Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  The need for larger training areas and, as weapons shot further and marksmanship became so important, more rifle ranges, inspired the next burst of barrack-building. In 1854 the army bought land on the sandy heath at Aldershot, conveniently situated midway between London and Portsmouth. ‘What Pompey is to the sailor, the ’Shot is to the soldier’, thought Francis Hereward Maitland.7 First troops were accommodated in bell tents in North and South Camps on either side of the Basingstoke Canal. Wooden huts soon replaced tents, and were themselves succeeded by barracks made of ochre brick, with the first permanent structures called Wellington Lines. Stanhope Lines, its barracks named for battles in the Napoleonic wars (and with one commemorating Wellington’s surgeon-general, James McGrigor) replaced South Camp. Marlborough Lines, its barracks names celebrating battles of the War of Spanish Succession, replaced North Camp.

  One of the most striking edifices in the whole complex was ‘the Glasshouse’, the three-storey Aldershot Military Detention Barracks, built from 1870 to house 165 inmates in individual cells designed, as penal theory then demanded, to ‘prevent the evils of association’. The building earned its nickname from its great glass roof, and ‘glasshouse’ was to become synonymous with a military prison of any sort. The building was no longer used as a prison after it sustained heavy damage in a spectacular riot in 1946 and was dismantled in 1958. The army’s only ‘glasshouse’ is now the Military Corrective Training Centre at Colchester.

  Cardwell’s reforms inspired the building of regimental depots in county towns, but however useful these structures were as links between regiment and community, they were often badly placed for access to training areas. Though they were able to house ‘miniature’ ranges on which troops could fire subcalibre or ‘tubed down’ versions of their service rifles in .297/.230 and later in .22 calibre, it was often a brisk tramp to the nearest full-bore shooting range. The army had begun training on the rolling expanse of Salisbury Plain in 1898, and just after the Boer War – which had so effectively illustrated the need for individual marksmanship – it built new barrack complexes at Tidworth and Bulford on the plain. The barracks at Tidworth, approached via the Grand Trunk Road, its name echoing that of the great lifeline of British India, are named after battles fought in India and Afghanistan, like Aliwal, Bhurtpore, Delhi and Lucknow, with Candahar (despite its unfamiliar spelling) as evidence that if history does not actually repeat itself it sometimes rhymes. The attraction of open countryside also encouraged the army to build a new set of barracks at Catterick in North Yorkshire just before the First World War. This now constitutes the largest barrack complex not only in the United Kingdom, but probably in the whole of Europe.

  It was ironic that barrack accommodation across the empire was often a good deal better than it was in the United Kingdom. Billeting was rarely an option, and disease spread so quickly that crowded and insanitary barracks dramatically lengthened the sick-list. An official report on Up Park Barracks, Jamaica, in 1806, warned that the soldier’s

  situation is particularly distressing, far different from anything he experiences in any other countries; the soldier here is debarred from the common indulgence met with in other barracks; he is left exposed to the necessity of sleeping on damp fixed platforms, or more generally damp floors, which must almost constantly be the case in the rainy seasons (when fevers are most prevalent) without a bed to lie upon, consequently must have increased the dreadful mortality so lately experienced in this island … The Board inspecting the construction of the new barracks regret that they had not been erected on arches at least six feet from the ground, which would have afforded a free circulation of air attended with the advantage of a comfortable shade during the day. Under these arches the soldiers’ arms and accoutrements might have been cleaned without occasioning filth in the barracks, or any unnecessary exposure to the sun …

  The Board on minutely inspecting the barracks find that they cannot accommodate the number of men for which they were originally intended. Each barrack is to contain ten rooms, each room supposed capable of accommodating 50 men, but after the hammocks are hung it is found that they can only contain 36 men … Each room is 50 feet in length and 24 in breadth … In consequence of the confined manner in which the rooms are built, being not more than 10 feet in height including joists and beams in the lower apartment, and 9 to the pitch of the roof in the upper, the Board cannot think considering the health of the soldier, that the two feet allowed in the estimate under so low roof, sufficient to accommodate each man.8

