Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  There were, though, times when the inhabitants of a town might sympathise with the men quartered there. In about 1776 an Irish regiment was billeted on private houses in Perth ‘and in most cases were wretchedly lodged; often in open tiled garrets with an unglazed window, or in dismal vaults fit for only for pigs.’ The men had just 3d. a day for food, and their ‘common breakfast was a half-penny roll, and half-penny worth of Suffolk cheese.’ Those who spent the rest of their allowance on ‘a glass of spirits’ to ‘alleviate their sufferings’ could afford nothing more to eat that day. In consequence the men ‘were driven to commit petty depredations’, and the regiment responded by flogging those who were caught, so that ‘the North Inch became a scene of continual barbarity. It was no uncommon thing to see six, or even ten of these unfortunate wretches suffer from 100 to 500 lashes each.’ Eventually a married soldier with four children was sentenced to 500 lashes for stealing potatoes from a field. The regiment’s commanding officer turned away the man’s wife when she begged for mercy, and the minute the flogging was over

  a general attack was made upon the officers. The adjutant was less fortunate than some of the others in escaping. He got a terrible mauling from the women, who laid him down on his belly, in which position he was held by some scores of vigorous hands, till he got a handsome flogging on the bare posteriors, in the presence of thousands, inflicted with an energy that would remain imprinted on the memory till the day of his death.19

  The unpredictable pattern of movement made it hard for commanding officers to get companies together for training, and while recruits could be trained well enough in billeting areas, collective exercises were well-nigh impossible. In consequence the authorities established ‘camps of instruction’ in wartime, with troops concentrated under canvas and able to learn the collective grammar of their trade. In August 1757 William Todd’s regiment marched to Portsmouth to prepare for the Rochefort expedition, and was shipped to the Isle of Wight where it encamped with ten other battalions of foot, two recently formed battalions, and a company of the train of artillery – the whole under Lieutenant General Sir John Mordaunt. The cavalry destined for the expedition trained separately at Salisbury. The infantry was divided into two brigades under major generals Conway and Cornwallis, and ‘we were frequently exercising by bushfighting, street firing, etc.’ Todd added, ‘We had our guards round the island to stop any man from deserting, and no man was allowed to pass above a mile from camp without a passport.’20

  Desertion, the wasting disease of eighteenth century armies, was encouraged by billeting. Men sloped off to home when their regiment’s route took them close to it, or ran rather than embark for a campaign or foreign posting. Some disappeared without apparent reason, although the frequency with which several deserted from the same troop or company suggests that harshness or poor leadership made its own contribution. The pages of the London Gazette are speckled with notices describing deserters and advising ‘the diligent subject’ how to claim money for apprehending them. On 21 December 1728 the Gazette announced:

  Deserted Nov 30 1728 from His Majesty’s third Regiment of Foot Guards, commanded by the Right Honourable the Earl of Dunmore, and out of His Lordship’s own Company, John Eidis, aged 27 Years, five foot, 11 inches and a half in his shoes, a tailor by trade, thin faced, staring full eyes, dark brown hair and eye brows, but wears a fair bob wig, a white set of teeth, wide mouth, thin lips, thick spoken, round body, good cleaver legs, stoops forward with his head when he walks, born in Guildford in Surrey, and says his mother keeps the White Hart Inn or ale-house, went away in his regimental clothes with white lace.

  Private Alexander McLeod and Drummer Philip Longbon of the same company had also deserted. They were told that if they returned to the regiment within 21 days of the Gazette ‘they shall be freely pardoned, as if no such misfortune had happened.’ Otherwise anyone who apprehended any one of them and lodged him in a town or county jail could, on application to the regimental agent, Captain Edison, ‘at his house in the Savoy, Strand, London,’ receive five pounds reward from the regiment for each of the privates (but only two guineas for the drummer) together with ‘the King’s Bounty Money’ of twenty shillings a head. John Williams, who had deserted from the Coldstream Guards, must have been the answer to a thief-taker’s prayer, for he cannot have been difficult to spot: he was ‘short and bald on the crown of his head, with a large scar on his right cheek and a small one on his left, a large mole with white hair on it growing on the right side of his head.’

