The Equine Army World War I at Home

WWI is often thought of as the first truly mechanised war.

A deadly conflict of machine guns and barbed wire.

Of tanks and trenches.

For four years, Europe was locked in tactical stalemate.

But it was also the war of the horse.

From the cavalry and artillery

to the humble packhorse.

Without the horse, the outcome of the war

could have been very different.

And for the first time,

the British Army turned to mules in vast numbers.

They're a much more robust animal

to deal with on a day-to-day basis in the conditions of the Western Front.

Getting these animals to the front line was a mammoth operation.

Pushing the British Military Remount Service to the limit.

The Remount Department managed the largest horse-purchasing

industry the world has even seen.

By the end of the war, 1918, almost a million horses

and mules were serving the British Army.

On the west coast of England,

where Bristol meets the Severn Estuary,

we're searching for traces of the county's largest Army Remount Depot

at Shirehampton.

No-one's seen it for almost 100 years.

If stories are to be believed,

it would have been teeming with thousands of horses

and mules preparing to go to war.

Peter Insole, an archaeologist with the local council,

is overseeing a geophysical survey of the area.

So, Peter, this place seems a bit of an enigma to me

in the sense that there's nothing here.

How do we know actually what went on?

Well, we knew there was a Remount Depot in this region,

but it was just by chance, I was working on another project

and I happened to find a map that shows exactly

where all the buildings and paddocks of the Remount Depot

were actually situated in this area.

And so what we're trying to do today

is see if there's any remains of these buildings

actually beneath the ground, using this geophysics technique.

What we can see from Peter's map

is that the Remount Depot was really quite extensive.

With 64 stable blocks, 35 paddocks.

Some holding over 100 horses.

There were forage barns, shoeing sheds,

separate quarters for officers and soldiers.

And even a pharmacy.

This was a huge area.

It just seems from the size of these

and the actual total amount of area it covered...

It was a pretty significant location.

This was a Remount Depot for 5,000 horses.

And from 5,000 horses, it got extended.

At its peak, it held 7,500 horses at any one time.

For thousands of years, horses played a vital role in war,

as they did in everyday life.

But in the years leading up to WWI,

the horse was starting to make way for machines.

At the beginning of the war, August 1914,

the British Army was probably the most mechanised army

of all the countries to fight in that war.

And the bulk of our horse transport

had, in fact, been taken over by motor vehicles.

But with the advent of war and the expansion,

the motor vehicle industry couldn't keep up with production.

So they went back to horse transport.

At the time, the Army had just 25,000 horses.

But six times that number were available in reserve

on farms and stables across the country.

And more could be commandeered at any moment

by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener.

His impressment of horses, as it was known,

became a national talking point.

Particularly among the owners of smaller horses.

Lord Kitchener had been sent a letter by a couple girls

that their ponies would be taken for the war effort,

asking that this would not happen.

And he replied back to say he had ordered no horses

under 15 hands would be taken for the war.

I tend to think that's a little bit of propaganda.

Because the size of an Army horse is prescribed.

And the minimum is probably 15.1, 15.15 hands.

Horse musters were organised across the country,

where anyone handing over the right animal was handsomely rewarded.

But still more were needed. Hundreds of thousands more.

So they looked to America, with its endless supply of wild horses.

A commission was dispatched to find them and send them back to Bristol.

So, why was the location here?

Because the war was going on on the Western Front.

It's a fair way away. What's the reason for being here?

Avonmouth is one of the first ports you come to as you cross the Atlantic.

And you can ship them straight in to the country here.

And King Edward Dock had just been built, just before WWI.

Now, that means it's a modern facility.

And it's got all the rail links and also, when Lord Kitchener

comes here in August, he sees that you've got all this

farmland that you can use for paddocking the horses.

And it's just an ideal place to set up a Remount Depot here.

Soon, animals were arriving from America by the shipload.

A thousand a week.

At Shirehampton, they would convalesce after their journey.

Sick animals would be treated.

