Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Beastings do not go on in today’s Armed Forces of Her Majesty … much.

  The third form of beasting is ‘Contact Counselling, normally administered on a one to one basis in order to re-educate a cnut[sic].’20 Spike Mays has already shown us the regimental bath. For the avoidance of doubt, shoeing is described as ‘a well administered and carefully conducted physical assault on the enemy’, much on the lines of the beating with a musket-sling mentioned earlier. A ‘right shoeing’ has to be defined by ‘milky handed 250K a year lawyers’, and ‘excessive shoeing is still being debated … by a bunch of Chardonnay drinking, bree [sic] munching guardianistas … so expect a decision that a slap on the wrist is too much fairly soon.’21 The author of these words evidently regards beasting as an inherent part of army life, albeit one that is officially disapproved of, and that is criticised by exactly those elements of society least likely to understand the role it plays in the creation of robust morale.

  In July 2006 Private Gavin Williams of 2/Royal Welch died of heat stroke leading to a heart attack, after being made to carry out physical exercise on one of the hottest days of the year. He had returned to barracks drunk – the post-mortem also found traces of Ecstasy in his body – and set off a fire extinguisher at a guest at the officers’ mess ball. Although Private Williams could have been formally charged for this breach of discipline, Captain Mark Davis, the adjutant, ordered him to be brought in ‘hot and sweaty’, after a work-out. The three NCOs involved (one of them the provost sergeant) were tried for manslaughter and acquitted. The trial judge asked the jury to consider whether the NCOs had been ‘hung out to dry’ while Captain Davis was not prosecuted, although we might note that as this was a criminal trial rather than a court martial, the decision not to prosecute Captain Davis had been made by the Crown Prosecution Service, not the military authorities. The judge went on to say, ‘The practice of beasting, which clearly falls outside appropriate military discipline, was going on openly and must have been known to senior officers.’22 The Ministry of Defence, straight-batted as ever, affirmed, ‘The Army does not allow or condone any form of physical activity to be used for disciplinary purposes. Commanding officers are made fully aware of their responsibility to protect their soldiers from all forms of physical or mental harassment, and any suspicion of bullying is dealt with immediately.’23

  Private Williams’ father set up a petition to ‘Stop Beastings in the Army’, and an angry mother joined the correspondence initiated by the trial. Her son was serving in Afghanistan, and his unit had taken with it the shell used for beasting: ‘the sad thing is that this punishment is given out for the smallest misdemeanour and is used on a regular basis … I remember the day my son passed out with such pride, however now I count the days until he can get out.’ But another correspondent echoed an old, hard logic.

  Of course Williams told the officers and NCOs that he’d been E’d up to the eyeballs as well as drunk on the night in question? NOT likely! So his probable silence contributed to his own sad end. And as for the hour and a half beasting. Does anyone seriously think the Taliban fight only in short hourly sessions? Of course not … The army was giving him a chance to redeem himself without getting a disciplinary record by giving him the exercise that a normal soldier would just have sailed through. A bit of the dreaded ‘beasting’ to more of our young people who stray would do them all more good than a thousand probation and welfare officers.24

  Many of the army’s professional and political heads, across the years, have made it clear that beasting will not be tolerated. Indeed, even in 1906, when we might have expected more blind-eye tolerance, Second Lieutenant Clark-Kennedy of the Aldershot-based 1/Scots Guards complained that he had been given a ‘subalterns’ court-martial’ followed by a guardee version of the regimental bath. There was an immediate Court of Enquiry, presided over by Lieutenant General Sir Gerald Morton. Clark-Kennedy said that on 15 March he had been:

  stripped. He was put into the bath, water was poured over him as though he were verminous, and a grey mixture, motor oil, he thought, was poured on him, strawberry jam being rubbed in his hair. Then a pillow of feathers was put over him.

  He eventually locked himself in his room, then escaped through the window to the Queen’s Hotel at Farnborough, wearing pyjamas, Wellington boots, and greatcoat.

