One of the original Bantams, Private William Boynton Butler, who had joined 17/West Yorkshires in early 1915, earned the Victoria Cross when, in August 1917, he stood in front of a mortar bomb whose fuse had ignited prematurely until some passing infantry had moved on, and then hurled it to safety: it exploded as soon as it left his hand. On 26 March 1918 Sergeant Albert Mountain, who had enlisted in a Bantam battalion but had later transferred to 15/17th West Yorkshires, rallied his company in the face of an overwhelming German attack. He too was awarded the VC. Both Butler and Mountain were 5ft 1in tall. The British army’s current lower height limit is 148 cm (4ft 8ins), although some arms demand more.
As Lieutenant Colonel Edward Windus warned Samuel Bagshawe in 1760, one could seldom rely on junior officers sent off in search of recruits, for ‘very young gentlemen are apt to be a little giddy and to mind their country diversions more than their recruiting’. Of the ten men enlisted by Ensign Cook, for example, one had already run off, and seven were Roman Catholics and thus expressly forbidden to enlist. ‘One of which, at least,’ grumbled Windus, ‘must be known by Ensign Cook to be so, as he was a servant of Mr Cook’s father, and lived in the house with him.’ Another recruit was ‘very old and not strong. He acknowledges to me that he was born in the year of the Battle of Almanza [1707], and calls himself 53 years of age.’ The wise Captain Bennett Cuthberston warned his readers that
It very highly concerns the recruiting officer, to depend more on a man’s looks than on what he calls himself: the common people are in general so ignorant on this point that it is absurd to take a peasant’s word for being only twenty-five when his appearance … bespeaks him to be many years advanced beyond that age.
Cuthbertson thought that men between the ages of 17 and 25 made ‘the most tractable of soldiers’.10 In 1839 it was suggested that men who joined over the age of 25 were ‘habitually dissipated and profligate characters, broken-down gentlemen, discharged soldiers, deserters, etc.’ Moreover, as only 5 per cent of soldiers were then fit for service at the age of 40, enlisting a 20-year-old gave a better return than taking on a man of 25. When the 13th Foot was inspected at Martinique in 1812, it contained only three men over 55, nine aged 50–55, eight 45–50, twenty-four 40–45, sixty-three 35–40, 137 aged 30–35, 209 of 25–30, 240 aged 20–25, sixteen 18–20 and twelve under 18.11
Recruiters were allowed to take younger lads an inch shorter than the rules required if they could be deemed ‘likely to grow’. From 1797 to 1814 thousands of orphans between 10 and 15 years of age on parish relief were given military training until they were sturdy enough to sign on. In December 1797 the manpower shortage was so desperate that six regiments of foot were allowed to complete their recruiting with boys of 13–18. ‘They are to be well fed,’ the regiments were told, ‘and for some time to be mere walking drills, after which they are to be exercised with light fusees [muskets], one hundred of which have been sent to each of the six regiments.’12 Four more regiments were later allowed similar latitude. In January 1811, as the demands of war bit ever harder, regiments were authorised to enlist up to ten under-16-year-olds per company.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century formal age limits for normal enlistment were set between 18 and 25, rationalising what had in effect been standard practice for many years. The cavalry had long declined to take youths below 19, but when the minimum age for the army as a whole was put up to 19 in 1881 an immediate recruiting shortfall forced its reduction to 18 just two years later. However, an official committee reported that youngsters often broke down in service: ‘a large proportion of the losses from death and invaliding which occur … in the first years of a soldier’s service is due to the extreme youth of the men that join, who cannot stand the labour and fatigue to which they are subjected … and therefore either die or break down and return to civil life weakened and with diminished powers for earning their livelihood.’13 This echoed the complaints of late eighteenth-century inspecting officers that too many units, especially those recovering at home after lengthy foreign service, were composed, like the 27th Foot in 1786, of ‘weakly recruits … too small and slight for any service’. In 1773 the 37th Foot, just back from Minorca, was composed of ‘mostly growing boys’ who lacked ‘strength enough for any very hard service’.14
The recruitment of under-age soldiers was a regular feature of army life until, after the First World War, recruits were at last required to produce birth certificates. As it had been a legal requirement to register a birth from 1875, we must conclude that the army, perennially short of soldiers, was anxious to permit a little creativity where birth dates were concerned. In 1892 General Sir Redvers Buller, adjutant general, was accompanying the Duke of Cambridge on an inspection of recruits:
We looked at one young fellow who seemed very young. His Royal Highness said to him, ‘What is your age?’ He said ‘Seventeen years and one month’. A sergeant, who was standing near, said ‘What is your regulation age?’ and the recruit answered ‘18 years and 5 months’.15
However, for most of its history the army legitimately enlisted boys as drummers and bandsmen, so the issue is not straightforward. Such boys were often the sons or orphans of soldiers, and in parallel with the grand military dynasties of officers went the smaller tribes that meant so much to individual regiments. William Sweeney enlisted into the 79th Highlanders at the age of fourteen in 1825, and was probably the son of Terence Sweeney of the 79th, killed in a Glasgow riot. William was discharged to pension in 1846, and all his five sons joined the 79th. One them, Robert William, was born at Stirling Castle Barracks, signed on in Ireland in 1846 at the age of 11, and eventually went on to become one of the first graduates of the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall, reaching the warrant officer rank of bandmaster. Another of William’s sons, Donald Spence Sweeney, became band sergeant of the 79th. Donald had two sons, one of them band sergeant in the Cameron Highlanders, as the 79th had now become, and the other was killed as a bandsman in the Camerons on the Aisne in September 1914, and remembered on the Memorial to the Missing at La Ferté sous Jouarre.16
Drummers and bandsmen, whatever their age, were not primarily combatants, but both ran a soldier’s risks. When Lieutenant Fred Roberts entered the Secunderbagh at Lucknow on 16 November 1857, on the heels of the storming party, he saw a drummer of the 93rd Highlanders:
he must have been one of the first to pass the grim boundary between life and death; for when I got in I found him just inside the breach, quite dead, a pretty, innocent-looking fair-haired lad, not more than fourteen years old.17
Also during the relief of Lucknow, the 12-year-old Drummer Ross of the 93rd climbed to the top of the Shah Najaf Mosque, where, clutching a spire with one hand, he sounded the regimental call on his bugle, followed by other tunes including ‘Cock o’ the North’. The two youngest-ever winners of the VC were Drummer Thomas Flynn of the 64th Foot, awarded his decoration for gallant conduct at Cawnpore in 1857; and Hospital Apprentice Andrew Fitzgibbon, who accompanied the 67th Foot when it stormed the Taku Forts, at the mouth of the Peiho River in China, in 1860: both were 15 years and 3 months old. Although John Bent of the East Lancashires was 23 when he won the VC as a drummer in 1914, he fits comfortably into the pattern of army brats: son of a regular soldier, he had enlisted at the age of 14 in 1905.
Regiments were not inclined to take on the boys simply because they were short of men, but because they also felt a moral responsibility to look after the ‘sons of the brave’. Until after the Crimean War, when regiments went on foreign service they were accompanied by a limited number of families, and those left behind received no official support. In 1785 1,400 children, whose soldier fathers had died in the service or been posted abroad, were begging on Dublin’s streets. The Hibernian Society, a philanthropic organisation, had founded the Hibernian Asylum in Phoenix Park, Dublin in 1769, noting that ‘great numbers of children had been destitute of all means of subsistence’ and that the establishment had been founded ‘to prese
rve children left in such circumstances from popery, beggary and idleness.’ The military authorities took on responsibility for the school, now the Royal Hibernian Military School, in 1806 – it already contained over 2,000 children, one-third of them girls.
Three years before, the Royal Military Asylum, also for boys and girls, was established near Sloane Square on the King’s Road in Chelsea, on a site to be long known as the Duke of York’s Headquarters. It was renamed the Duke of York’s Royal Military School in 1892, and thereafter took boys only. The school moved to purpose-built premises on the cliffs at Dover in 1909. When Ireland became independent in 1922 the Royal Hibernian School moved to Shorncliffe in Kent, and two years later the remaining boys transferred to the nearby Duke of York’s. The last Hibernian student to leave the school was Cecil Vincent Walsh, who volunteered for the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in 1931, was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, served in a Royal Signals cipher unit throughout the Second World War and died as a retired lieutenant colonel in 1989.