And unbroken animals, of which there were many,

would be prepared for the regimented discipline of the British Army.

A War Office newsreel attempted to show the lighter side.

The reality wasn't nearly as much fun.

Young soldiers, many recruited from local farms,

shivered through the winter months.

Bedding down on narrow straw mattresses,

packed into corrugated-iron barrack huts.

Young men like Charlie Day.

So, Roger, how did your Great Uncle Charlie come to be at Shirehampton?

Well, he came from the Wiltshire village of Ramsbury.

He had two brothers and three sisters.

And I think one of his brothers had joined the Army

and he wanted to join the Army as well,

but he'd hurt his leg in a wagon accident as a young man.

That meant he wasn't really fit enough to be a soldier.

At least not in 1914.

But by 1916, of course, the British Army was getting desperate

and he was now a soldier.

We don't know exactly when he arrived at Shirehampton,

but we know that in August of 1916,

he sent a postcard saying he was on his way here.

I'm assuming that given that Charlie was brought up on a farm,

he cared about the conditions of the animals when they arrived here.

Oh, yes. Like all farmers, he was always concerned

about the condition of the animals.

And I think he was rather distressed about the condition of some

of the horses and mules when they arrived at Shirehampton.

In one of these letters, he says, "They are packed in very tightly.

"There's not room for them to lie down.

"For if one got down, it would mean no chance of it getting up again.

"Some of our mules have gone and some more are going tomorrow.

"And then we have 50 to come from the sick lines.

"They have such dirty noses and blow them all over you,

"even into your face."

LAUGHTER

So he's sort of implying that he thinks

-he might actually catch something off the horses.

-Yep.

And he writes to his mother in another letter

and asks for a bar of Mr Strickland's disinfectant soap

because he thinks if he washes with it,

it'll prevent him from catching any diseases.

Despite Charlie's concerns,

the treatment of horses by the military had actually improved.

Ten years earlier, after the second Anglo-Boer War,

in which more than 300,000 horses died,

the Army had been forced to change its approach.

They had learnt it was important

that you actually have to take care of your horses.

Medical care, having the right type of horse to do the job

and to transport them correctly.

So when they entered the war, the Army Remount Department

and those working with horses were really very professional

and very skilled.

After three weeks at Shirehampton,

most horses were fit and healthy

and ready to take a saddle or a harness.

For many, a future of mud and toil now lay ahead.

But not for all horses.

This was still the age of the cavalry.

And so larger animals, particularly

those with a bit of thoroughbred in their blood,

were sent for training in the traditional art of mounted attack.

Aye!

Yargh!

I'm taking a ride with Jerry Watkins,

a former captain in the Army Veterinary Corps,

which is still responsible

for the care and training of military animals today.

When people think of WWI, they think of the trench lines.

It doesn't look like an obvious battlefield for cavalry.

How were they effective during WWI?

You must remember the whole trench warfare phenomena

came later on in the war.

And in the early years, there were certainly many incidences

where the sword was drawn and used in battle.

Very often, cavalrymen versus cavalrymen.

They still thought that for close-quarter work,

the thrusting sword, the cutting sword, would be of use.

And that really is why we saw the training with the sword

carrying on through the WWI years and well beyond that, as well.

The use of the horse changed enormously.

And that was primarily for two reasons.

One was barbed wire.

Horses are great at jumping fences and walls and so on,

but they're not very good at coils of barbed wire.

There was a huge amount of injury caused to horses through wire.

The other thing was the machine gun.

A troop of cavalry in the sights of a German machine gun would be

absolutely devastating.

Cavalry charges led to the deaths of many hundreds of horses

and their riders.

The Army had to learn from these mistakes...and change.

The cavalry quickly got rid of their lances and swords,

which had been so important to them in previous battles.

It was the carbine that become the important weapon

of the mounted soldier.

So in effect, you've got a soldier

who can get off and use his carbine on the ground,

but he's got the horse for mobility. That sounds clever, actually.

It is clever. And that's important, that point you made.

