SAHR Conference: Land Forces of the Crown, c. 1660-2000
Saturday 22nd - Sunday 23rd February 2025
The SAHR’s highly successful ‘Land Forces of the Crown’ research conference was held in Leeds on the weekend of 22 and 22 February 2025. The event was organised by Dr Andrew Bamford (SAHR), Matthew Hough (a 2nd year PhD candidate at Leeds), and Rory Butcher, the SAHR’s Student Representative who also undertook much of the planning, hosting and social responsibilities.
Attendees were treated to presentations on a wide array of topics, periods, and themes.
Day One
- The first three parallel panels featured everything from disciplinary issues in James II’s Catholic Army and the West India Regiments in the Napoleonic period; epidemics and disease in the late-eighteenth century; and officer training in North Africa 1941-45.
- The next two parallel panels considered the commemoration of British soldiers (with some art history included along the way); and questions of medical care, injury, and maternity from the twentieth century to the present.
- The keynote was delivered by Dr Zack White, founding Chair of the Napoleonic and Revolutionary War Graves Charity – on the importance of respecting war dead from the period 1775-1815 (i.e. not covered by Commonwealth War Graves Commission).
- The evening’s festivities began with a well-attended reception at the conference venue and continued well into the evening.
Day Two
- The second day panels opened on service experiences abroad and within coalition contexts - everything from eighteenth-century Irish Catholic recruitment and post-Korea service questionnaires through to the failed military mission to Poland in 1939.
- A conference highlight was Mick McTiernan (recent recipient of an SAHR Research Grant) speaking about his work on the British soldiers who were deployed to Crete as part of an allied peacekeeping force in the 1890s.
- One of the four panels examined how the British Army has undergone development and change: it examined military technology in the nineteenth century and the First World War before heading into the army of 2025 and its current application of research.
- Another panel was brought to us by a group from the University of Oxford, considering the material costs of the British Civil Wars, and the new approaches they have employed to examine the period.
- Lunch was swiftly followed by the last panels, which featured papers on: Edwardian officer selection; the role of infantry NCOs in the Great War; motivations of the men who enlisted in the British expedition to the Russian Civil War; the reality of the life in the British Army in the 1790s; and how two brothers fighting in the Peninsular War influenced their sister, poet Felicia Hemans, as she read their letters at home.
- The final keynote was delivered by Professor Jessica Meyer, of the University of Leeds, on how civilian identity was essential to personnel’s service during (and indeed after) World War I; a topic which forms part of her newest book project.
Chairman’s note: Rory Butcher’s characteristic modesty belies the sheer amount of work and enthusiasm he and his SAHR colleague Andrew Bamford, put into this outstandingly successful conference, which reflected such credit on the Society. It showcased some of the best work on military history currently being conducted across UK – often by young people and including SAHR research projects. The Society owes both Rory and Andrew a great debt of gratitude for volunteering to organise this event in their own time, and carrying it off so smoothly & effectively.