  Officer deserters were infinitely more rare. The Gazette for 11 May 1805 appointed Quartermaster Robert Russell of the 18th Light Dragoons to be adjutant of his regiment, with the rank of cornet, ‘vice O’Donnell, deserted’. Despite the detailed descriptions of deserters and the substantial rewards on offer for catching them, many slipped back into civilian society or struggled for an existence on its margins. Eighteenth-century Gazettes often warn of deserters who ‘are now supposed to be guilty of ill practices on the highway’. Many re-enlisted under an assumed name, pocketing, as we have seen, a fresh enlistment bounty. The Gazette repeats offers of pardon to re-enlisted deserters in terminology that changes little over the years. In April 1742 they were ‘to continue in the same regiments they now are, without being molested or claimed by the officers of the respective corps to which they did formerly belong’.21 In October 1805, with the army urgently short of men, there was a general pardon for all deserters from the regular army provided they surrendered to a magistrate, commanding officer or senior officer of the recruiting service. Once established in new regiments ‘they shall not be liable to be claimed by any other corps to which they might formerly have belonged.’ Those who failed to return to service within the prescribed deadline of a month would be ‘proceeded against with the utmost severity’.22

  Few deserters voluntarily returned to service, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries desertion remained a running sore. In the 1780s one soldier in every six deserted from the army in Ireland, and from 1796 to 1825 desertion comprised between 14.3 per cent and 77.4 per cent of all military crimes, with an annual average of around 33 per cent. In 1875 the radical MP John Holms pointed out that recent attempts to make the army fully recruited had ‘utterly failed’; over the past five years desertion had run at an average of 5,516 men a year, most of them coming from the home-based army of around 90,500 men. Soldiers escaped easily enough from an army that circumnavigated the land, but potential deserters were surprisingly undeterred by a combination of well-guarded barracks and draconian punishments. Wully Robertson reported that it was easy enough to escape from his own barracks in 1870s Aldershot, but added that most had high walls, tipped with broken glass. It was not until 1871 that the practice of branding deserters with the letter ‘D’ at last stopped. True, by that time the process involved administering a tattoo with a spiked stamp, an improvement from the brutality of needles and black powder, but it was an index of the army’s fear of this debilitating illness.

  The steady increase in barrack accommodation from the late eighteenth century helped reduce the frequency of regimental moves, but they never wholly ceased. As early as 1840 the War Office shifted the 20th Foot from Manchester to Liverpool by rail, demonstrating that the railway could be used to move troops more quickly and with less attendant disorder than was entailed in long marches. In 1858, North Camp station – its four broad platforms designed to help troops entrain and detrain – was opened to serve the new camp at Aldershot. The big redbrick barracks at Tidworth were served by a station that opened in 1900. In 1907 the army opened its own railway line, the Longmoor Military Railway, to connect the barracks and training camps in the Bordon area. Thenceforward the railway would remain the preferred method of moving troops until the internal combustion engine supplanted it in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the worst rail disaster in British history involved a troop train, and took place on 22 May 1915 at Quintinshill, near Gretna Green in Scotland, on what is
now the West Coast main line. 1/7 Royal Scots, a Territorial unit raised in the Leith area, was on its way to Gallipoli, and lost 210 men killed and 224 injured, making up the majority of the 473 casualties.

  Long after the railway hissed and smoked its way across the landscape, small military parties still moved by road. In 1879 Corporal Robertson was ordered to take three troopers as mounted orderlies from his regiment’s barracks in Brighton to headquarters Chatham district, and on the way he encountered a problem that would not have surprised his ancestors:

  The only available accommodation was occupied by an old lady who flatly refuse to take us in, and consequently I had to ride on for another two miles to a police station and obtain the requisite authority compelling her to take us in. This brought her to her senses, and by the time we had groomed our horses and made them comfortable for the night, about ten o’clock, she had prepared for us an excellent supper to which we did full justice.23

  In February 1881 his regiment moved from Brighton to York by road in ‘exceptionally severe’ winter weather which meant that the horses had to be led for much of the way to prevent them from slipping. However, in the process the regiment marched the 26 miles from Chatham to Woolwich, the next 18 miles to Edmonton, and the next 16 to Ware in a day apiece.

