Home of the British Army

For more than 170 years Aldershot has stood at the heart of the British Army. Created in the1850s as Britain’s first permanent large-scale military training camp, it rapidly became the Army’s principal concentration of troops, a centre of experimentation and reform, and ultimately the place that earned the enduring title ‘Home of the British Army’.

From its beginnings on an isolated expanse of Hampshire heath, Aldershot developed into the largest military garrison in Britain. Its establishment transformed not only the surrounding landscape and civilian town, but also the way the Army trained, housed, fed, educated, disciplined and cared for its soldiers. Large formations could now exercise together on a scale previously impossible in Britain, while the concentration of troops, specialists and commanders encouraged new ideas in training, physical fitness, signalling, communications, transport, aviation, medicine, catering and many other aspects of military life. Aldershot became a testing ground in which the Victorian Army was gradually transformed into the professional force that entered the twentieth century.

But Home of the British Army is not simply an institutional history. Paul H. Vickers reconstructs the everyday experience of the generations who lived and served there: the crowded wooden huts of the early camp; the routines of drill, parades and field exercises; the lives of officers and ordinary soldiers; wives and children; schools, hospitals, churches, libraries, sport, entertainment, crime and discipline. Drawing extensively on contemporary records, memoirs, newspapers, oral histories and personal testimony, the book brings to life both the hardship and the humour of garrison existence. Particularly important are previously unpublished documents collected in 1917 by General Sir Archibald Hunter, including recollections from figures ranging from senior commanders to former private soldiers, which were subsequently forgotten for more than ninety years before being rediscovered.

Aldershot’s importance was never confined to peacetime. Its troops fought in Britain’s imperial wars throughout the nineteenth century, while during the South African War more than 100,000men passed through the camp for training and preparation. In 1914 Aldershot Command mobilised within days of the out break of war, its resident formations becoming I Corps of the British Expeditionary Force; the garrison then became one of the principal training centres for the New Armies. In 1939 it again mobilised as I Corps, before becoming a major base for the Canadian Army and a centre for the build-up of forces preparing for the liberation of Europe.

After 1945 Aldershot repeatedly reinvented itself. It became the home of the Airborne Forces, trained generations of National Servicemen, and was comprehensively rebuilt during the Cold War for a smaller, professional and increasingly technological army. Later defence reductions placed its future in doubt, yet renewed investment under Project Allenby-Connaught ensured that Aldershot remained an important part of the Army’s modern basing structure into the twenty-first century.

Richly illustrated and based on an exceptional range of archival and personal material, Home of the British Army is both the first fully modern history of Aldershot Garrison and a broader study of the changing British Army itself. Through the story of one remarkable military community, it reveals how soldiers lived, trained, fought and adapted across more than a century and a half of profound military and social change.