On 6 August 1914, two days after Britain entered the Great War, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, concluded an address to parliament with a call to arms. ‘Let us now make sure that all the resources, not only of this United Kingdom’, Asquith urged, ‘but of the vast Empire of which it is the centre shall be thrown into the scale.’ The Prime Minister was sure that the Empire would rally around Britain in the war that followed, and subsequent events proved his confidence well founded. The dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand alone contributed expeditionary forces of more than 840 000 men to the conflict. The origins of such imperial military cooperation, however, pre-dated the war by decades. The physical manifestations of intra-Empire military cooperation might have unfolded on the shores of Gallipoli, the fields of France and the deserts of Palestine, but conceptions of how, or even whether, this situation was ever to come to pass had been the subject of tentative, halting thought and discussion since the late-Victorian era.

This book is a study of the military career of Lieutenant-General Sir Edward ‘Curley’ Hutton. Yet it is not a traditional biography. Rather, Hutton is a means by which to shed light on late-Victorian thinking on the ‘land’ defence of the British Empire and the embryonic structures of imperial (military) defence during this period. Developed in an era when traditional military mechanisms and assumptions in London were increasingly seen as inadequate to cope with rapidly changing global circumstances, these were issues concerned fundamentally with whether and how the white self-governing colonies could contribute to the collective security of the Empire at large. They were complex questions, which spoke to a wide range of issues beyond a narrow – and at times shallow – contemporary defence debate in Britain and at the edges of the Empire.

Hutton returned to England on 17 December 1904 and a few days later visited the War Office. The reception, this time around, was not as it had been after his return from New South Wales, Canada or South Africa. Although military figures received Hutton with courtesy, the environment had changed. A new guard with new ideas had taken over. Moreover, Arnold-Forster, as Secretary of State for War, gave a ‘coldness’ of reception that disturbed Hutton, despite the long pseudo-friendship between the two. He refused Hutton an official audience and ensured that he never officially received the Australian Government's formal thanks for his efforts. Nor, for that matter, did Hutton receive any formal honours for his services in Australia. In Hutton's mind such a rebuff was a consequence of Arnold- Forster's support for the failed imperial reserve scheme of 1902. Hutton was received well by Sir Montagu Ommanney at the Colonial Office and with civility by Alfred Lyttelton, Chamberlain's successor as Secretary of State for the Colonies. In truth, however, Hutton had risen on the stars of Wolseley and Chamberlain. Without such men there was little to shield him from the controversies that had stalked him for the last decade or from his reputation at home and abroad as an outspoken and difficult martinet.

As a consequence, once back in London Hutton had difficulty securing an active appointment of significance. On 1 July 1905 he was given temporary command of the 3rd Division at Aldershot (subordinate to the now General Sir John French) and, soon after, concurrently took up responsibilities as the officer in charge of administration within Eastern Command under the command of Lieutenant-General Lord Methuen. Neither role satisfied Hutton's ambitions, and he chaffed at working under officers he considered from his time in South Africa to be his equals, if not his inferiors. Winning no friends in the process, he complained to those around him that more was his due thanks to ‘twelve years of Independent Command under diverse and difficult circumstances in various parts of the Empire’.

Events moved at a rapid pace for Hutton in early 1893. At further meetings in January with Colomb and Vincent it was suggested that he might consider taking up an appointment to command the military forces of New South Wales. The particular hook was that, in such an appointment, he might have a hand in ‘strengthening the tie between Australia and the Mother Country’ and even to ‘assist so far as possible, in bringing about the long-discussed political union of the six States of Australia’. While key figures in the Colonial and War Office worried that Federation might edge the Australian colonies away from Britain, for many ardent imperialists in it represented an opportunity for fresh and even stronger ties. A newly federated nation, united in the context of prevailing imperial sentiment in both Britain and the Australian colonies, might offer more to the Empire than the sum of its colonial constituent parts. This was particularly so for defence. A sound military system for New South Wales might subsequently be developed into a federal scheme, which in turn might help solve the strategic dilemmas of the Empire along the lines advocated by such men as Seeley. The notion fired Hutton's imagination. Here was an opportunity to exert an influence on the imperial questions that had increasingly been occupying his thoughts. From three threads – an effective force for the colony, the hope that it might be the basis of a federal military arrangement for Australia and the potential this force offered the Empire – was woven the fabric of the next phase of his career.

There is little question that well-connected and influential men like Vincent and Colomb made use of their personal relationships at the War Office and elsewhere in order to ensure the appointment of an officer like Hutton to New South Wales, as part of their own imperial agendas. Here was a young, energetic, outspoken, intelligent, ambitious, imperial-minded and reform-minded Etonian, eager to make his mark and seemingly happy to take ‘advice’ from his mentors.

