for Munitions Supply, pp. 260–75.

¹⁰¹ ‘Alfred Howe Collinson’, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, 2017 <http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Alfred_Howe_Collinson> [accessed 29 Sept. 2017]; ‘1922 who’s who in engineering: name H’, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, 2017 <http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/1922_Who’s_Who_In_Engineering:_Name_H> [accessed 29 Sept. 2017].

¹⁰² General Organisation for Munitions Supply, p. 17; D. Crow, A Man of Push and Go: the Life of George Macaulay Booth (London, 1965), pp. 68–113.

¹⁰³ History of the Ministry of Munitions: Industrial Mobilisation, 1914–1915 (12 vols., London, 1922), i. 106.

¹⁰⁴ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), ii. 583–88.

¹⁰⁵ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 586–7.

¹⁰⁶ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 589–90.

¹⁰⁷ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 594–95, 602.

¹⁰⁸ A. Gregory, ‘Railway stations: gateways and termini’, in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, ed. J. Winter and J. L. Robert (2 vols., Cambridge, 2007), ii. 23–56, at p. 27; J. A. B. Hamilton, Britain’s Railways in World War I (London, 1947), pp. 29–30.

¹⁰⁹ Brown, British Logistics, p. 112.

¹¹⁰ History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), v. 596–97.

¹¹¹ ICE, Original communications, O.C./4277, H. A. Ryott, ‘The provision of personnel for military railways in the war of 1914–1918’, p. 1; Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 613–14.

¹¹² Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 348; Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 111; Gregory, ‘Railway stations: gateways and termini’, pp. 34–5; TNA, ZPER 7/103, records of railway interests, pp. 23, 27.

¹¹³ TNA, WO, 95/4053, lines of communication troops. 109 Railway Company Royal Engineers, war diary.

¹¹⁴ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 596; C. Baker, ‘The RE railway construction companies’, The Long, Long Trail: the British Army of 1914–1918 – for Family Historians <http://www.1914-1918.net/re_rlwy_cos.htm> [accessed 20 September 2017].

¹¹⁵ A. E. Kemp, Report of the Ministry, Overseas Military Forces of Canada, 1918 (London, 1919), p. 355; G. W. Taylor, The Railway Contractors: the Story of John W. Stewart, His Enterprises and Associates (Victoria, BC, 1988), pp. 107–8.

¹¹⁶ M. Kaye Kerr, ‘Waghorn, Brigadier-General Sir William Danvers’, in Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland: 1890–1920, ed. M. M. Chrimes et al. (London, 2014), p. 626; C. Messenger, Call-to-Arms: the British Army, 1914–18 (London, 2005), p. 224; Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 591; J. Bourne, ‘William Danvers Waghorn’, Lions Led by Donkeys <http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/warstudies/research/projects/lionsdonkeys/t.aspx> [accessed 20 Sept. 2017].

¹¹⁷ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v, pp. 35–6. On Britain’s wider economic interests in South America before 1914, see P. A. Dehne, On the Far Western Front: Britain’s First World War in South America (Manchester, 2009), pp. 8–39; C. Emmerson, 1913: the World Before the Great War (2013), pp. 252–66.

¹¹⁸ For details of the two companies’ activities during the war, see the relevant war diaries in TNA, WO 95/4410, general headquarters troops; WO 95/4718, line of communication troops.

¹¹⁹ E. Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: the Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (London, 2015), p. 116.

¹²⁰ R. Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East: a Strategic Study (Oxford, 2016), pp. 60–3; Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 161.

¹²¹ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 175–6.

¹²² Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East, pp. 64–7; Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 163–9.

¹²³ K. C. Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 59, 60–1.

¹²⁴ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 166, 177.

¹²⁵ TNA, WO 106/712, defence of Suez Canal and railway policy, notes on the forward railway policy in Egypt, outlined in War Office telegram, 3 Dec. 1915; estimate by the general staff of forces required for defence of Egypt, 11 Dec. 1915.

¹²⁶ ‘The Palestine campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 119–28.

¹²⁷ For a description of the ‘Herculean British efforts that were made to construct the railway’, the battle of Romani, and the EEF’s systematic advance across the desert, see Johnson, The Great War and the Middle East, pp. 116–20; Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans, pp. 312–18.

¹²⁸ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 95. On the development of a Franco-British presence at Salonika, see TNA, CAB 28/1, papers I.C. 0–12, Balkans (Salonica expedition), July 1918, pp. 2–4.

¹²⁹ TNA, CAB 28/1, papers I.C. 0–12, proceedings of a conference held at 10 Downing Street, London, S.W., on Friday, 9 June 1916, at 11:30 a.m., pp. 30–2.

¹³⁰ D. J. Dutton, ‘The Calais conference of December 1915’, Hist. Jour., xxi (1978), 143–56, at p. 144; A. Palmer, The Gardeners of Salonika (London, 1965), p. 40.

¹³¹ TNA, CAB 28/1, papers I.C. 0–12, notes of a conference held at 4:30 p.m. on Friday 29 Oct. 1915, at 10 Downing Street, p. 2; C. Falls, History of the Great War: Military Operations, Macedonia (2 vols., London, 1934), i. 44.

¹³² Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 101–2.

¹³³ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, vi. 229–31.

¹³⁴ LHCMA, papers of Field Marshal Sir George Milne, general staff (operations) Army of the Black Sea, diary entries, 4–15 Nov. 1915.

¹³⁵ ‘Railways and the Salonica campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 110–18, at p. 110.

¹³⁶ A. Fox, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2017), p. 176.

¹³⁷ V. Murray, ‘Transportation in war’, Royal Engineers Journal, lvi (1942), 202–32, at p. 207.

¹³⁸ Brown, British Logistics, p. 65.