1901. Field Army Brigades.
On the 22nd January, 1901, Her Majesty Queen Victoria died. The Regiment was informed in due course that the King would honour it by continuing to retain the position of Honorary Colonel.
In April, 1901, the Regiment lost its Commanding Officer by the promotion of Lieutenant-Colonel the Earl of Albemarle to the command of the Norfolk Volunteer Infantry Brigade. Colonel Tytheridge, who had temporarily commanded during the absence of Lord Albemarle in South Africa, now succeeded to the command.
The experience of the South African war had forcibly impressed the country with the fact that in the Volunteer Force it possessed an asset deserving of greater encouragement and development than it had hitherto obtained. As a result of this feeling, the higher military authorities issued new and more stringent conditions of efficiency in an endeavour to bring the backward Corps up to the general level.
Regimental Camps of Instruction were now abolished and replaced by Brigade Camps. The Old Deer Park, Richmond, where the Battalion had encamped for nineteen years in succession (1880 to 1898) was to harbour it no more. Easter Manœuvres, Whitsuntide Marching Columns, Aldershot Provisional Battalions, Clacton Seaside Engineering Camps all dropped out; and energies were concentrated on securing a maximum muster at the Brigade Camp, where it was necessary to maintain an attendance of half the full strength (500) for the period of fourteen days in order to earn the War Office grant.
The position in which the Regiment might find itself in the event of a national emergency had long been a subject of uncertainty and doubt.
The Treasury had firmly expressed themselves on this point in a Minute issued in 1899 and published in Regimental Orders, as follows:—
“The Volunteer Force was primarily formed for Home Defence, and there seems special objections to a regiment like the Civil Service Rifles serving abroad. The men have their public duties to perform at home, and if they were sent abroad, untried men must be temporarily employed in their places for the performance of Civil Service professional work.”[6]
[6] There is no doubt that if it had not been for this attitude adopted by the Treasury and firmly maintained up to 1914, and the hampering effect it had upon Regimental authorities, the Civil Service would have been found in that fateful year among the first of the Territorial battalions on the field of war.
The Battalion, nevertheless, was selected as one of those to be placed in the “Field Army Brigades” which were formed under the new scheme of Home Defence. At first it was placed in the 24th (Volunteer) Brigade, consisting of 2nd (South) Middlesex, 12th Middlesex (Civil Service), 21st Middlesex, and 4th (Volunteer Battalion) Royal West Surrey Regiment.
Camp was formed this year at Jubilee Hill, Aldershot, under the Officer Commanding the District.