Wagoner Pre-War

Some of the first men to go to war in 1914 were not trained soldiers; they were wagoners from East Yorkshire, who formed a special reserve set up by Sir Mark Sykes at Sledmere. He had seen the chaos of poor transport in the Boer War and saw that the farms on his estates in the East Riding used exactly the same system of pole wagons and postilion driving that the army used. This was very much an old fashioned system and had become rare elsewhere in the UK.