Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Freemasonry was strong in the army, although it is difficult to be sure of its practical effect on promotions and appointments. I read about the way that Freemasonry had the Territorial Army of my time in its grips. But I managed to become its professional head without ever having been a mason, and so am inclined to suspect more smoke than fire. In 1810 there was a British Freemasons’ procession through Lisbon, causing much local offence. Wellington at once issued a general order saying that Freemasory was ‘an amusement which, however innocent to itself, and allowed by the laws of Great Britain, is in violation of the law of this country’. In 1838 the members of a Dublin lodge asked his permission to call themselves the Wellington Lodge, and he told the master

  The Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Mr Carleton. He perfectly recollects that he was admitted to the lowest grade of Free Masonry in a lodge which was formed at Trim in the county of Meath. He has never since attended a lodge of Free Masons.

  [It] would be a ridiculous assumption of the reputation of being attached to Freemasonry, in addition to being a misrepresentation.4

  A provincial grand lodge was established in India in 1728, and regional lodges soon followed, with growing numbers of regimental or ‘ambulatory’ lodges following fast. Freemasonry in India peaked towards the end of the nineteenth century, but even by 1919 there were eighty lodges in Bengal, forty-one in Bombay, thirty-one in Madras and another thirty-one in the Punjab.

  Military men played a notable role in Indian Freemasonry. A succession of commanders-in-chief India were masons, amongst them Kitchener, O’Moore Creagh, and Power Palmer. Of the twenty-nine officials of the District Grand Lodge of the Punjab in 1914 eight were officers, five warrant officers or NCOs, and four were Indian. Sergeant Major George Carter records the first meeting of his lodge on 11 August 1856:

  Present Bros Wood, Carter, Monk, McDowell, Lake and Guthrie; joining members balloted for successful Bros Lord Wm Hay, Graham and Tapp of Simla, and Harding and Campbell of Kussowlie.5

  As far as the army in India was concerned, Freemasonry helped, in its small way, to blur the rougher edges of an unthinking racism. It brought together the military and the civil, especially in the weary circles of tiny communities deep in the hinterland, And, within the army, as Kipling, a Freemason himself, argued so sonorously, its own oblique formality helped blend other rigidities.

  Outside – ‘Sergeant!’ ‘Sir! Salute! Salaam!’

  Inside – ‘Brother’, and it doesn’t do no ’arm.

  We met upon the Level and we parted on the Square,

  And I was Junior-Deacon in my Mother-Lodge out there.6

  At a regimental level, Freemasonry added another shade to the chiaroscuro of influence, patronage, and understanding that gave sensitive officers and NCOs the chance for informal discussion where stripes and stars mattered less than they did outside the Lodge.

  So too did sport. There was a general agreement that football was the soldier’s sport. James Jack complained that, wherever one went on the Western Front, soldiers claimed to be exhausted, and yet there was a kick-about at the first opportunity. Many officers loved the game, and the eccentric Lieutenant Colonel Mainwaring of the 51st encouraged robust tackles, assuring his men that there was no rank on the football field. A Norfolk lad who joined the cavalry told a comrade that he had no family or regional connection with his new regiment, but ‘when you were at Norwich I played football agin you, so when I thought o’ takin up sodgerin’ I found out where you was and here I be.’7 Percy Wyndham thought that soldiers enjoyed watching officers playing cricket because it gave them the opportunity to lament, in mock-genteel, the drop of another catch. When the 68th Light Infantry on its way to the Crimea played in what the scorebook calls ‘Sultan’s Valley, Varna’ there was a creditably hard-fought match, with Private Fossy taking four wickets and Corporal Jester another three, including that of Lieutenant Barker, caught and bowled.