  In contrast, barracks built in India after the Mutiny paid careful attention to the soldier’s well-being, with the new cantonment at Jakatalla in the Nilgiri Hills in Madras presidency looking ‘more like a health resort than a military camp’. John Fraser thought that the barrack blocks at Agra had

  a certain affinity in size and shape to a cathedral. One for each company. Long and wide and spacious, they were cut off in the middle by a transept-like messroom fitted with tables where the whole company could sit down at table at one time. The two halves for sleeping accommodation consisting each of an airy, high space, forty feet to the roof and twenty feet wide, the walls interspersed with aisles. The stone slabs of the floor added to the effect of cloistered coolness. The necessary shelves, cots and kit-boxes were fitted between an arch at the side.

  A wide verandah, where men could chat and smoke on tropical evenings, ran right round the building.9

  The two world wars saw huge increases in military population but most of the accommodation built to house it was intended to be temporary. The breeze-block sheds and Nissen huts thrown up to supplement existing barracks or create new camps on training areas like Salisbury Plain or the Yorkshire moors proved to have a longer life than had ever been intended. In 1942 the army took over 30,000 acres of breckland around Stanford, near Thetford in Norfolk, and the camps built to house the troops training there will still be familiar to Second World War veterans. Hawksmoor’s rustic stonework at Berwick, and Wyatt’s elegant façades at Brompton, both demonstrate that the design of barracks had always reflected the architectural ideals of the age. It was inevitable that that the 1960s would leave their mark on barrack construction. Montgomery Lines in Aldershot was built to accommodate an airborne brigade, with its barracks – Arnhem, Bruneval, Normandy, and Rhine – commemorating airborne actions. The complex was opened by Field Marshal Montgomery in 1965 but soon began to show its age: its flat roofs leaking, with concrete walls taking on a fungal hue. The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst comprises three large buildings built to accommodate officer cadets: Old Building, completed in 1812; New Building, finished a century later; and Victory Building, opened in 1970. I have worked in all three, and it always struck me that their attractiveness and utility alike were in direct proportion to their age – the older the better.

  Shortage of barrack accommodation within the United Kingdom is a major reason for so many British troops remaining in Germany so long after the end of the Cold War. One way of making more military housing available was for the army to take on redundant RAF stations. Thus RAF Swanton Morley, near Dereham in Norfolk, is now Robertson Barracks (named for the Wully Robertson who features so often in these pages) and houses the Light Dragoons. RAF Tern Hill in Shropshire now incorporates Clive Barracks, and is home to 1/Royal Irish. Stoke Heath Young Offenders Institution is within sight of the barracks, and when a battalion of my own regiment was stationed there, one senior Tom, rightly dissatisfied with his own accommodation, jerked his thumb in its direction. ‘If I was over there,’ he told me, ‘I’d have a room to myself and there’d be hot water in the showers. Tell me, sir, where did I go wrong?’10

  Whatever the face they showed to the outside world, barracks could lour, grim-faced, upon their occupants. From the eighteenth century onwards private soldiers and NCOs lived in long barrack rooms, often part of a block that could house a whole company, with stores and offices on the ground floor and accommodation above. Sergeants had partitioned-off ‘bunks’ at
one end of the room, though as part of deliberate attempts to improve the NCOs’ lot they were gradually given separate quarters and their bunks were taken over by corporals. This process did not encourage philosophical reflections after lights-out.

