Page 26 - The Cormorant Issue 14

Amid a life of considerable achievement, Brigadier and Professor Richard Holmes was a great friend and sup- porter of the Staff College. He was a familiar face on all of the courses, Regular, Territorial or Reservist, Single-Service or Joint; he was a founding mem-
ber of the Distressed Club for the Directing Staff; and he was a friend, advisor, narrator, and source of wisdom, wit and badinage to a succession of Commandants, Directing Staff and students. Above all, he was the pillar of continuity for the HCSC.
Richard Holmes’s life-long dedication to imparting military schol- arship began in 1969 when he joined the War Studies Depart- ment at RMA Sandhurst (eventually rising to be its Deputy Head). He arrived at Sandhurst, in his own usual self-mocking words “considering myself no end of a scholar”, his path there having taken him from Forest School in East London, via a scholarship to study History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and then on to Northern Illinois University in the USA to complete his PhD on the French Army of the Second Empire. Perhaps it is no coinci- dence, in view of his later relationship with the medium, that his long and passionate relationship with military history was origi- nally sparked by the television – in 1964, during his final year at school, he was captivated by the BBC series The Great War.
His taste for the theatrical side of his craft, and, he liked to say, his ability to understand the lot of history’s common soldiers, was stoked by his hands-on approach to history, including member- ship of organisations like the Sealed Knot in which he applied his knowledge of old arms and armour, his administrative skills, and the use of the pike and boot with equal relish. He would seize every possible opportunity to try on armour, to fire a flintlock or to test the draw of a bow, not just to satisfy the thespian side of his character, but, significantly to get under the skin of those who had stood in serried ranks over the centuries using such tools of war. He had a large and ever-growing collection of swords which he accumulated with magpie-like delight, often from contacts in the darker corners of East London who would ring to talk to ‘Rich’ or ‘Richy Mate’ to let him know that they had “acquired a late-pattern, First Empire, straight-bladed, French, heavy-cavalry sabre that had his name all over it”.
His fame from his appearances on television, amused, pleased and embarrassed him in equal measure. He disliked the phrase ‘television personality’, describing it as an ideal example of the ‘perfect oxymoron’, but he enjoyed the opportunity to perform to the cameras, not least because his television series, the best known of which was probably War Walks, brought an under- standing of, and enthusiasm for, military history to as wide an audience as possible. Television, he considered, was very much a side-show to his real passion for communicating the lot of the ordinary soldier, or the ordinary general for that matter, through his books. In over twenty publications, ranging from Acts of War, through Tommy and Sahib, to Shots from the Front and Dusty Warriors, Richard Holmes gave us deeply perceptive insights into the lot of the simple fighting man, and in Sir John French: the Little Field Marshal and his biography of Marlborough, he gave us scholarly and balanced insights into the human side of great men. Above all, his work – either written, delivered from the lectern, or on our television screens – contained extraordinary empathy with his subjects.
Richard Holmes had garnered this empathy from an almost unique mix of personal experience and scholarly research. He joined the TA, as a trooper in the Essex Yeomanry in 1964 (he avoided admissions that this was a gunner, rather than a cav- alry, unit!). He received a TA commission while at Cambridge, served from Lieutenant to Major while on the staff at RMAS and assumed full time command of 2 Wessex, as a Lieutenant Colo- nel, in 1986. Of this he used to say: “of all my achievements in a not wholly unsuccessful life, it is the command of a battalion of infantrymen of which I am most proud”. He went on to become a Brigadier, serving his last appointment as the Director of the TA in the MoD. This military experience, from private to Brigadier, was not only a guiding passion in his life, but also a major source of his empathetic understanding with the British fighting man, and in particular with those ordinary men of work-a-day professions who were called to the colours in the World Wars.
His close association with the Staff College began at Camberley when he was co-opted in 1984 by General ‘Ginger’ Bagnall to join the new enterprise that was the first HCSC. He remained the guiding light of the course, both as a sage friend and as a mem- ber of staff, from that first course onwards, with the HCSC Staff Ride being one of the things that he professed to enjoy most in life. In that role he has had an indelible impact on the most senior officers of all three services: General Sir Mike Jackson, at Sand- hurst this year, described him as “the one single individual who had the most impact on the second half of my career”, and that sentiment would be universally endorsed by all those who have attended the course. Sharing a car with him as one travelled the by-roads of ‘that fateful highway’ of northern France and Flan- ders was a roller-coaster ride of entertainment and education with almost every village, crossroads or cemetery containing a treasure-trove of moving or amusing anecdotes. And, of course, the self-important HCSC students (and staff) were kept in check by the ever present fear of his awarding of the Croix de Bazaine for outstanding incompetence.
For all of his extraordinary achievements (from soldier to scholar and from JP to president of any number of societies and organ- isations), Richard Holmes was, above all else, a bon viveur in the true sense of the expression. He saw the best in all and in everyone, he was, rightly, described at his memorial service as a gentleman and a gentle man; he was also a trencherman who loved good food, who enjoyed “giving good service to a bottle of Claret” and who had a weakness for Calvados that caught many a fellow-traveller through the Norman countryside unawares, with painful after-effects. He was a fun-loving, deeply caring Homo Narrans (a higher evolution of story-telling man!) who lived life to the full, filling every minute of the course with fun, passion, care, enjoyment, observation, empathy and a burning desire to communicate.
He is now, no doubt, sitting at a rough-hewn bench bathed in gentle sunlight leaning back against the wall of a celestial Café Gondré, a manly helping of ambrosia and nectar at his elbow, and the Dukes of Marlborough, Wellington and Buckingham hanging on his every word as, with a two-handed pull on those moustaches, a flash of teeth and a glint in the eye he leans for- ward, hands spread and face alight with enthusiasm to tell them the way it really was.......
For the JSCSC, and for HCSC in particular, he is simply irre- placeable.
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Obituary: Professor Richard Holmes
Brigadier Andrew Sharpe OBE