Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Soldiers’ close acquaintance with public houses was only partly linked to their search for drink or their interest in congenial civilian employment. As R. E. Scouller observes in his magisterial The Armies of Queen Anne, ‘the government had to make shift for their dangerous charges by visiting them on the other criminal class – inn-keepers.’6 The practice of billeting troops on private houses, such a hated feature of the Civil War, was declared illegal in 1679 and again outlawed by the 1689 Bill of Rights. That year the second Mutiny Act recognised that because there was so little barrack accommodation, available soldiers would have to be housed somewhere. Because there was occasion for ‘the marching of many regiments, troops and companies in several parts of this kingdom towards the sea-coasts and otherwise,’ local constables and magistrates were authorised to billet the army in ‘inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualling houses, and in all houses selling brandy, strong waters, cider, or metheglyn, by retail, to be drank in their houses, and no other, and in no private houses whatsoever’.7

  Even after most soldiers were housed in barracks the law still permitted them to be billeted in public houses when they were on the line of march, and they were ‘frequently billeted after they had arrived at their destination under a presumption that they were still on the march, and that the route authorising them to be billeted was still in force’. The ‘route’ – from the French feuille de route – was a document signed on behalf of the Crown by the secretary at war and then by the secretary of state for war, with regiments being issued with sufficient blank forms for their use. The 1914 Manual of Military Law noted proudly that ‘billeting is now hardly ever resorted to by regular forces, except when actually moving, and the introduction of railways has greatly diminished its necessity even on these occasions.’8 The rules in Scotland and Ireland were different: in Scotland soldiers could be billeted on private houses till 1857, and in Ireland till 1879.

  Although it was recognised that billeting was ‘oppressive and generally unpopular, as well as detrimental to the soldier’, opponents of the standing army maintained that putting troops in barracks not only institutionalised a force that ought to be dispensed with, but provided the government with a ready means for oppressing the people. There was certainly a grain of truth in the latter argument, for some of the earliest barracks were built in Scotland and Ireland, where governments needed military force readily to hand and it was either impractical or downright dangerous to billet soldiers. The first purpose-built barracks, at Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border, were built in 1717 to the design of Nicholas Hawksmoor. They could accommodate 600 men in what was, by the standards of the age, reasonable comfort. Ruthven Barracks, sited on top of an old castle mound in the Highlands, was built in 1719, just after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. It had two three-storey barrack-blocks within an enclosing wall, with bastioned towers on two of its corners, and both barracks and wall were loopholed for defence. Fort William, Fort Augustus, and Fort George picketed the Great Glen. Fort George, Ardersier, not far from Inverness, was built in 1748 to replace an earlier structure. It is a formidable star-shaped fortress, the best example of Vauban-style ‘artillery fortification’ in the British Isles.

  Neither scattered inland barracks nor the limited accommodation within the elderly fortifications of great seaports were sufficient to house the army of the Georges. It was in a state of constant movement, as regiments marched to and from the harbours that connected Britain to her burgeoning empire and the seats of war in Europe, North America, and India. There were the West Country ports of Plymouth, Bristol, and Bideford; mighty Portsmouth on the south coast; Greenwich, Woolwich, Dartford, and Gravesend on the lower reaches of the Thames; Chatham and Rochester on the Medway; and occasionally Newcastle upon Tyne. Troops sailing to and from Ireland used the River Dee, near Chester, Liverpool, and the Clyde. Within Britain there were established corridors of military movement. These tended not to be in bleak and exposed countryside with little in the way of towns for billeting troops. So Wales or the extreme south-west would be avoided. Billeting cavalry brought the added complication of feeding and watering horses. On three of the four occasions that cavalry was sent into Wales to support the civil power, it went dismounted. In Scotland regular soldiers did not stray far from fortified barracks or large towns, and the policing of the Highlands was left largely to independent companies of locally raised infantry, in whom the Black Watch has its origins.