  Colonel G. J. Cuthbert, the commanding officer, told the enquiry that Surgeon-Major P. H. Whiston had come to him on 8 March and warned him that he had recently examined Clark-Kennedy, finding him ‘in a very dirty bodily condition, and his teeth and mouth in a very filthy condition.’ He added that in November 1905 Clark-Kennedy had presented with itch, although that was now cured. General Morton informed the court that: ‘Itch might be contracted by going with a dirty woman, putting on some dirty clothes, or coming in contact with some person who had it.’ He added helpfully that in this case the aggrieved had picked it up from a brother officer in the Bedford militia, though he gave no further details. Colonel Cuthbert,

  expressed his unqualified disgust that such a thing should be possible in a man brought up at Eton and in such a path of life as he. It was not a military offence, and he expressed the opinion that it was a matter for the subalterns. He meant that moral pressure should be brought upon him to become clean. He made these remarks to the adjutant. This officer might have been foolish in repeating the words, but he could not blame him.

  The adjutant had indeed ‘conveyed the colonel’s opinions to the senior subaltern,’ and the subalterns had, predictably, we might think, taken the matter forward in their own way. It transpired that Clark-Kennedy had been so ill as to be unable to wash himself or clean his teeth, and his private servant testified that ‘bathing and shaving was a pretty regular custom with the young officer [and] his master did clean his teeth regularly.’

  The court was not favourably impressed by what it heard. Colonel Cuthbert was immediately stripped of command and placed on half-pay. Captain Stracey lost the adjutancy and was severely reprimanded, and fourteen subalterns suffered a variety of punishments, mostly by being severely reprimanded, having their leave stopped and being superseded for promotion. Surgeon-Major Whiston, by no means the last doctor to confuse duty to regiment with responsibility to patient, had ‘an expression of the displeasure of the Army Council’ conveyed to him. One subaltern was a peer, another a peer’s son, and amongst the guilty officers’ surnames were some well-known in society – Dalrymple-Hamilton, Jervoise, Orr-Ewing, Liddell-Grainger, and Ballantine-Dykes. Sheldrake’s Aldershot Military Gazette reported ‘a general feeling of regret’ for the loss of Colonel Cuthbert. He was ‘a strict disciplinarian, but no martinet … Not only was his word law, his every wish was in itself a command. But his methods were paternal – punishment where punishment was deserved …’ yet he strove to avoid formality.25

  The Victorian army called it ragging, but beasting in its many forms is so deeply embedded in the gnarled load-bearing timbers where officers’ mess, sergeants’ mess and barrack room meet that it is part of the tribe’s fundamental structure. It is neither always good nor always bad. Although it can often be deliberate cruelty or thoughtless brutality, it no less often reflects a genuine desire to use informal sanction to avoid an interminable or career-stopping process of law. It has helped gear the extraordinary power of common identity to serve the organisation’s wider purpose, has buttressed the ancient against the pressures of the modern (sometimes wisely and sometimes not), destroyed and created self-regard, and aroused hatred, contempt, and sometimes even gratitude. It has both wrecked lives – and saved them.

  CHAPTER 26

  OH! WHAT A TIME THOSE OFFICERS HAVE

  TRUMPET AND BUGLE sounds, our trusted pilot across the long army day, suggests that when the ‘Officers’ Dinner’ blares out at about 7.30 p.m. the men, their own tea-meal long behind them, intoned; ‘Oh! What a time those officers have – I’d like to have their din-ner … Just give me theirs and let them have mine: I bet they’d get much thin-ner.’ />
  Officers’ messes, buildings where the officers of a regiment could live and eat together, were generally included in fortresses and barracks built from the seventeenth century onwards, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. In the forts on the American frontier of 1758–78, officers might be allocated a block of their own, subdivided into rooms, or have separate chambers in the corner bastions flanking the barrack rooms. Field officers were allocated two rooms, captains a room each, and subalterns were two to a room as ‘the army reinforced the social hierarchy on which good order and discipline were thought to depend.’ At Fort Niagara officers lived in the ‘Great House’, a self-contained fortified manor-style house that had been the original French fort, pleasantly reflecting the ‘good order and elegance’ that a gentleman holding King George’s commission might hope to encounter, even on the wildest margins of that monarch’s expansive domains.1