  In 1914 both regular battalions of Royal Welch Fusiliers were so close to Southampton, their port of embarkation for France, that they marched part of the way in the old style. A coal merchant in Lyndhurst remembered 1/Royal Welch Fusiliers as

  the last of the Old Contemptibles, were these soldiers. The finest body of men I ever saw. Drunk as lords every night, but each one as fresh as a band box the next morning. They marched out of here on October 4 1914. I saw them go. All those proud men. They marched out of here to Southampton Docks and got caught in the First Battle of Ypres.24

  When told to prepare for mobilisation, 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were training at Bovington Camp in Dorset and marched, on the night of 30–31 July, to their home barracks at Portland.

  For the main body the march was long and dreary. The Band and Drums were unable to play the whole night without their music, but they put up a wonderful show. Day was breaking as we came down the hills to Weymouth, and, as daylight increased, the awful sleepiness always associated with night-marching wore off and the march became less irksome … The Band and Drums started to play again, and the good folks of Weymouth were roused about 6 o’clock by the Band playing ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’.

  A rail move from Portland to Dorchester was something of an anti-climax, and on arrival the battalion was sent into billets,

  Which was a new experience for us. It was not real billeting, however, for the officers went into one or another of the hotels, HQ was in the King’s Arms, and the men were in various public buildings. A Company’s first billet – Infant School, block floor with a pack for a pillow. B Company, in the Corn Exchange, were also able to test the discomfort of sleeping on the hard wooden floor.

  On 10 August the battalion was taken by train straight to Southampton Dock. The optimistic Major Williams opined that ‘we should be lunching on a sumptuous Cunarder, with unlimited Champagne at the government’s expense.’ Unfortunately they were destined for MV Glengariff, ‘a wretched pig boat … She was not very clean, and, since there was no food whatever on board, we subsisted on the ration we had with us – bully-beef, biscuits and water.’25

  CHAPTER 24

  BARRACK-ROOM BLUES

  SOCIOLOGISTS CLASSIFY BARRACKS with boarding schools, warships, prisons, monasteries, nursing homes, and some hospitals, as total institutions where the lives of individuals are dependent upon the organisation’s authorities, and a clear sense of hierarchy prevails. Stanley Goffman, who identified the total institution, wrote of

  Mortification processes … A privilege system of rewards and punishments … house rules … institutional lingo … social formalities and informalities [and the] phenomenon of engaging in forbidden activity.1

  British army barracks were traditionally designed as much to keep their occupants in as to hold the unauthorised at bay. A process of gradual liberalisation that had begun to see barracks built without external walls and might well have seen the development of ungated military communities was curtly ended by the IRA’s bombing campaign in the 1970s.

  John Lucy enlisted in the Royal Irish Rifles in early 1912, spent six months at the regimental depot in Belfast and then joined the 2nd Battalion at Dover. He thought that a battalion in barracks was like being in

  a little town, and viewed in this way has many attractions. The seven or eight hundred men and the thirty or so officers are not solely and at all times engaged in training for war. Working hours are not long, and holidays are numerous. A duty soldier, that is, one fully trained, may ease his boredom by finding employment in various stores and workshops, by looking after horses, making himself expert in specialised jobs like machine-gunnery or signalling, or by educating himself in the regimental school. While still in the army he may become, among other things, a cook, a waiter, a valet, a clerk, a butcher, an armourer or a storekeeper, if he so wishes. He may also compete for promotion.2