You don't fire your rifle off the horse.

So you would dismount very quickly, hand your horse to a horse holder

and then get forward, where you can engage the enemy,

fire off rounds as quick as you can.

This is quite a skill, isn't it?

What sort of training do they have to undergo to get to that level of ability?

The horses need to be steady to gunfire.

You're going to skirmish forward,

but you're still really fairly close to where the horses may be,

so it needs to be steady to the bang.

And remember, there's going to be a lot of banging going on.

The cavalry in the old days did a lot of drill work.

So they'd be looking splendid on the plains of Aldershot.

This changed. This was rather like the Commandos.

They would use the ground

and they would be able creep forward quietly, yet at speed.

Do their business and get out of there sharpish.

If the finest riding horses went to the cavalry,

then the finest cavalry horses went to cavalry officers.

To ensure an adequate supply,

the Government began work establishing its own stud

at Russley Park in Wiltshire.

To breed chargers for the top brass.

I'm getting a tour of the stables from horse writer, Susanna Forrest.

So, Susanna, what was happening here during WWI?

Well, it was sold to the War Office with the idea that they would

breed cavalry horses here,

maybe from the thoroughbreds that had been here before.

But in the end, there wasn't enough time to quite get this up to speed

and what they were doing was, we think,

somewhere between rehabbing and training horses for the cavalry.

The stables have recently been

lovingly restored to their original splendour.

It's pretty roomy, this stable. Would it have just held one horse?

Yeah. It was originally built for racehorse stallions

and then during the war, we think it was the officers' horses.

There's this beautiful porcelain bowl for fodder that could have been

cleaned out every day to keep the risk of disease or problems very low.

It's light, it's airy, the bed's been beautifully made properly,

as it would've been at the time.

The very top grade of horses had all this living space.

So, who were the people running the place here?

I've heard that the lady in charge was a bit of an eccentric.

It was unusual in that it was entirely run by women.

And the superintendent was Lady Mabel Birkbeck,

who was married to the Director of Remount for the Army.

In a way, a bit of a showpiece.

It was locked into the highest echelons of the Army

and upper class and upper middle class young girls working here.

These were genteel girls.

Debutants more accustomed to society balls and fine dining.

The public struggled to accept the idea of them grooming horses

and mucking out stables.

And what's more, they were doing it dressed as men.

A lot of the publicity and at rallies, you'd get speakers saying,

"We know you're dressing like a man and doing the work of a man,

"but you must be women.

"You must be pure and steady-minded and attractive."

But there was this sort of anxiety about all these women

running around the countryside in trousers.

Even their style of riding,

sitting astride rather than side-saddle, attracted notoriety.

But times were a-changing.

Right up to the beginning of WWI,

we have the Queen trying to ban women riding astride in Hyde Park,

we have the King insisting that at Olympia, the big society horse show,

women did not appear astride in the main arena.

In a way, what WWI and Remount Depots did was to give respectability

and even a sort of patriotic finish to riding astride

instead of side-saddle.

-So, did this attract a lot of press attention?

-Certainly.

And they got a lot of propaganda value out of this.

And people talked about this divineness of spirit

that comes from this labour

and that they were freeing up men to go to the front.

This is the overall message.

By the end of its first year, the Remount Service had mobilised

more than half a million animals.

But on the Western Front, the Army was finding itself

desperately short of the right kind of horse.

The big shortage was in light draft horses.

Predominantly, that's the type of horse

that the Horse Artillery used.

And as the war developed and the requirement for horses expanded,

they started then to use mules.

With little experience of these curious donkey/horse hybrids,

the Army up to now had only employed them in small numbers.

Indeed, the old adage, "stubborn as a mule,"

didn't sit comfortably with the straight-backed British Army.

Andy Smerdon, a member of the Great War Society,

owns both a horse and a mule.

Well, this is Mack on my left here.

He's a Tennessee walking horse.

Very typical of the horses coming in from North America and Canada.

The animal on my right is Meg.

She's a typical military mule.