  If some regimental peregrinations were dictated by the demands of foreign service, others reflected the army’s frequent employment in aid of the civil power. Cavalry and dragoon regiments patrolled the coast and sent detachments inland to cut routes used by smugglers. Horse and foot alike were stationed in areas where riots and other disturbances were common. Seaports were troublesome, for these towns often bent under the strain of industrial expansion. Gloucestershire had unruly weavers, and there were areas of persistent agricultural unrest like Northumberland and Durham. Ireland was particularly taxing. In November 1753 Corporal Todd found himself in a subaltern’s party sent by sea from Cork ‘to take Murphy O’Sullivan, a great smuggler, who was outlawed for killing an officer of the customs’. They surrounded Sullivan’s hut and the lieutenant ordered him to surrender. When there was no response they tried to fire the place, but at first it would not burn, for it was a rainy day. Three women emerged and were spared, and the men inside fired through the windows until the roof was well alight, then ran out and were shot. O’Sullivan was the last to appear: his blunderbuss missed fire, and he was shot dead at the door. The soldiers found some silver spoons and other valuables in the hut ‘which was divided amongst us’, and sewed O’Sullivan into a piece of sail cloth to take him back to Cork. There was a reward of £500 for taking him dead or alive, and the soldiers happily pocketed £4. 12s. apiece.9

  Not all excursions in aid of the civil power ended as happily. The Bristol riots of 1831 saw three days of serious unrest, in which the bishop’s palace, mansion house, and much of the prison were burnt. Isambard Kingdom Brunel halted his work on the Clifton suspension bridge to become a special constable. The 3rd Dragoon Guards charged the mob in Queen Square with drawn swords. Officers were usually concerned about being accused of over-reacting, and would take no action until an hour after a sheriff or magistrate had read the riot act. On this occasion, though, the Irish-born Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brereton – as Inspecting Field Officer, Bristol Recruiting District, he found himself in command – was court-martialled for neglect of duty. He had tried to persuade the crowd in Queen Square to disperse, and had ordered the troops to use swords rather than firearms. He shot himself while his trial was in progress.

  A soldier in 1/Cameron Highlanders remembered a Belfast riot in 1907 that might have been familiar to men of his regiment eighty years later.

  The scene that followed must have closely resembled the night before Quatre Bras … our services were called for the 11th and 12th August, when the natives of the ‘Falls’ district entered into a nut-cracking competition with the police, and several of the military had the opportunity of experiencing what it was like to be struck with a ‘Belfast Kidney’ (a paving stone) and also of listening to the elocutionary power of the ‘Falls’ damsels.10

  Soldiers were regularly used to contain or disperse riots, to patrol the countryside at times of agricultural unrest and, increasingly, to intervene during strikes. In the Featherstone colliery riot of 7 September 1893 two bystanders were killed when troops opened fire, and thereafter the military authorities sought to intervene in maximum strength so as to deter the crowd without the need to use firearms. The need to provide aid to the civil power disturbed regimental deployments in the eighteenth century, making it harder for battalions to train together. Thereafter, there were occasions on which the army’s whole pattern of life was disrupted by the need to maintain essential services: the fire service disputes of 1977 and 2002–3 had a major impact on training.

  Keeping troops in volatile urban areas was
believed to be harmful to discipline. In 1771 Major General James Murray reviewed the 35th Foot in Bristol. It was packed with recruits, and he reported that the city was ‘a very bad quarter for so young a regiment. It is productive of all the vice, and bad consequence, which Wapping would be.’11

