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Richard Holmes

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Professor Richard Holmes CBE, the new President of The Battlefields Trust, was educated at Cambridge, Northern Illinois and Reading Universities and was appointed Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield  University in 1995.  Professor Holmes has written over a dozen books on military topics.  He is best known for Firing Line, a study of human behavior in battle, and Soldiers, the book of the prizewinning BBC TV series, which he wrote in association with John Keegan.
 
In 1993 he rode on horseback from Mons to the River Marne, following the route of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, and the ensuring book, Riding the Retreat, was published in 1995.  He has also published Redcoat and Wellington - The Iron Duke. Professor Holmes recent book Tommy (published in May 2004, price £20.00) is a history of the British soldier in the First and Second World War.
 
He has written and presented several television programmes, including two six-part BBC Two series, War Walks I and War Walks II, as well as a series on the Western front which was televised in the summer of 1999.  He wrote books to accompany each of these series.  His Second World War book and series, Battlefields, appeared in 2001.
 
He was appointed OBE (Military) in 1986 and received the CBE in the 1998 New Year's Honours.  In September 1999 he became Colonel of the Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment.

A MESSAGE FROM RICHARD:

"I was absolutely delighted to become President of the Battlefields Trust.  Having been a military historian for most of my working life, I believe that battle – terrifying and squalid thought it generally is – lies at the very heart of war.  Much as I appreciate the work of those who come to the study of conflict from a variety of other disciplines, it does seem to me that for the historian, at least, examining the clash of forces on land, sea and in the air retains a fundamental importance.

And battlefields, taking the term in its broadest context, are where these clashes occurred.  The longer I ply my trade the more convinced I am of the danger of writing or speaking about a battle without having seen its  field.  The ‘ridges’ of Passchendaele (important in the 1917 3rd battle of Ypres) and Ruweisat (significant at Alamein in 1942) would scarcely rank as ridges elsewhere in the world: their value, on these flat landscapes, was relative, not absolute.  The Boer War battlefield of Spion Kop (1900) is not, as some would have us believe, dominated by surrounding high ground.   However, troops entrenched on its flat top cannot look down onto the hill’s slopes to see an attacker climbing up.  Yet if they stand to get a better view, they are ‘skylined’ to observers from miles around. 

Small details of a landscape can have a profound military effect. The Duke of Marlborough was able to use a little gully at Ramillies (1706) to shift troops between his right and his centre. Whatever our views on the strategic wisdom of the Somme (1916), the attack on the village of Serre on 1 July by those fine North Country battalions of 31st Division was likely to fail, given the open ground on the attackers’ left from which the Germans could fire into the flank of the assaulting units. Cromwell’s defeat of the Scots at Dunbar (1650) makes sense only when one sees that, having got onto the lower slopes of Doon Hill on the Scottish right, the Parliamentarian cavalry could then attack westwards, along the hill, not up it.       

Some battlefields still present us with unanswerable questions.  Despite the work of several enterprising historians, we cannot be absolutely sure of the site of Bosworth (1485) or even of Cheriton (1644), though with the latter the margin of error is happily quite narrow.  But for other battlefields, new work has helped confirm or amend old sitings.  Naseby (1645), one of the most evocative battlefields in England, has greatly profited from the work of historians and metal detector enthusiasts, working in friendly co-operation.  Understanding of Culloden (1746) has been enormously encouraged by sympathetic work on the site, and discovery of the piles of old Stirling Bridge (1297) has brought a flush of patriotic pride to the cheek of many a Scotsman proud to remember William Wallace’s victory.

But to interpret a confirmed battle site, or to work towards a consensus on the location of battlefields whose location is currently disputed, we need help.  If a battlefield is lacerated by new roads, bent out of shape by building, or simply used for an inappropriate purpose (like a rubbish-dump or car-park), it cannot tell us as much as it might.  Nor can we take pride and pleasure in helping others understand what went on there.  And there is a quality to battlefields that goes beyond the intellectual.  They are not simply spots where history was made: they are places where men, doing their duty as they saw it, went to their deaths.  Properly maintained, they touch our hearts as well as our heads.  

I am supportive of the Battlefields Trust because it provides us with just the help that we need.  Its main aim reflects ‘the presentation, interpretation and conservation of battlefield sites as educational and heritage resources.’   I have no doubt that the foundation of the Trust was long overdue, and that in its relatively short life it has made a very real difference.  There was once an ‘official’ view that a place was only ‘historical’ if there was some man-made artefact – earthwork, fortification of building - upon it.  Some terrible things were done to battlefields before the Trust’s foundation, and the construction of a major road across the southern edge of the field of Naseby is noisy evidence that even public enquiries were no guarantors of good sense.  Now, however, the Trust has agreed a list of battlefields with English Heritage, and I am pleased to see evidence of a better-integrated defence of these key historical sites than we would once have expected.  While this cannot prevent the occasional violation of haunted acres, the whole situation is on a far firmer footing than it was a decade ago, and we largely have to thank the Trust for this.

The Trust has also made a very good start in improving the way battlefields are interpreted.  Even if a battlefield has escaped the ravages of development, all too often it gives its visitors no real clue to what went on there.  Monuments are sometimes wrongly placed, their inscriptions are often unhelpfully cryptic, and in any case there are limits to what one piece of engraved stone can tell the passer-by.  Interpretive panels are at least part of the way ahead, but they require very careful thought, not simply in terms of content, sitting and access, but also because of the danger of overwhelming a field with guidance or drowning it with commerce: Waterloo (1815) shows the danger of over-exploitation.

In short, I am the Trust’s greatest fan.  I believe that it has already transformed the way that we protect and interpret battlefields.  Of course there is much more work to do.  Some of it will doubtless be quiet and uncontroversial: but there will be moments when the Trust should not shrink from fighting for its cause.  I am proud to be carrying my pike in its ranks."

Richard Holmes
August 2004