Driving along the main road from Fricourt to Maricourt across the Somme battlefield – the D938 Albert–Péronne road – you pass the old British front lines where the British 7th Division went into the attack in the early hours of 1 July 1916, the first day of the great battle. It is one of the many hallowed spots on the Somme where thousands of British soldiers died miles from home, but in this case it is a site that is for ever a part of England’s West Country. Just before the village of Mametz, in a small wood known as Mansel Copse, stands a monument to the men of 8th Devonshire Regiment and 9th Devonshire Regiment who were part of the first wave of British attacks on that fateful morning. Of their number 161 did not return; they were killed by enfilading German machine-gunners whose position by the church in Mametz had not been destroyed during the earlier artillery bombardment, even though its dangers had been pointed out by one of the Devons’ officers, Captain D. L. Martin. To make his point he had even constructed a plasticine model of the area to show the threat posed by the German machine-gun position, but this had been ignored.
Three days later, after the fighting had died down and the enemy positions had eventually been taken, the Devons returned and buried their dead in the old front line trench from which they had launched the assault. Above it a simple wooden cross was placed with the noble words: ‘The Devonshires held this Trench: The Devonshires hold it still’. Although the cross disappeared long ago, in the 1980s a handsome stone memorial was placed beside the cemetery gate with the same words contained within a depiction of the original cross. Among those killed that day was Lieutenant William Noel Hodgson MC, son of the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and a noted war poet whose final poem, ‘Before Action’, was grimly prophetic, the last line reading ‘Help me to die, O Lord’.
Heyday of Empire: 2nd Battalion The Devonshire Regiment march out of Fort William in Calcutta. Built on the eastern banks of the River Hooghly it was the centre of British military power in Bengal and is still a military base, being the headquarters of the Indian Army’s Eastern Command.
The regiment came into being as the Duke of Beaufort’s Musketeers in 1685, raised to defend Bristol against the Duke of Monmouth’s unsuccessful attempt to seize the throne from James II, although the records also show that it had an earlier life as the Marquess of Worcester’s Regiment of Foot, which existed for a few brief months in 1667. In 1751 it was numbered the 11th Foot and in 1782 it received the territorial designation North Devonshire. The final cementing of the county connection came in 1881 when it merged with the Devon Militia and was given the title The Devonshire Regiment with its depot at Topsham Barracks, Exeter. Later this became Wyvern Barracks and it is still in existence as a Territorial Army facility.
By that time the regiment had acquired a substantial war record, having served under the Duke of Marlborough during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) and under the Duke of Cumberland at the battles of Dettingen (1743) and Fontenoy (1745) during the War of the Austrian Succession. It had also engaged Jacobite forces twice – at Sheriffmuir during the 1715 rebellion and at Glen Shiel in 1719 when its grenadier company played a leading role under the command of Major Milburn. The latter battle site is today under the protection of the National Trust for Scotland and the walled enclosure which formed the Jacobites’ ammunition store is still visible. In the wars against Revolutionary France, the 11th North Devonshire Regiment had the distinction of serving as marines or ‘sea-soldiers’ during the naval battle of Cape St Vincent where a British fleet under Admiral Sir John Jervis defeated a larger Spanish fleet commanded by Admiral Don José de Córdoba y Ramos on 14 February 1797. It was also in action in the Peninsula where it was given the nickname ‘The Bloody Eleventh’.
From the outset the Devons built a reputation as doughty fighters who enjoyed the trust of those who commanded them and quickly won their respect. In 1899 at the outset of the Boer War, 1st Devons was one of the experienced battalions sent out to bolster the British forces and on 21 October was in action at Elandslaagte in the company of two other equally fine battalions – 1st Manchester Regiment and 2nd Gordon Highlanders. The Devons were the first to go into the attack, streaming forward across the veldt, the men firing controlled volleys, the company commanders blowing whistles. Just short of the Boer positions they regrouped to wait for the Gordons, a scene later described by Drummer Ernest Boulden of D Company in an ungrammatical but heartfelt letter to his parents: ‘… and then we had to lie down flat and the Bullits came round us quite thick and we hadvanced in such a splendid order they [Boers] said they were sirprised to see it and we said we hadvanced like a stone wall, and so we did …’
A cavalry charge finished the battle, which was one of the only clear-cut tactical successes during the war. In the subsequent fighting at Wagon Hill near Ladysmith the regiment won its first Victoria Cross, awarded to Lieutenant James Edward Ignatius Masterson for exceptional bravery on 6 January 1900. A thirty-seven-year-old Irishman who had been commissioned from the ranks, Masterson demonstrated ‘unselfish heroism’ in taking an urgent message to the Imperial Light Horse detachment, showing no regard for his own safety while under heavy enemy fire. He survived the war and retired from the army in 1912. By coincidence, one of his ancestors had shown similar courage during the Napoleonic Wars by capturing a French eagle during the Battle of Barossa in 1811. The incident is described in Bernard Cornwell’s novel Sharpe’s Fury.