Both the Hibernian Military School and the Duke of York’s School were explicit about placing male pupils in the army. The former’s 1808 warrant, based on that so recently granted to the Chelsea school, gave its aim as ‘to place in the Regular Army as private soldiers, in such corps as from time to time His Majesty shall be pleased to appoint, but with their own free consent, the orphans and children of soldiers in Ireland, for ever.’18 The army’s concept of ‘free consent’ was somewhat elastic. E. Souter, recalling his time at Chelsea in the 1850s, tells how:
About a fortnight after joining, the commandant, Colonel Cotton, asked me at what trade I would like to be trained; band, drums, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters or shirtmakers. He said that it was the practice to allow a boy to make his own choice, as a lad made better progress at a vocation of his own selection. I said I would like to be a tailor. The colonel then pointed out the advantages of a musical education and the privileges enjoyed by bandsmen in the army. The interview ended with the colonel using his own discretion and sending me to Mr Butley to be trained as a musician.19
Both schools were expressly military: students wore uniform, held ranks, were called upon to teach as part of a monitorial system, and were subject to rigid discipline. Teaching standards were not always high and some NCOs were not bright. One boy remembered being reprimanded when the school lined up in alphabetical order. ‘Phillips! Phillips!’ bellowed the NCO. ‘Why aren’t you with the Fs?’
The fact that both schools initially took boys and girls caused difficulties, and in 1822 a formidable steel barrier was erected between the sleeping quarters at Chelsea in a, predictably futile, attempt to prevent nocturnal association. One commentator considered the schools to be ‘infant regiments, more or less’, and what might have been deemed schoolboy larks elsewhere were here military offences. At Chelsea on 30 December 1852, Private Ends Seta was awarded six cuts of the cane and six hours in the ‘Black Hole’ for answering the commandant in a disrespectful manner. The punishment was repeated the following day when he was accused of kicking and making a noise in the Black Hole, and he received another eighteen cuts for throwing a mug of water out of the Black Hole and calling the sergeant major a fathead. The same year privates Batemen and Barry, both 13, stole the muff from the regimental chapel and cut it in pieces. They were given eighteen strokes of the birch, four days in the Black Hole, and six days’ extra drill.
Both schools produced a steady stream of recruits, many of whom relished the prospect of foreign service and what seemed decent pay. Drummer John Hammond of the Royal Berkshires affirmed,
I am very happy in my regiment. I have been granted effective drummer and now I clear 9½d. a day pay which I think very good for a boy of 15, don’t you?
In my regiment we feel it very keenly at not being sent to the war in South Africa. I think it is a shame as the 1st Royal Berks distinguished themselves at Tofrek, on the 22nd March 1885, and were made a royal regiment on the field of battle … As it is, they are bringing the Royal Sussex Regiment from Malta prior to sailing them to South Africa and sending us to Malta to linger in obscurity.20
John Holland left the Royal Hibernian to join the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Dublin in 1902, and went to India the following year. He remembered his arrival in Bombay largely because he found himself at the end of a queue of soldiers at the bar. Each said that the man behind would pay, and he was left with the bill. Of the five boys in his contingent, ‘one became a musician, and eventually became conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and one was sent home paralysed with VD.’21
The youngest soldier to enlist in the period 1792–1815 was probably James Wade of the 9th Foot who joined at the age of seven in July 1800, and one study suggests that there were 6,000 boys serving in the infantry alone in 1811.22 In 1833 N. W. Bancroft was ‘a very small shaver’ attending a regimental school in India, and told the local brigade commander how much he wanted to sign on. ‘Yes, my little man, you shall be a little soldier’, replied the brigadier. So Bancroft was enlisted as a boy, posted to the band, and began man-service (in the full splendour of horse artillery uniform) when he attained his 18th birthday, seven years later.23 In 1924 Spike Mays was 16 years and 3 months old when he left his Essex village to become a band-boy in the Royal Dragoons, and commenced his man-service the following year.