  Shut up, out there! Ow many more times do you want telling! If I ’ave to come out there I’ll ’ave a few names an’ numbers. Why don’t you let decent soldiers sleep? Another word and I’ll put some of you on a crime sheet.11

  Initially soldiers slept in straw-filled wooden cribs, sometimes with four men to a crib, or on straw-filled palliasses on the floor, but by the 1820s single beds, with palliasse, bolster, and two blankets, were more usual. There was often as little as five inches between beds, and not much more between the foot of the bed and the communal table that ran down the length of the room. Until the advent of dining rooms towards the end of the nineteenth century men did ‘everything but drill’ in their rooms. These were proverbially overcrowded. In 1858 it was said in the House of Lords that the average allowance of air for a convict was 1,000 cubic feet but only 400 for a soldier, and some barracks and five military hospitals managed a mere 300. A private in the 15th Hussars maintained that in the cavalry barracks at Maidstone men were ‘packed … so closely that I have seen them sleeping on the tables used for dining, under the tables and in the coal-boxes. This in the middle of the summer.’12

  A row of outside privies served each barrack block, but for overnight sanitation men relied upon the latrine tub or ‘sip pot’. This receptacle, a two-man lift when full to the brim, as it so often was after liberal consumption of swipes, was carried off first thing in the morning and scrubbed out, whereupon it became a wash-basin: the only alternative was to wash directly beneath a pump. One sergeant spoke of a promising recruit as ‘a smart, active boy, always first in the urine-tub in the morning’.13 It is small wonder that a sergeant, giving evidence to a commission reviewing the state of barracks in the 1850s, admitted that he found it impossible to enter a barrack room first thing in the morning, until the room orderly had thrown open the windows. ‘The air was offensive both from the men’s breath and from the urine tubs in the room; and, of course, some soldiers do not keep their feet very clean, especially in the summer time.’14 During the nineteenth century pipe-smoking became increasingly popular amongst soldiers, and in 1842 an officer who entered a room 72 ft long by 36 wide could not see any of its 48 occupants because of the smoke. Nor did the practice of quartering cavalrymen directly above the stables improve matters, and Hulme Cavalry Barracks in Manchester had the additional disadvantage of having the privies and middens of a closely populated neighbourhood right up against its walls.

  There were substantial improvements in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ablution blocks were added to barracks, and in 1874 the modern Anglesey Barrack in Portsmouth had a handsome wash-room, as that unlikely private soldier, John Acland-Troyte tells us,

  with stone slabs all round, and also down the middle. Large tin basins were supplied in quite sufficient quantity, and water pipes running all round, just above the stone slabs, with taps at intervals, and always a good supply of water.

  Besides this ‘Ablution Room’ there was a bath-house with four or six baths, in which a man could lie at almost full length. Cold water was laid on as a permanency, and in the winter hot water also.15

  There had been a short-lived attempt to replace urine tubs with chamber pots in 1858–61, but it was not until water urinals were eventually installed that the problem was at last solved. Cardwell barrack blocks had four, eventually converted to proper WCs, on each landing. Yet even the close proximity of urinals has never quite prevented bed-wetting, where drunken men simply fail to make it to the lavatory. In my time the ‘urinated mattress’ always featured on the list of ‘barrack damages’ that had to be paid for by a departing unit.

  Private Acland-Troyte goes on to tell us about his barrack room.

  The walls were whitewashed, and the floor, bare boards; there were [trestle] tables in the centre sufficient for all the occupants of the room to sit down at once, and wooden forms to correspond. Generally a hanging shelf over the table, on which are kept all the plates and basins, one of each being provided for each man in the room. The iron bedsteads are arranged all round, the heads against the wall, and they are made in two parts, so that during the day one half can be run in or closed up under the other, thus giving much more free space to move about in. The mattress is rolled up, pillow inside, and kept fastened with a strap, the two blankets and the two sheets folded up very neatly, and placed on top of the rolled mattress, which is stood against the head of the bed, occupying about half the bedstead when closed up. The remaining half (on which the rug or counterpane is laid) serves for the men to sit on. As a rule there is a space of about three or four feet between the bedstead, and a man next a window is generally best off.