At the beginning of 1900 the Devons’ 2nd Battalion joined the war and quickly distinguished itself in the fighting in Natal where the men caught the eye of their brigade commander, Colonel Walter Kitchener, the younger brother of General Lord Herbert Kitchener, the army’s chief of staff. Later he repaid that debt by writing the following encomium in the regimental war history: ‘No one can quite appreciatively follow the story of the work of the Devons, unless he realises the intense feeling of comradeship that animates these West-country men. To work with Devonshire men is to realise in the flesh theintensity of the local county loyalty so graphically depicted by Charles Kingsley in his Westward Ho! and other novels.’
In 1953, 1st Battalion The Devonshire Regiment was posted to Kenya for a three-year tour at the height of the Mau-Mau insurgency, also known as the Kenyan Emergency. Once in Kenya, serge battledress was exchanged for khaki drill uniforms.
During the Second World War the Devons added to the West Country’s military reputation by fighting on all the main battlefronts, while the 12th Battalion distinguished itself by serving in Europe as part of 6th Airlanding Brigade which went into battle by glider during the Normandy landings. In 1948 the regiment lost its 2nd Battalion and ten years later it amalgamated with the neighbouring Dorset Regiment (39th/54th) to form The Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, which in turn became part of The Rifles in 2007. One of the Devon and Dorsets’ most distinguished soldiers was Lieutenant Colonel H. [erbert] Jones who transferred to The Parachute Regiment in 1979 and was awarded the Victoria Cross during the Falklands War of 1982. There is a plaque to his memory in the Church of St Thomas of Canterbury in Kingswear, Devon, where Jones spent part of his childhood.
On amalgamation the Colours of The Devonshire Regiment were laid up in Exeter Cathedral and the regimental records are held in Dorset at The Keep Military Museum, Bridport Road, Dorchester.
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Dettingen, Salamanca, Pyrenees, Nivelle, Nive, Orthes, Toulouse, Peninsula, Afghanistan 1879–80, Tirah, Defence of Ladysmith, Relief of Ladysmith, South Africa 1899–1902
Those in bold are carried on the Queen’s Colour
Aisne 1914, 18, La Bassée 1914, Armentières 1914, Neuve Chapelle, Hill 60, Ypres 1915, 17, Gravenstafel, St. Julien, Frezenberg, Aubers, Loos, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, Bazentin, Delville Wood, Guillemont, Flers-Courcelette, Morval, Arras 1917, 18, Vimy 1917, Scarpe 1917, Bullecourt, Pilckem, Langemarck 1917, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele, Rosières, Villers Bretonneux, Lys, Hazebrouck, Bois des Buttes, Marne 1918, Tardenois, Bapaume 1918, Hindenburg Line, Havrincourt, Èpéhy, Canal du Nord, Beaurevoir, Cambrai 1918, Selle, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Piave, Vittorio Veneto, Italy 1917–18, Doiran 1917, 18, Macedonia 1915–18, Egypt 1916–17, Gaza, Nebi Samwil, Jerusalem, Tel Asur, Palestine 1917–18, Tigris 1916, Kut al Amara 1917, Mesopotamia 1916–18
Those in bold are carried on the Queen’s Colour
Normandy Landing, Port en Bessin, Tilly sur Seulles, Caen, St. Pierre la Vielle, Nederrijn, Roer, Rhine, Ibbenburen, North-West Europe 1944–45, Landing in Sicily, Regalbuto, Sicily 1943, Landing at Porto San Venere, Italy 1943, Malta 1940–42, Imphal, Shenam Pass, Tamu Road, Ukhrul, Myinmu Bridgehead, Kyaukse 1945, Burma 1943–45
Lieutenant (later Major) James Edward Ignatius Masterson, 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Private (later Corporal) Theodore Veale, 8th Battalion, First World War, 1916
Lance Corporal (later Captain) George Onions, 1st Battalion, First World War, 1918
