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This is a table of the number of recruits for the British Army during the First World War, 1914–1918. [1] [2] All recruits were volunteers until January 1916, when men were recruited under the Derby Scheme and as conscripts following the Military Service Act 1916. From July 1917, all recruits were counted as Conscripts.
At the beginning of 1914 the British Army had a reported strength of 710,000 men including reserves, of which around 80,000 were professional soldiers ready for war. By the end of the First World War almost 25 percent of the total male population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had joined up, over five million men.
The Derby Scheme was introduced during World War I in Britain in the autumn of 1915 by Herbert Kitchener's new Director General of Recruiting, Edward Stanley, 17th Earl of Derby (1865–1948) after which it was named. It used strong pressure tactics to try to pressure men regarded as eligible to serve in the military to voluntarily enlist.
By the First World War, the British military forces (i.e., those raised in British territory, whether in the British Isles or colonies, and also those raised in the Channel Islands, but not the British Indian Army, the military forces of the Dominions, or those of British protectorates) was still a complex of organisations, and not strictly a single force under a single administration.
The British Army in 1813 contained over 250,000 men, [13] though this was much larger in comparison to the army at the beginning of the war, the all volunteer British army was still much smaller than that of France, which with conscription had an army over 2.6 million. [9]
Alfred Leete's recruitment poster for Kitchener's Army.. On 6 August 1914, less than 48 hours after Britain's declaration of war, Parliament sanctioned an increase of 500,000 men for the Regular Army, and on 11 August the newly-appointed Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, issued his famous call to arms: 'Your King and Country Need You', urging the first ...