A donkey is the father and the mother is a horse. 15 hands upwards.

You can get them a lot bigger.

The basic differences between the two of them,

apart from personalities, ears. The big ears is a giveaway.

That's from the donkey father.

Mealy muzzle on the front here. Smaller nostrils.

They don't need so much oxygen in their bodies as a horse does.

They can actually close these up, to a certain extent.

Very strong, straight back.

Straight legs, hard feet and on the back end,

there's a pin-on tail, just like the donkey.

She would've been used for carrying supplies

up to the front and also in draft.

The differences temperament-wise,

I always like to say, a horse is a dog...

Will you stop that?

..and a mule is a cat.

That's the reason why, unfortunately,

mules have got this bad reputation about being stubborn.

They're not stubborn, they're just independently minded.

They have their own mind and they know what they're doing.

Nevertheless, the Army did struggle

with the temperament of their American imports.

Treating them like horses didn't seem to be working.

They had thousands of horses and mules to train.

It was just get on, ride until it gave up

and you broke it, literally, breaking a horse.

And then you went on to the next one.

You didn't have the time to be kind and gentle.

A mule will respect that kind and gentleness,

but more so than a horse.

Once the British Army learnt that,

then, in fact, no, we didn't have huge problems with mules.

Most people you speak to and most of the accounts you read,

people will tell you mules were a very efficient and largely docile,

very useful, hardy animal.

It turned out that they were cheaper to run,

they could go further on less food and they were more robust.

But there was a catch.

The trouble with a mule is it can kick in any direction.

Whereas a horse can only kick backwards,

a mule has 360 degrees of aim.

They actually can kick forward and they can kick sideways,

what they call a cow kick.

There's a famous story of a cavalry general

walking down the horse lines at a Remount Depot,

taking in the animals that were there

and one of the more infamous animals double-barrelled him,

much to the enjoyment of the soldiers watching

because he wasn't a particularly popular general.

You've always got to watch them. That's the trouble with mules.

Having now accepted that mules were the answer,

the Army faced a problem getting them into the country.

The main Remount Depots at Shirehampton

and Liverpool were full to capacity.

And German U-boats were preventing ships

from reaching the only other depot at Southampton.

So they decided to ship into Bristol and into Shirehampton

and then move them down into the West Country

to well-watered, warmer climates and simply run them on farms.

12 farms were chosen. All close to stations

along Brunel's Great Western Railway.

From the spring of 1915, more than 100,000 mules were transported

in railway horse boxes requisitioned by the Army

and converted for the purpose.

In a train yard at Bishops Lydeard Station,

a project is under way to refurbish

the country's only surviving example.

Obviously a fair bit of work to be done.

What sort of condition was it in when you got it

and how did you get hold of it?

Well, it was in remarkable condition, really.

It was actually in a farmer's field in Pershore.

It had chickens underneath and a diesel tank on the roof

and I think for 116 years old, it's survived remarkably well.

So, can you tell me how everything works on this?

This ramp would've actually dropped down on the platform.

There's two. One either side of the vehicle.

So you could load or unload from either side.

They'd have probably taken out the centre partition

because originally, this was for two horses and a groom.

It's quite roomy, isn't it?

I know you say originally just two horses, how many mules could they have got in here?

Well, I would've thought anything up to half a dozen mules.

Because you would've taken out the centre partition

and just cram as many in as you possibly can.

-This is wartime. It's needs must.

-Needs must. Exactly!

One of the 12 Somerset mule depots was just outside the popular

seaside resort of Minehead.

Here, the mules were herded down the town's main avenue

and out into the countryside, to the farm at Bratton Court.

Can you tell me a bit about what this place was used for during WWI?

In the spring of 1915,

the whole of Bratton Farm, which is 600 acres,

was taken over by the Army for rest and recuperation for mules

that had been brought over from the States and from South America.

A long journey by sea.

And for training before they were sent on to France.

So, how many mules are we talking about?

Well, we reckon 500 mules at any given time.