  All round the room, over the heads of the beds, are iron shelves, and hooks just below, each man having that part of the shelves immediately over his own cot. All the soldier’s worldly possessions are kept on these shelves, and have to be arranged with scrupulous tidiness. The knapsack and other accoutrements are put up on the hooks … Very often if a man has near his cot a piece of spare wall he will hang up pictures or photographs, which gives the room a more comfortable appearance, and provided it is done tidily, it is never objected to. The other articles of common property in the room are a hair broom, mop, long-handled scrubber (for cleaning the wood floors), a hand scrubbing brush (for cleaning tables and forms), two tin dishes, on which the dinner is brought in, two tin pails, two wooden buckets and a big iron coal box, also two coal trays, i.e. square wooden boxes used for carrying coal about in, but generally kept in the room for throwing any litter into.

  Despite hard scrubbing it was difficult to keep the tables clean, and so the men generally used one side for eating and writing on, and reversed it to show the ‘extra clean’ side for inspections.16

  This barrack-room organisation would change comparatively little over the next century. The precise form of kit layout was determined by regimental regulations, and as late as 1929 the sliding bedframe was still in use, so that the Royal Army Ordnance Corps standing orders could specify that for room inspections

  The bedstead will be drawn out to the full extent, and at a distance of nine inches from the wall, the bed made up so as to form a seat, a blanket folded and placed over the bedirons from the lower mattress to the foot. The soldier will then stand one pace from the foot of the bed, at the right-hand side.

  Labelled photographs now replaced the illustrative diagrams of yesteryear, showing exactly how each of the soldier’s forty-one items of equipment should be laid out, from mess-tin cover, drawers, woollen, and drawers, cotton, through to boot polish and dummy ammunition, and on to medals.17 A regimental bedplate, made of brass, stamped with its owner’s name and highly polished, marked a man’s ownership of his territory when he was away on duty. There had long been complaints that a soldier had nowhere secure to store his personal belongings, and by this time a padlocked barrack box, sliding neatly under the foot of the bed (thus footlocker in American English), was issued to soldiers.

  The system was intended to ensure that all a man’s kit was present and in good order, but this was often counter-productive. Many soldiers ‘won’ extra personal equipment by fair means or foul, kept a show set of key items ‘gimped up’, pressed or polished to perfection, and actually used another set. Horace Wyndham recalled that an inspection shirt was not a wearable garment at all, but actually consisted of ‘about a square foot of grey flannel, with a collar band attached thereto with a couple of pins.’18 Commanding officers generally inspected their unit lines on Saturday mornings, and this gave rise to what 2/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, in garrison at Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow in 1911, called

  the barrack sports – get down on your knees and scrub the place out. And the floor had to be snow white. And to keep it snow white you used to put a blanket
from your bed down on the floor so that the floors wouldn’t get dirtied.19

  Soldiers often slid about in slippers made of loose blanket so as not to injure the floor, and it was sometimes most convenient to get one’s bed suitably arranged for inspection and then sleep on a blanket on the floor.

  The military day was regulated minutely. The daily routine of cavalryman or gunner was defined by trumpet calls, while line infantry used drum-beats until the 1820s and 30s, when the bugle replaced them. For most soldiers the day began with ‘Reveille’, generally sounded at 6.00 a.m. in the summer and 7.00 a.m. in the winter, followed by ‘Rouse’, the last warning to get up. Men were taught words that rhymed with the most common calls. The first bars of ‘Rouse’ were meant to bring to mind the phrase ‘Come, make a move! And show a leg! Why dil-ly da-ly? Now don’t you hear? Get out of bed, It’s past re-veil-le.’ But other words came to mind more easily ‘Get out of bed, Get out of bed, You lazy bug-gers; Get out of bed, Get out of bed, You lazy bug-gers.’ The orderly sergeant, coming to the end of his 24-hour period of duty and thinking of his breakfast, would stride amiably through the room, full of the gentle aphorisms of his breed: ‘Hands off cocks and grab your socks, the sun’s burning your eyes out.’ If he was in a room full of recruits he might cheerfully defenestrate any stray items of clothing, promoting tidiness and keeping the men on their toes, but it was not always advisable to treat old soldiers like that, for scores might well be settled later.