  Just as the inhabitants of other total institutions can become wholly absorbed with their surroundings, so too soldiers could find barrack life reassuringly absorbing. Spike Mays of the Royals thought that ‘there was something almost sacramental about daily turnout and the wearing of uniform, and to us professional soldiers this became an end in itself; a strange combination of regimental and personal pride, an art, ritual, ceremony, almost a religion.’3

  It was not until 1793, with the war against revolutionary France in full swing, that barrack-building began in earnest. Until then there had been some purpose-built accommodation at Chatham, Tynemouth, Plymouth, Liverpool, and the notoriously unhealthy Hilsea barracks at Portsmouth, alive with smallpox when the Norfolk Militia were housed there in 1759. Ireland was better provided with barracks than either England or Scotland, but many were very small, and one penalty paid for a more settled military life in Ireland was the barracking of many regiments in small detachments. Dublin, however, housed ‘the largest peacetime concentration of regular regiments of infantry and cavalry in the British Isles’, and Phoenix Park was the largest exercise-ground at the army’s disposal. However, Irish barracks were not necessarily an improvement on their counterparts in England, and in 1774 Lieutenant General Lord Blayney, inspecting the 27th Foot at Limerick, reported

  The Lower Barracks of Limerick which now contains 7 companies of this regiment, have been condemned near twenty years. The stairs, floors, windows and doors very bad, officers were obliged at their own expense to plaster the ceiling, as the Barrack Master would not do it without an order from the [Irish] Board [of Ordnance], the building being condemned.4

  The construction of new barracks was not trouble-free. The Royal Artillery Barracks at Woolwich were begun in 1774, after a false start when an inconvenient pond imperilled the new foundations. The buildings were almost ready for occupation three years later, but there were the usual unedifying squabbles between the Board of Ordnance – responsible for the construction, maintenance, and equipping of barracks – and the contractor and the building’s occupants. Rooms were not aired before occupation, and so ‘through the inclemency of the weather continued extremely damp’. The Board would not pay for stables to prevent the adjutant’s horse ‘standing out in all weathers when he has business at the barracks’, and although it generously agreed that the orderly room could have a chimney, it directed that old timber ‘where salvageable’ should be used for work in the barracks. Soldiers’ bedding arrived before there was anywhere to store it, and no sooner were the ‘dust holes’ in the barrack yard roofed than the lead was stolen.5

  There was also accommodation in fortresses like the Tower of London, the Royal Citadel at Plymouth and Dover Castle, but much of it was in decidedly poor order, for the Board of Ordnance had other things to spend its money on: some things n
ever change. As late as 1785, the 64th Foot complained that Dover Castle lacked

  all kinds of barrack utensils and [had] a very small allowance of wood and candles, the men not having a sufficient quantity to dress their provisions. No pump for the tank, for getting water … [and men are] obliged to draw water from a well 350 feet deep, with very great labour.6

  The barrack construction of the Napoleonic era left a lasting legacy. Brompton barracks, the largest of the new constructions, sat within the defences of Brompton Lines, overlooking Chatham. It was built to house 1,300 artillerymen, with stables and gun-sheds at hand. The architect James Wyatt drew up three blocks to frame a quadrangle on which parades took place, in a pattern than was familiar elsewhere. An infantry barracks was built at Colchester in 1794, and by 1805 there was accommodation there for 7,000 officers and men. It was also in 1794 that work began on new barracks on the site of the King’s House in Winchester, a palace once intended by Charles II (his regal vision characteristically blurred by lack of funds) to rival the Versailles of Louis XIV. The complex was able to house 3,000 troops, and in 1872 the upper barracks, now named Peninsular Barracks, became the Rifle Depot, for the Rifle Brigade and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. This started a long association that ended only when the Light Division Depot left the site in 1986. At the end of the nineteenth century the barracks was badly damaged by fire, and the rebuilt structure, bright brickwork faced with quoins and pediments in white ashlar, has few rivals. It is now divided into luxury apartments, and the old parade ground, for so long the delight of riflemen, is a parterre that might have gratified Charles II’s architect, Sir Christopher Wren.