  The Foot Guards were more static, marching into central London for parades or inspections or less frequently going off on campaign. In 1726 1st Foot Guards had nine of its companies billeted about Holborn and the parish of St Andrew Holborn, with two each in Clerkenwell and St Giles Cripplegate, one apiece in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, and St Sepulchre without Newgate, a company in Shoreditch and Folgate, and one in East Smithfield and St Katherines. A further ten were across London Bridge, in the Borough of Southwark.12 With companies of around 100 men apiece and an abundance of alehouses – more than 7,000 in the whole of London – such arrangements worked well enough. But when the 20th Foot marched from Canterbury to Devizes in May 1756, it did such damage that Lieutenant Colonel Wolfe feared ‘We have ruined half the public houses upon the march, because they have quartered us in villages too poor to feed us without destruction to themselves.’13 In order to avoid swamping local accommodation, regiments customarily marched in two to four ‘divisions’, each a day ahead of the next, and all observing two ‘halting days’, usually Thursday and Sunday each week. In consequence a battalion covered the ground far more slowly than an individual traveller. In May 1738 the 11th Foot set out from Exeter for Berwick, marching in three divisions and observing the usual halting days. It was quartered at twenty-nine towns on its route, and rested a full week at Newcastle and Gateshead, taking 51 days to cover about 430 miles.14

  In October 1756 William Todd’s 12th Foot was on the move in the south east. On the 24th he was on baggage guard, marching with the wagons behind the regiment. These held the officers’ baggage, and such of a soldier’s possessions as he was not wearing about his encumbered person or carrying on his broad back. From 1729 an infantryman received

  A good full-bodied cloth coat, well lined, which may serve for the waistcoat for the second year

  A waistcoat

  A pair of good kersey breeches

  A pair of good strong stockings

  A pair of good strong shoes

  Two good shirts and two good neckcloths

  A good strong hat, well laced.

  For the SECOND YEAR:

  A good cloth coat, well lined, as for the first year

  A waistcoat made of the former year’s coat

  A pair of new kersey breeches

  A pair of good strong stockings

  A pair of good strong shoes

  A good shirt, and a neckcloth

  A good strong hat, well laced

  For the Fusilier regiments, caps once in two years

  The new waistcoat in the first year, is only to be given to regiments new-raised, and to additional men, who are likewise to be furnished with two pairs of stockings and two shirts.15

  William Todd would have worn a broad leather belt for sword and bayonet over his right shoulder, although by now swords were not worn by privates and corporals except in grenadier companies, whose men affected natty hangers, not much use in battle but comforting in a Dartford tavern. Over his left shoulder went another belt, this one supporting the cartridge box. Both were coloured buff in his regiment, and Todd, a reliable handyman, was allowed 4½d. to make each man in his company a ball of yellow clay, ochre, and tragacanth gum so that soldiers could buff up their belts before an inspection. He may still have been carrying most of his belongings in a large cow-hide knapsack slung across his right shoulder, but oblong packs were increasingly popular: the government paid for canvas ones, but generous regimental colonels might run to the more durable goatskin. A water bottle and light knapsack completed Todd’s equipment. On the march he might have slung his musket across his back to keep both hands free to help with the wagons along their rutted way.

  Much as the details of dress and equipment were to vary over the centuries, Todd’s own problems would change little. He might, with luck, discover that arrangements had been made for his large pack to travel in a baggage wagon, but soldiers were often unhappy, not without reason, about letting their kit out of sight. Also on the baggage wagons were a variety of ‘camp necessities’, like hatchets, tin kettles, blankets, ‘bells of arms’ to cover piled muskets, and tents – 14-man tents for the men, and privately purchased ones for the officers.

  With its patient oxen hauling the creaking wagons, the baggage train of the 12th Foot lumbered along.

  We marched to Dartford but the regiment crossed the river Thames at Gravesend and the next day we marched and quartered in London, and the next day we marched to Romford, the next to Chelmsford and the next to a village, and on the 30th instant we marched into Colchester. The Regiment had got in two days before us, our comrades had got a very good billet for me at the sign of the Crown in the market place.

  On 23 December they trudged off again.