We're not sure how long they would've stayed.

Could've been as little as three weeks,

but if they were having to break them in,

as I think a lot of them were not trained in any way,

I think it would've taken longer than three weeks.

Rita, what traces are left on the farm of that time?

Can we still see some of the history of that period?

Yes. This is what we gradually discovered.

Because we didn't know there had been mules at Bratton,

but mule shoes have been found and we've still got a couple.

-They're a particular size, obviously, aren't they?

-They are.

They're a very different shape, funnily enough.

They are much longer and slimmer.

In those days, of course, having taken over the entire farm over,

they would also have been using the forge to shoe the mules.

But the idea of making and fitting a couple of thousand mule shoes

every three weeks sounds like an impossible job.

Maybe not all of them would have gone out shod,

but a lot of them would have been shod before they left.

Because you wouldn't want to start having to shoe them

as soon as they arrived in France, that's for sure!

Even keeping the animals fed was a mammoth task.

An advert placed in the local newspaper invited tenders

to supply hay to Bratton. Six tonnes a day.

A condition states, "Any trusses found to be musty, mouldy,

"badly mow burnt or wilfully damped may be rejected."

And to make sure the Army wasn't being sold short,

a weighbridge was installed in the farmyard,

which still works perfectly today.

So to have your farm taken over during WWI,

of course, that's all part of the war effort,

but was there any recompense for the farmer?

The Army were very good at recompensing

everybody for everything, funnily enough.

And we reckoned that for the use of the buildings,

for preparing feed, that kind of thing,

although all the labour was provided by the Army,

they would probably have paid 30 shillings a week.

In today's money, that would be around £140,

which doesn't sound like much.

But the landowner was also paid 2/6 per mule.

Nowadays, that would add up to a very respectable £5,500 a week.

Clearly, looking after the Army's mules could be a lucrative business.

From Bratton Court, the mules were put back onto trains

for their journey to the front line.

From where a great many would never return.

Over the course of WWI, 484,000 British horses and mules died.

One for every two men.

Stories of animals collapsed with exhaustion, caked in mud,

too tired to lift their heads to breathe,

seem all too plausible.

When the war ended in 1918, the Army Remount Service

had to begin the enormous task of unpicking all their work.

Unlike the men with whom they served,

900,000 horses couldn't just go home.

At the end of the war, any horses or mules the Army didn't require

in its peacetime role were simply sold off

in the domestic markets.

However, any horse that was not fit for work, generally speaking,

they were slaughtered either for domestic consumption, or, in fact,

for consumption for POWs, both in this country and on the Continent.

So there's a mixed picture.

At Shirehampton, the end of war meant the end of the Remount Depot.

A few stables and quarters were kept as temporary housing,

but within a few years, they were gone, too.

So, nearly a century later,

have we found any physical evidence of what went on here?

Two things that first strike me are the anomalies that we have here.

It's that angle between those two.

The relationship between those two areas of high resistance

which does match what we can see on the plan here.

The other thing I've just noticed is there might be

small paths in between the stable blocks.

It's a fair indication that these are the remains

of this element of the Remount Depot within this paddock.

-So good news, good results.

-I think so.

I'm really pleased we've actually been able to detect

some elements of what looked like the Remount Depot in this field.

We never know what we're going to be able to find

when we do these sorts of surveys.

An alignment that could be that stable block and the path

that we see on the actual plan, I think is a great result.

Although the Remount Depot's gone,

we've proved that remains of it still lie underneath the ground.

WWI saw horses and mules mobilised in numbers never seen before.

But the end of the war marked a turning point in their future.

Before long, most cavalry regiments had been mechanised.

And though this would not be the last time horses went to war,

never again would they have such a significant role in the outcome.

100 years on from the Great War,

there's very little trace of what went on here.

The wounds have healed over.

But dig a little deeper, as we have done,

and there is evidence of the extraordinary effort,

the hardship and the determination.

Life may have moved on,

but the memories are still right here, beneath our feet.