What class was Douglas Haig born into?
He would have been born into the middle class since his father was owner of a successful whiskey distillery (of which was a Haig family business) in Scotland. He also attended a public school in Bristol which only families with money would have been able to put their sons through. He became a separate branch of the middle class when he joined the army, known as “Officer Class”, which no longer exists – mainly because of actions such as the Battle of the Somme where thousands of these types of men that ran Britain’s Empire were wiped out through four years of war and were never really to return to the class structure. Britain never really recovered from their disappearance.