  Within Britain, however, most officers lodged and ate in public houses until the barrack-building of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Like the men they commanded they perambulated about the country. In the infantry only captains and field officers were entitled to horses and forage allowance, subalterns often procured nags to ride on the line of march, and all officers expected their baggage to be carried in wagons. Their requirements were a good deal more substantial than those of the private men they commanded. One newly commissioned ensign recalled the long-awaited arrival of his uniform:

  Never did I behold so beautiful – so ravishing a sight! The coat like silk – scarlet silk; the pantaloons as blue as the sky – ethereal blue; the epaulettes and lace as bright as the sun – or 20 suns! Price! What was the price to me? … It would be endless to describe the evolutions, the marches, and the countermarches, which I performed before the looking-glass that day. I nearly wore out my scabbard by drawing and sheathing my sword; I absolutely tarnished my epaulette by dangling the bullion of it, and the peak of my cocked hat was very much ruffled and crushed by practising my intended salutes to the ladies. I dined – in full uniform, and unshackled by my admiration of strangers to interrupt my admiration for it … This was the climax of my hopes.2

  Then there were swords, dress and undress; pistols nestling in their mahogany cases; civilian clothes for town and country; boat-cloaks and reefer jackets; riding gloves and dress gloves; sporting guns and fishing rods; horse furniture, and all those things a man wanted but was not yet experienced enough to know that he did not need.

  Demands that regiments should reduce their baggage trains to regulation scales (or worse if it was to be a demanding campaign) produced howls of misery. However, most young gentlemen eventually rubbed along well enough, as Captain William Dansey of the light company of the 33rd Foot, writing from North America in 1778, assured his father:

  after procuring a horse I have [spent] this month past in contriving what things to carry on him that will be most comfortable and convenient and not to overload him. My first thought was a comfortable tent which I have been lucky in contriving and executing one that is admired by everybody for its convenience, elegance and lightness … Now for furniture, first a floor cloth which serves as a bedstead and also to cover my baggage when loaded, a palliasse weight about two pounds to stuff with leaves, straw or grass for a bed … Two blankets and my Portugee cloak, my bed clothes, a small portmanteau holding a change of necessaries is my pillow, a pair of canteens holding liquor and provisions and a small writing trunk holding paper and some knick-knacks is the whole of the baggage that I expect to see before Christmas next and these are great comforts and conveniences to what I had last campaign.3

  Perversely, though, an officer often discovered that his home kit was not up to the demands of foreign service. When Lieutenant Walter Campbell reached Madras with his regiment in 1830 he found that he was hopelessly ill-equipped for India. He needed a tent, camptable, chair and basin stand, a light camp-cot whose cotton mattress fitted into the chair. And then there was the small matter of

  A good horse – or two of them if you can afford it – with his attendants …

  A sufficient number of bullocks to carry your baggage.

  Two servants; a doobash or head man and a ‘matey-boy’.

  Two ‘cowrie-baskets’ containing a sufficient stock of tea, sugar, coffee, brandy and wax candles, carried by a ‘coolie’, suspended from the end of an elastic slip of bamboo.

  A couple of hog-spears …

  A hunting-knife …

  A hunting cap, strong in proportion to the respect you have for your skull …

  A good stock of cheroots and ammunition – it being taken for granted you are already provided with a gun, a rifle and a telescope.

  Some men, who study their comfort rather than their purse, indulge in a palanquin, a Chinese mat, a tent carpet, and many other little luxuries; but the fewer things of this kind a man hampers himself with the better.4

  Lieutenant George Gleig of the 85th Foot had two portmanteaux that could be slung on either side of a mule’s back.