  Regimental policies varied a good deal. In the 1920s the junior officers of 1/King’s Own Scottish Borderers were told that, once parades were complete, their first duty was to play sports with their men, but ten years before an officer in another regiment discovered that he was one of only two officers who regularly played team sports. Many regiments cultivated expertise in a particular sport. The Duke of Wellington’s was a famously hard rugby-playing tribe, while the officers of the Durham Light Infantry took on the cavalry at polo and very often won. During the National Service years some regiments took infinite care in getting suitable sportsmen posted to them, ‘packing’ high-quality teams and ensuring that a successful sportsman was not over-burdened with military duties. ‘The CO was boxing mad’, wrote Henry Cooper, called up into the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. ‘He kept an eye peeled for likely looking fighters coming up and wangled them. In two years our battalion never lost a match.’8

  Keeping men fit and busy was now an important element in barrack design. Tipperary Barracks, begun in 1874, housed an infantry battalion, initially the 1/East Yorkshires, who arrived in 1879. It was

  A self-contained installation with accommodation for over 500 officers, NCOs and men. For the welfare of its military personnel and their families, the barracks had an officers’ mess, sergeants’ mess, canteen and recreation establishment, chapel, hospital, teacher’s quarters and school house, soldiers’ quarters, married quarters, washing establishment, bath house and cook house. All three buildings were equipped with the most modern conveniences of the period. Other buildings within the confines of the barracks included the regimental office block, band room, warrant officer’s quarters, guard-room, detention barracks, stores, magazine, stables, water tower and latrines. Sporting and recreational facilities such as a fives court, skittle alley, sports green and a fully equipped gymnasium were available.9

  The Army Gymnastic Staff came into being in 1860, became the Army Physical Training Corps in 1918, and a corps in its own right in 1940. Soldiers were introduced to scientific physical training by ‘muscle benders’ who ran unit gymnasia and larger complexes in major garrison towns like Aldershot. A man could join the ranks, show aptitude as a fitness instructor, and eventually, just as a bandmaster might become a director of music, a skilled gymnast could move to commissioned rank as a master at arms. None of this overturned the army’s social structure overnight, but it made another of those little differences. The names of sportsmen and women in the army now come to our attention more easily than many of the great and the good: Kriss Akabusi MBE had been a warrant officer in the APTC, and Kelly Holmes DBE a sergeant in the same corps.

  So, as the band plays us in to dinner, we cross that richly textured rug of communal life, with its dress, phrases, and behaviour – learnt, borrowed or stolen – reflecting the weft and warp of four structures so well identified by Charles Kirke, gunner colonel turned academic. Firstly there is the formal command structure, embedded in hierarchy and discipline; next, the informal command structure, that network in which unwritten behaviours – friendships and associations, nicknames and sharing – are fundamental. Third comes the functional structure, the attitudes and expectations concerned with carrying out military tasks – really the whole nature of being soldiers. Finally the social structure of the army (to which so much of this book is devoted) is about belonging and group identity. None of these structures is distinct: indeed, even during our short walk to the table we will unconsciously weave from one to another.

  CHAPTER 28

  CAMPAIGNERS STRAIGHT AND GAY

  THE BROADER RELATIONSHIP between men and women within the army was not primarily about sex, but constituted another of those informal structures that had a disproportionate effect on the way the army really worked. For most soldiers sex was indeed a serious preoccupation. For many, indeed, it was intimately linked with alcohol so as to constitute a man’s major interest in life. Through the army’s history, a far smaller proportion of soldiers than civilians was able to marry, and by no means all wives accompanied their husbands on active ser
vice, so that there was a constant shortage of women. Sometimes soldiers had affairs with comrades’ wives, often with fatal results. In 1756 Drummer Lewis of the 30th Foot cut his wife’s throat with his razor – ‘this rash action he confessed to us all that he was jealous of Sergeant Hemmington of their company.’ He tried to drown himself in the Medway, but was caught and tried: ‘The next day he was sent to Gaol at Rochester where he was hanged and gibbeted.’1 A century and a half later a cavalryman warned rookies that a young soldier could easily catch the eye of Potiphar’s wife, and get sent up to do a little light duty at his married quarters. ‘Hey, you, will you go up to my quarters and help my missus give the place a dig out?’ he asked. ‘She’ll give you a good supper and a glass o’ beer. And draw my ration o’coal while you’re at it.’ The lady in question had other ends in view. ‘I’ve seen you,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken a likin’ to you … Don’t you be afraid o’me … I’m a sport, I am. I’ll give you a good time.’2