The enlistment of limited numbers of boys into non-combatant roles offended neither the letter of the law nor, on the eve of the First World War when children generally left school to begin work at 14, the custom of the age. What was more questionable was the enlistment of under-age youths by military authorities who had a shrewd idea that the recruit’s given age was false. In one sense it was a mutually reinforcing conspiracy, for the army needed to fill its ranks, and potential recruits knew that boys’ vacancies were limited and that pension rights only began with man-service. The issue became extraordinarily contentious in and after the First World War, when a large number of under-age soldiers were enlisted. For many years it was believed that Private John Condon of the Royal Irish Regiment was the youngest British soldier killed in the war, aged only 14, although there is now some doubt as to whether this was actually his age (some suggest that he was 18, and others maintain that the body buried in his grave is actually that of another soldier). There is no doubt that Rifleman Valentine Joe Strudwick was killed near Ypres in January 1916 at the age of 15, and that there were many 16-year-olds amongst the 6,340 British soldiers killed before they had reached the age of 21.
George Coppard tells us how he managed to enlist in the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1914 at the age of 16:
I presented myself to the recruiting sergeant at Mitcham Road Barracks, Croydon. There was a steady stream of men, mostly working types, queuing to enlist. The sergeant asked me my age, and when told, replied ‘Clear off, son. Come back tomorrow and see if you’re nineteen, eh?’ So I turned up again the next day and gave my age as nineteen. I attested in a batch of a dozen others and, holding up my right hand, swore to fight for King and Country. The sergeant winked as he gave me the King’s shilling, plus one shilling and ninepence ration money for that day.
Coppard actually gave his age as 19 years and 7 months. When, in February 1916 after he had gone to France, his family applied for his release saying that he was under-age and providing his birth certificate, the army replied that the age given on attestation was Coppard’s ‘official age’ and he could not be discharged.24 This reflected current policy, laid down in September 1915, which affirmed that a soldier under 17 years of age would be discharged on the authority of his commanding officer, but that youths over 17 would be held to serve according to their official age. Coppard, indisputably over 17 when his parents made their request, was retained in the service. But Private James Tait of the East Yorkshires who had joined aged 15½ in 1915, was released the following year when his mother protested, because he was still under 17. Tait signed up again, this time into the Durham Light Infantry, as soon as h
e was 18.
George Adams enlisted under-age into the Middlesex Regiment and survived Loos, telling his parents of the fate of so many of his comrades: ‘I am sorry to say that nearly all the fellows I knew have gone, and Dad, Jack Badrick the bricky who used to work for Harry Rooney has gone as well.’25 It is small wonder that his parents told the army of his real age soon afterwards. Offered the choice of staying in France or going home, he went home (in part because he thought that the army had not treated him fairly by denying him proficiency pay as a machine-gunner) but signed on again in January 1916. That year, after significant parliamentary pressure, the army changed its official policy. Soldiers under 17 years of age were to be sent home, and those between 17 and 18½ would be repatriated unless they were unwilling, in which case they could be used for duties out of the line. Men between 18½ and 19 were to be held in training or other units behind the lines until they reached the age of 19 and became eligible for front-line service. Given that units would be unaware of a soldier’s real age as opposed to the official age on his records, the process of investigation would only be initiated by an external source, usually the boy’s parents.
Some under-age boys signed on giving false names precisely to prevent family interference, and others, however illogical it may seem in liberal retrospect, were prepared to take extraordinary steps to get to France. Captain Dunn tells of a band-boy from the Royal Welch Depot who made his way to the front to join 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, who at once sent him back. The band went out to France officially in February 1919, and although Sergeant-Drummer Dyer ‘ruled them with pre-war severity’, the boys managed to burn down the band hut and frequently broke out of camp. In April they found their way into an ammunition dump, where one was killed and three others wounded in an accidental explosion probably caused by fiddling with grenades. Dunn thought that the dead boy, buried with full military honours at the age of 15, ‘was probably the youngest British soldier to be buried in France’.26 His comrades, who had gleefully put up blue ‘overseas service’ chevrons on arrival in France, returned to the depot wearing wound stripes as well.
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