In mid-December 1903, Hutton wrote to Lord Northcote, soon to be appointed Australia's third Governor-General, to introduce himself. He claimed that his success as GOC thus far in forging an Australian federal army and the radical restructuring it entailed had been ‘very remarkable’. Few could have anticipated so little friction, Hutton continued, in effecting 'so many and such vital changes’. It was a similar message to many others Hutton had been sending home to friends and patrons back in Britain, yet it smacked more of wishful thinking than reality. The truth was that from mid-1903 Hutton faced a slowly rising tide of resistance and antagonism towards his sweeping reform plans and, in some quarters, against his person. It began to feel no doubt like a version of Canada all over again. Many of the drivers were in fact similar, especially those connected with Hutton's methods and personality. Others were quite different. The net result, however, was hauntingly familiar.

To begin, in the wake of the war in South Africa, the colonies watched with interest continuing turmoil at the War Office, especially the submission of the Elgin Report, weeks before Brodrick left office on 6 October 1903. His successor, Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster, took the Elgin recommendations regarding War Office reform and established the Esher (War Office Reconstitution) Committee to oversee them. Hutton, like other senior British officers in the colonies, was increasingly identified with what was seen from afar as rank War Office incompetence, which itself was understood to have contributed to difficulties in South Africa. At same time the Norfolk Commission, appointed in spring 1903 to investigate British auxiliary forces, was brutal in its criticisms. Questions began to be asked in Australia. Was it not the same ‘British’ system, for example, that Hutton was trying to impose? The fact that the GOC was already advocating many of the commission's recommendations was less important than perceptions.

Edward Hutton was born on 6 December 1848 into a respectable middleclass family, with traditions of military service. Although he later mixed in the highest social circles, Hutton was not born to the aristocracy and was always sensitive about his social positioning. His ancestors, the Huttons of Lincolnshire, had their roots in the ‘yeomanry of Nottinghamshire’ of the early seventeenth century. His great-grandfather, Henry, was a barrister and elected Recorder of the city of Lincoln in 1784, establishing the family's respectability by taking possession, through his wife's inheritance, of Sherwood Hall near Mansfield in 1804. Henry's eldest son and Hutton's grandfather, Edward William, joined the 4th Royal Irish Dragoons in 1805 and retired as a lieutenant-colonel in 1838, after considerable operational service. His grandfather, Hutton later reflected, ‘much impressed my childish imagination as a Peninsular War veteran’. Three of Hutton's paternal uncles were also military officers. One, Thomas, joined the 4th Light Dragoons and commanded a squadron in the Crimean War at the Battle of Alma, the Siege of Sebastopol and at the ill-fated charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Hutton's own father, Edward Thomas, however, did not choose a military career but rather, after school at Rugby, became a junior partner in the West Riding Bank.

In 1845 Hutton's father married Jacintha Charlotte (always known as Charlotte), daughter of the Reverend James Phipps Eyre. The Eyres of Hampshire were strongly liberal in political outlook and had a lineage that could be traced to members of Oliver Cromwell's Council. The joining of such a strongly Whig family to the Huttons was not viewed with satisfaction by Edward Thomas's parents. Consequently, when Hutton's father died on 15 February 1849, two months after his son's birth, Charlotte and her in-laws grew steadily estranged. Alone and isolated, Charlotte doted on her son and received his deep affection in return.

From his earliest meetings with Howard Vincent in January 1893 to his discussions with Robert Meade in March and his close study of George Sydenham Clarke's papers on the voyage to Melbourne, Hutton busied himself considering exactly how he might initiate a federal defence scheme or system for Australia. Success in this regard would make a mark and his reputation. He was therefore, in his ownwords, ‘determined to risk all in my efforts … to bring about [such] a scheme’. It was an ambitious objective. Much stood in Hutton's way. The issue of a federal defence plan for the Australian colonies had been under discussion from the time of the Carnarvon Commission, but little had eventuated. By 1893, in addition to political inertia, colonial parochialism and lack of funds that had long acted to stifle such an initiative, the apparent closeness of political union encouraged opposition to interim defence measures. So too the fundamental question of who or what would control a federal military force in the absence of political union had never been adequately addressed. The idea of a British federal military commander, as suggested by Bevan Edwards, was out of the question. Nor, without executive authority (or even representation from New South Wales), could it be the Federal Council. Indeed, Sir Henry Parkes, for one, believed that the establishment of a federal defence system would take more effort to effect than political Federation itself. Once set on a course, however, as he had already and amply demonstrated, Hutton possessed an ability to ignore any and all realities that suggested otherwise. His efforts to use his time in New South Wales to achieve this federal purpose, and perhaps even leverage success in this regard towards imperial ends, was no different.

Hutton's immediate reform agenda for the New South Wales forces and his mounting friction with Dibbs did not allow him to press the federal issue in the initial period of his command, although developing an effective military system in the colony that could serve as a federal model was an important early step.