  Officers and soldiers alike availed themselves of prostitutes who varied in wit, appearance, aptitude, cleanliness, and potential lethality from ‘All Night Miss from Boarding School, Chelsea’, who cost Lieutenant Lord Alvanley £5. 5s. in 1808, to the sixpenny tart pursued by James Boswell disguised as ‘a half-pay officer’, and on down to Portsmouth’s ‘fireships of the sally-port’ who might give a man what he sought (and much, much else besides) for a tumbler of gin. Some women started in the officers’ mess and crashed down to behind the barrack wall. By no means all of them had intended to become prostitutes. Many a woman enjoyed an honest and monogamous relationship until her man’s regiment went abroad and she could not follow it. Another might have a series of long-term relationships with men in the same unit but, as one told Henry Mayhew, collecting material for his book London Labour and the London Poor, ‘If I have a row with a fellow he’s always the first to taunt me of being what he and his fellows have made me.’

  In many parts of the Empire there were women who were less than wives but a great deal more than prostitutes. It was far easier for officers to maintain ladies like this than it was for soldiers; and practices that Georgian Britain tolerated happily enough soon raised Victorian eyebrows. Lieutenant Thomas St Clair was shocked to discover, on arrival in the West Indies, that

  Two of our officers were living in barracks with two of these girls, one in Demerara, Lieutenant Myers, had a beautiful young mulatto, and Lieutenant Clark, in Berbice, had with him a fine handsome black woman. Though I disapproved of the system, which, on first arrival, appeared to me an outrage on common decency and propriety … yet I was at last obliged to alter my opinion, as I saw both the above-mentioned officers saved from certain death by the uncommon care and attention which these two girls paid to them during a violent attack of fever.3

  British India eventually took to calling women like this bibis, but it was a cruel gibe, brought about in part by the jealousy of memsahibs and partly by the pious mutterings of missionaries. You must forgive me for manoeuvring the following lady into these pages, for her husband did not hold a regular commission in the British army, though he died fighting the Queen’s enemies, commanding a well-equipped local regiment, ‘having its own band and colours’. She was Moslem, and regarded herself as his wife, and the things that made this Scots professional proud made her proud too, as she tells us on his headstone.

  Hamish McGregor McPherson of Scotland

  Killed in battle at the head of his Regiment

  While fighting against the Dewan Mool Raj

  At Siddhoosam, near Multan, on the

  1st July, 18484

  Around barracks and camps in Britain and the Empire, sex was largely a question of supply and demand at its most basic level. The great camp at the Curragh bred its own ‘wrens’, girls who lived rough in gorse huts, and in India there were whole communities devoted to servicing the troops. No sooner had Private Frank Richards arrived at Jhansi and gone to wash his feet in a nearby stream, than a local procurer arranged numerous girls at six annas apiece and several soldiers duly formed up in line, it being their nature to do so. Private Richards thought that it worked very smoothly.

  The native took the money while the girls did the work. The stream was very handy; it enabled the girls to wash themselves and they did not mind in the least who was looking at them while they were doing this.5

  Prostitution raised practical and moral issues for army and government alike. If desertion had been the wasting disease of the eighteenth-century army, venereal disease was scarcely less damaging to the Victorian army. In the middle of the nineteenth century about one-quarter of its strength was infected at some point in the year. In 1864 the Contagious Diseases Act established compulsory medical inspection for prostitutes in garrison towns, and infected women were confined in ‘lock hospitals’ until they were ‘cured’. The unreliable nature of treatment together with the harsh and intrusive nature of inspection, all brought the scheme into disrepute. Some zealots believed that by reducing the risk of the disease, medical inspections would actually ‘make sinning safe’, and by becoming a practical success this could be a moral disaster; policy soon changed. The encouragement of prophylactic treatment went some way towards reducing the risks of infection, but in 1890–93 VD rates had risen to 438 admissions per 1,000 men in India, double the ratio for the British army at home and almost six times as bad as in the German army.