  In one portmanteau … I deposited a regimental jacket with all its appendages of wings, lace, etc.; two pairs of grey trowsers; sundry waistcoats, white coloured and flannel; a few changes of flannel drawers; half a dozen pairs of worsted stockings and as many of cotton. In the other were placed six shirts, two or three cravats, a dressing case completely filled, one undress pelisse. Three pairs of boots, two pairs of shoes, with night-caps, pocket-handkerchieves etc. in proportion.5

  An officer could live out of portmanteaux like this in taverns or on campaign.

  The whole brown-wood-and-brass world of campaign furniture lay ripe for exploration by a man with funds behind him. The two-part teak chest with recessed handles and brass-bound corners, often with a cunningly-fitted secretaire top drawer, could sit on either side of pack-saddle or be stacked in the back of a wagon or in a vessel’s hold. With its big bun feet screwed in to lift it above the damp it would look well in a tent. Before officers’ rooms had much issued furniture, the chest made a good start for the whole panoply of rattan chairs, ‘Brighton bun’ candlesticks and collapsible bookshelves, squatting beneath walls that groaned under the weight of big game heads, native weapons (as likely to be the booty of bazaar as battlefield) and paintings that sometimes showed mama but sometimes did not.

  Not all officers could afford such luxury, and in 1808 an old captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, his ‘many singularities’ attributed to a blow on a head during a shipwreck, eschewed furniture. He spread out all his belongings on the floor – ‘a curious piece of mosaic work, composed of coats, waistcoats, fishing rods and stockings, boots and swords, shoes and sashes’, leaving ‘a sort of alley’ between door and bed, and reckoned that he could count all his 307 worldly possessions in just fifteen minutes. He was ‘as correct as any officer of the corps, and exceedingly beloved by the soldiers of his company’. He kept his accounts by making appropriate notes in red chalk on the wall of his room in large characters: ‘I have just lent Browne a shilling.’

  As on leaving barracks, officers are obliged to pay for any damage they may have done to their rooms. My friend the captain always had a bill to discharge for the fresh white-washing of his room, which he did without the least dispute.6

  Browne’s comment on prompt payment for damages raises a wider point. At this time a barracks was the responsibility of its barrack master, usually a regular captain or major posted there from his regiment, an ideal appointment for a man whose days of active soldiering were over. He was assisted by a small staff of sergeants, who were eventually to become the barrack-wardens, almost always retired NCOs, who remained an immutable part of this dusty, fly-blown, blocked-drains world. Officers and soldiers – and families in married quarters – were obliged to pay ‘barrack damages’ for damage incurred during their occupation. The system was bound to cause disputes, for it was easy to ignore what seemed trivial knocks and scratches on ‘marching in’ when one was late and tired, and the warden all courtesy, only to be charged handso
mely for serious structural defects when ‘marching out’. Moreover, it was often not clear what barrack damages actually paid for. Our sour acquaintance the urinated mattress, for instance, with the evidence of successive mishaps ringed, dated and initialled by ‘barracky-bill’s’ marker-pen, rarely showed a sign of the ‘special cleaning’ for which successive beery miscreants had been forced to pay. Those mattresses were steady little earners.

  So too were broken windows. Ensign Garnet Wolseley reported to Chatham Barracks in 1852 to await his passage to India.

  Like all other ensigns, I was allotted one very small room as my quarters. It had the usual barrack table and two chairs: the rest of the furniture, as is usual in all barracks, I had to find myself. The officers’ quarters were very old and abominably bad. An old great-uncle had told me that he had towards the end of the previous century occupied a room in the house where I was now lodged. It was, he said, even then generally understood that these quarters were so bad that they had been condemned as unfit for use.

  Wolseley thought that the barrack-master and his underlings charged young officers, those inexperienced birds of passage, for damage done long before: ‘A cracked pane of glass was a small silver-mine to these men. Fifty ensigns may have occupied the quarter with the cracked pane in it, and all had to pay for a new one.’ Wolseley was billed for a latch key just before he sailed. He had it in his pocket, and duly gave it to the sergeant. This worthy, true to his colours, refused to accept the key and continued to demand payment: Wolseley, never a man to cross, even as a subaltern, hurled it into the river.7