  Marched from Colchester for Canterbury in the County of Kent, the same road the regiment marched from Chatham camp, only we had two days more marches from Chatham to Sittingbourne, and from thence to the city of Canterbury. I was quartered at William Badcock’s at the sign of the Cold Bath as he rented the bathing house for the quality, they paying so much for the season … My old comrade Sergeant Merrin got in with Mrs Cooper at the sign of Lord Marlborough’s head … I very often visited them and was made one of the best, as he was made paymaster sergeant and could not make up his accounts without me.

  In March 1757 the regiment left Canterbury briefly to help make space for seven Hanoverian regiments on their way to Dover for transport home. When it returned Todd found that the influx of troops had had a serious effect on the local prices:

  Everything is unreasonable dear and it is said several poor people eat grains, potatoes is 3½d. per pound. Here I sent for ½ a guinea which was sent me under seal of a letter but I never received it. John Freeman of our company stole a silver tankard from his quarters for which he was transported for 7 years. All our Regiment was put into stoppages [of pay, to recompense the owner for it]. Here the officers could not live upon their pay, etc. … Men live very hard.16

  The military authorities paid publicans to supply soldiers on the march with breakfast and dinner, washed down with small beer. Wise men kept sufficient bread, and cheese too, if they could salvage any, in their ‘snapsacks’ to sustain them at the midday halt. Publicans were also required to provide men with straw and candles, arrangements which were as much honoured in the breach as the observance, and soldiers quipped ‘The Angel treats us like devils, and the Rising Sun refuses us light to go to bed by.’ In Scotland men quartered on private householders supplied their own food for the landlady to cook, as James Anton of the Black Watch, in garrison in Edinburgh in 1804, tells us:

  I shall mention here our usual meals (with which we were perfectly contented) during the time we were in quarters, as they differ so widely from what soldiers now-a-days are accustomed to; premising, that we had our provisions, without contract, at our own purchasing. We breakfasted about nine in the morning, on bread and milk; dined at about two in the afternoon, on potatoes and a couple of salt herrings, boiled in the pot with the potatoes: a bottle of small beer (commonly called swipes) and a slice of bread served for supper, when we were disposed to take that meal, which soldiers seldom do. On the whole I am certain our expenses for messing, dear as markets were, did not exceed three shillings and sixpence each, weekly; and to do our landlady justice, she was not anxious to encourage extravagance in preparing and cooking our meals, particularly as they required fuel and attention; and, in these matters, we were far from being troublesome or particular. Our obliging landlady would, when requested, bring us a pennyworth of soup, called kale, for our dinner, instead of herring; and if we had a little cause to remark on the want of cleanliness in the dish, or its contents, she jocosely replied, ‘It tak’s a deal o’ dirt to poison soge
rs.’17

  Officers paid for their own food, though they received an extra daily allowance to help them to do so, and could generally afford a convivial dinner, though local shortages of provisions might limit their menu and drive up its price.

  Although the billeting system was well regulated and familiar, it was fraught with hazards. Sergeant Ned Botwood of the 47th Foot advised his listeners that there was much to be said for settling tavern debts by ‘giving leg-bail’, simply failing to pay when the detachment moved on. Before a detachment departed its drummers would beat the ‘General Call to Arms’ around the town, telling soldiers to prepare to fall in under arms (the next call would be the ‘Assembly’ which brought the companies together), and coincidentally warning tradesmen that this was their last chance to get their bills paid. Soldiers brawled with civilians and one another, led youths astray, and seduced local girls. Regiments passed from town to town leaving a trail of broken hearts and broken pates, unpaid accounts and raided orchards. James Anton recalled three girls from Hamilton who had been induced, ‘by promises of marriage’, to follow their soldier lovers to Edinburgh, where they scratched a living by walking barefoot to Leith to unload colliers. ‘These poor girls were sensible that they had acted wrong in leaving their home,’ he wrote, ‘relying on the faith of worthless lovers, but they were still honest, and as yet had not been under the necessity of throwing themselves upon the town.’18