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Remembered Today:

probationer commissions


mike n

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how successful was the system of producing officers and was the drain of supplying monthly candidates of experienced front line troops. How was selection made and did prospective candidates have to be of minimum rank or other qualifying criteriapoppy.gif

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how successful was the system of producing officers and was the drain of supplying monthly candidates of experienced front line troops. How was selection made and did prospective candidates have to be of minimum rank or other qualifying criteriapoppy.gif

There was very little system to speak of, in the early days. Young men who had had a university education, those who had contacts in the forces or access to strings ( Rudyard Kipling for instance). As the war wore on, that changed and there was a move toward recruitment from the ranks. Not necessarily front line troops but senior NCOs were put forward by their C.O.s. Prospective officers were interviewed and underwent a short selection course.

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One flippant remark - of course they had to be gentlemen. One slightly more serious. Tom refers to a 'selection' course. That sounds something like the much later (I think) WOSB and RCB. Would not 'training' course been more likely.

Old Tom

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One flippant remark - of course they had to be gentlemen. One slightly more serious. Tom refers to a 'selection' course. That sounds something like the much later (I think) WOSB and RCB. Would not 'training' course been more likely.

Old Tom

I am short on detail. My knowledge is from a couple of lines from a biography. The man went on a course from which he could be rejected and returned to his unit. I don't know the correct name for the course he was on but there was an element of selection in it.

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Do I detect a little cynicism in Mikes post? Such could be justified in the case of a soldier who had shown himself, in action, to be capable of being an officer, possibly without further training. But units were not in line all the time and a wider knowledge of his units role and how the officers of his unit lived out of the line, would not be amiss.

Old Tom

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If I remember rightly, the London Scottish, which, unusually, contained a large proportion of professional men in the ranks, was plundered for officer candidates as early as late 1914. Apparently most of these would have already been officers in any other battalion but, pre war, preferred staying in the ranks of the London Scottish rather than moving to another.

Doug

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Is the title of this thread, 'Probationer commissions', strictly accurate in reference to the commissions from the ranks and elsewhere during the latter part of the war? i.e. were all men commissioned from the ranks on probation at first?

On two previous threads the various kinds of commission and promotion were discussed in some detail:

Temporary ranks and Role of the 2nd Lieutenant. In the latter, I asked at #68 about a 2nd Lieutenant in the 21/KRRC (a service battalion) who was on probation though he didn't seem any greener than any other young 2 Lt commissioned at the end of 1915. Grumpy explained that men from Special Reserve battalions (as this one was) were normally on probation when they were commissioned. The men who came straight from public schools at 18 were not, which seemed odd to me.

Anyway, on both those threads there is a lot of interesting detail from members with much more experience than I have, which is both indirectly and often directly relevant to the topic of this thread.

Liz

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In the Navy there used to be the course for potential Officers from ordinary ratings always referred to as the knife and fork course, This course was at Gosport and a part of the course was on the wardroom side of life

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As I reading it I think that those who were promoted in this way were probationers where as those who entered as officers so to speak were not

This makes sense but I don't think it can be the whole story.

The reason I have been unclear about it is that the London Gazette records for the battalion I have been researching, 21/KRRC, show a number of officers commissioned in early 1916 whose background was not the obvious public school one, but who were not on probation when they joined 21/KRRC. Two were working class (fathers a butler and a carman), but I have no evidence yet (haven't yet got their records at Kew) that they had any military service previously; at least one certainly did serve in another regiment before being commissioned.

What this group all had in common was that all had come from a reserve battalion, 15/KRRC, along with a number of more pukka types including a colonial officer just returned from Fiji, whereas the officer on probation had not. I think they may have been commissioned into that battalion as probationary officers, as the LG entry says they were already 2/Lts when commissioned into the 21/KRRC. I know they went on at least one officer training course from the reserve battalion, as I have a photo of one in a junior officer group at a Cambridge college (courtesy of another forum member).

So the group from the Reserve Battalion, including men of widely-ranging backgrounds, may all have been on probation during their period in that battalion. It doesn't seem quite so class-based as suggested elsewhere on this thread and I don't know how all were selected to be commissioned before joining that reserve battalion. My research is narrowly focused so only a small part of the picture.

Liz

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