  Lord Kitchener, as commander-in-chief India, introduced a number of effective reforms. First, more wives were allowed to go out to India. Next, VD returns were now required with other statistics at a unit’s annual inspection, and so a wise commanding officer could see the potential impact of a high rate of VD in his battalion on his own career. Making the issue one of command responsibility had much in common with the practice in the Second World War army of disciplining COs whose units had an unacceptable rate of malaria, revealing that men were not taking the anti-malaria drug mepacrine. In India regiments had long maintained Lal Bazaars (Red Bazaars), where a procuress (‘the old bawd’) dealt with recruitment and pay while the military authorities tried to reduce brawling and theft. I can already glimpse the provost sergeant engaged in some delicate quid pro quo manoeuvres. Officers also became involved, particularly in ensuring that there were enough girls to keep pace with demand and to prevent soldiers from taking their pleasures elsewhere. There were only 30–40 girls to accommodate the 1,500 men in the Agra garrison and it was clear that this would never do. Lieutenant Colonel Parry of 2/Cheshire formally requested the cantonment magistrate at Amballa to obtain ‘extra attractive women’ as the six girls in his Lal Bazaar were worn out. Kitchener appealed to his soldiers by asking them what their mothers or sisters would make of their conduct: even in the toughest of battalions there were many soldiers for whom such an appeal to common decency would never be wholly wasted. Lastly, lurid pamphlets left men in no doubt as to the ghastly progress of the disease. By 1909 there were just 67 cases per thousand British soldiers in India per year.

  In the matter of VD as in so much else, the First World War confronted the army with an old problem on a huge scale, constituting ‘the greatest amount of constant inefficiency in the home commands.’ Almost 417,000 men were admitted to hospital with VD during the war, and as each admission for syphilis averaged fifty days the bill for lost manpower was alarmingly high. There were occasional attempts to maintain licensed brothels, almost like the Lal Bazaar from Amballa somehow transported to Rouen, but now with redcaps keeping an eye on the steady pulse of trade. The evidence suggests that such establishments did indeed keep infection rates low, but there was always too much domestic political pressure for them to last for long.

  Men who contracted VD were obliged to declare it, and risked two years’ imprisonment for failing to do so. They were sent to special hospitals where, because their illness was deemed self-inflicted, their pay was stopped. A married man who had been making a regular ‘allotment’ of pay to his wife might now not be able to do so, and an ill-judged e
vening in Poperinghe or Amiens wrecked many a marriage. An officer might be able to persuade a kindly medical officer to treat him privately, or a member of the sergeants’ mess could perhaps get the medical sergeant (not known as ‘the pox-doctor’s clerk’ for nothing) to squirrel away an illegal prescription of what might have been the right drugs. For soldiers there was no choice between shameful hospitalisation and untreated disease. Nor would the disease remain undetected for long. Soldiers were routinely given intimate ‘short arm inspections’, the very depth of humiliation for many a middle-class conscript, and their ‘crimes’ were discovered.

  Effective treatment of VD had improved by the time of the Second World War, but policy had scarcely changed. The contraction of VD remained a criminal offence, and in consequence many soldiers waited until they were caught by an inspection rather than reporting the disease earlier when they might have been cured quicker. Montgomery, very much the realist, was censured for recommending officially approved brothels. In some theatres, especially Italy, where it should have been possible to bring well-established civilian brothels under military control, they were simply placed out of bounds. Soldiers were given practical advice on prophylaxis, and condoms were freely available. When the condoms arrived at his battalion, Company Sergeant Major Stan Hollis of the Green Howards, who was to win the VC on D-Day, told his company commander that this seemed to him to be a diversion from the real war effort. ‘What’s to do, Sir? Are we going to fight them or fuck them?’ None of this stopped soldiers from finding girls: it simply helped ensure that they did so in circumstances that minimised risk. Throughout the war the annual rate of infection ran at around 30 men per thousand, an improvement on rates of the high Victorian army, but scarcely the apogee of the successful application of what was in effect a major public health issue.