Birkenhead Bantams: Small men with a big fighting spirit
More than 3,000 men under 5ft 3ins were rejected from the army in 1914 for being too short but formed their own battalion and won the right to fight in the Great War.
It soon became apparent that this rule excluded many men, especially those from industrial and coal mining areas, who were otherwise perfectly fit to serve and ‘do their bit’
In Birkenhead, Cheshire local MP, Alfred Bigland got to hear of this rejection and wrote to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. Bigland criticised what he saw as the needless rejection of fit, healthy men and asked Kitchener for permission to form an undersized fighting unit. Whilst the War Office approved of the idea, they declined to fund it.
So Bigland decided to raise his own company and the 15th Battalion, 1st Birkenhead, The Cheshire Regiment was formed, composed of healthy men between 4 ft 10ins (140cm) and 5ft 3ins (160cm) tall. They were named Bantams after the small aggressive fowl which became their battalion emblem.
When the news about the Bantams spread, men came from all over the country to Birkenhead to enlist. By November 1914 there were 3,000 new Bantam recruits and a second battalion was formed.
DURHAN BANTAMS
The Durham Light Infantry (DLI) had two Bantam battalions during WW1: the 19th and 23rd. Bantam battalions were military units for soldiers who were under the minimum height requirement for the British Army.
Officers in Bantam battalions were “normal” size. One of them was the future Field Marshal Montgomery, then Brigade Major of the 104th (Bantam) Brigade.
Other units could be protective of the Bantams in a way that might be seen as patronising today. A private in the Guards Division – renowned for their height – wrote in 1916:
“After we finished telling the Bants they had duck’s disease we had to take a lot of very funny insults in turn. Very sharp tongues they have, and we’ve taken to the little chaps right away.”
Some, like the Highland Light Infantry’s 18th Battalion, gained notoriety.
“Their quarrelsome reputation was legendary,” wrote Sidney Allinson in his book The Bantams. After frequent bar brawls they became known around Glasgow as the Devil Dwarfs.
19th (Service) Battalion (2nd County)
Formed in Durham on 13 January 1915 by the Durham Parliamentary Recruiting Committee as a Bantam Battalion. Moved to Cocken Hall in May 1915.
June 1915 : moved to Masham and came under orders of 106th Brigade in 35th Division. Moved to Perham Down in July 1916.
1 February 1916 : landed at Le Havre.
January 1917 : ceased to be a Bantam Battalion.
8 February 1918 : transferred to 104th Brigade in same Division.
Historians opinions vary on the effectiveness of Bantam battalions.
“For all their recalcitrance, they had proved to be readily trained into smart soldiers on the barrack square and the assault course,” writes Allinson. He quotes a raid on a German trench in June 1916 by the 14th Gloucester that became a hand-to-hand fight. At the end, 30 Germans and eight British lay dead, he writes, and the British had captured a Maxim heavy machine gun.
Height differences could lead to problems. An unhappy sergeant major in the Northumberland Fusiliers complained: “Sir, them bloody little dwarfs have built up the fire steps so they could see over. Now when my lads stand up, half their bodies are above the parapet.” The Bantams were told to put two sandbags on the step instead.
The Battle of the Somme took its toll on Bantam morale and credibility, historian Peter Simkins wrote in his essay “Each one a pocket Hercules”. It was much harder for the Bantams, as opposed to regular army battalions, to find decent replacements. A Brigadier-General Marindin complained about the physical abilities of some later recruits.
In the last week of 1916, 26 Bantams in the 19th Durhams were sentenced to death for cowardice or leaving their posts. Only three were executed, the others had their sentences commuted. “The fact that some of the first Bantams to join up had in late 1916 been found wanting tends to reinforce the conclusion that it was not just the later drafts who were sub-standard,” Simkins writes.
The Bantam experiment was over. The 35th division’s sign was changed from a Bantam cock to seven interlocked 5s. Its soldiers were re-examined by medical experts and those deemed fit to fight were merged with conventional army units.
But there was redemption of sorts. The 35th Division, now with a mixture of Bantams and regular soldiers, recorded a success rate in battle of 60% in the Hundred Days offensive of 1918 – above the Second Army average.
The experiment was not a failure, says Greenwood. “It did what it could do at the time.” There were many moments of heroism and it showed the willingness of smaller men to fight for their country. One of the problems was that the replacement Bantams were either undernourished or underage – it was easier to lie about how old you were in a battalion for short men, he says.
There’s also some research suggesting that short men were more likely to be killed in World War One. A paper published by Oxford University Press for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology suggested that taller British soldiers were more likely to survive, external. The mean height difference between those who survived and were killed was nearly one inch (2.37 cm), according to the research.
In this age of anti-discrimination, creating Bantam battalions is unthinkable. Today a British soldier can be just 4ft 10in tall (148cm). Drivers need to be 5ft 2in (158cm).
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