Richard Holmes: TV Historian

John Crace, in the Gardian (May 18, 2004):

The room looks exactly as you might expect. Books of campaigns are piled floor to ceiling and there are battered helmets, rusty shell cases, rolled-up maps and regimental memorabilia occupying every spare surface. It seems perfectly to sum up the part-scholar, part-man of action in the field that makes up the somewhat old-fashioned on-screen persona of military historian Richard Holmes. Which makes it a shoo-in photo opportunity.

Except that the office belongs to a colleague and Holmes doesn't want his picture taken there. He takes us down the corridor to his own room, which is altogether more restrained and ordered. The books are on shelves and his desk is disconcertingly clear. And there's not a battlefield relic in sight. "You have to keep your humanity," he says.

You can understand why he's anxious to make the point. It's all too easy to mistake his deeply felt passion for his subject for gung-ho enthusiasm, and he wants to make sure he gets the balance right. He's not in the business of glorifying war and his books have always tended to the personal: his latest, Tommy, a social and cultural as much as military history of the British infantryman in the first world war, is his most heartfelt work to date.

"It really mattered to me to get this one right," he says. "There have been countless books on the generals, the campaigns, the Treaty of Versailles and the origins of the first world war, but the ordinary soldiers have been somewhat marginalised: they are usually only dragged in as evidence in another debate. Most soldiers didn't care much one way or the other about their commanders - their loyalty was to their battalion. So I wanted to put them centre stage. I wanted to create the light and shade that would allow their blood to come through the pigment."

Holmes has eschewed the traditional route of chatting to veterans. And not just because there are only 35 left. "I've never felt that eye-witness accounts so long after the event are of much value," he says. "If you look at what veterans were writing just 10 years after the end of the war, it's quite different from what they were writing at the time.

"In the late 1920s, history was refracted through unemployment and the depression, and the war became a sham that wasted men's lives, but contemporary diaries and journals reflect a different image. The war was something to be endured - not in the stiff-upper-lip class sense, but as a necessary hardship in which it was still important to maintain standards."

So it was to the Imperial War Museum and the Liddell Hart archive at Leeds University that Holmes turned for his primary sources. And he confesses to finding it unbearably moving at times. "You'd open a box and start a journey with a person," he says. "You'd get to know them intimately through their letters and journals and then it would abruptly end with a letter from a commanding officer saying that that person had been killed in action.

"It put me in mind of what TE Lawrence called 'the rings of sorrow' that spread out from each person's death. When you consider the scale of casualties in the first world war, the rings become overwhelming."

Holmes may be a professional historian but he's also a military man through and through. He joined the Territorial Army as a squaddie in 1964 and was commissioned as an officer whilst at Cambridge, before going on to command the 2nd battalion Wessex regiment in the mid-80s. He's also worked at the Ministry of Defence as Britain's senior reservist, in charge of all reserve forces, and spends 50 days a year as colonel in chief of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment.

His academic appointments have reflected his military status. He started teaching at the department of war studies at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst in 1969. "I just answered an ad in the paper," he says. "The only slightly unusual part of the selection process was being interviewed by the civil service appointments panel."...