A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (40 page)

The Royal Navy was, on the whole, popular with the public. While the Army was used to quell civil disorder (most notoriously in the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, when cavalry broke up a demonstration and killed a number of civilians), the Navy did not impinge on the life of those ashore – except in the occasional form of the press gang. This system of compulsory recruiting, the scourge of Britain’s coastal towns during the Napoleonic Wars, had often brought misery to those affected, but had benefited the majority by making it unnecessary to introduce conscription. In the decades after 1815 the press gang remained theoretically in existence, but with the reduction in ships it was no longer necessary to fill crews by these methods. However the harsh shipboard
discipline of Nelson’s era, based largely on floggings, remained, and ensured that the Navy was kept in a state of sullen efficiency. The public loved the sentimental image of the sailor (as opposed to the soldier, whom they usually mocked and disliked). One of the bestselling books of 1841 was a collection of the naval songs of Charles Dibdin, with illustrations by the Dickens illustrator George Cruikshank, of which Queen Victoria bought fifty copies and the Admiralty five hundred.

Flogging, like the press gang, declined in use rather than being abolished (the last flogging in the Royal Navy took place in 1880) as conditions gradually improved. In 1831, small pensions were granted to sailors with twenty-one years’ service. Regular long-term engagements for sailors were introduced in 1853, and all who signed on for these were entitled to pensions. Though there was a Naval Hospital at Greenwich for the care of old and wounded sailors this closed in 1867, for the Navy had been involved in so few major actions by that time that there were not enough veterans to make it worthwhile. The pensioners were sent home and paid what was owing to them there. For officers, there was no question of superannuation. They did not retire, for they held commissions for life. They were put on ‘half-pay’ (in practice often less than half) and sent home, in theory to be called back when circumstances required. Because no officers left the Navy except through death, junior men – whether able or otherwise – could not gain promotion except on the principle of dead men’s shoes, and many naval officers remained captains, lieutenants, or even midshipmen, throughout their careers. Those at the top, in the Admiralty, could retain their posts in perpetuity. The result was a moribund and ineffectual body that had no taste for innovation and did not grasp the importance of new technology. Only in 1860 – presumably after the last Napoleonic relic had left the Admiralty –
did the Navy have its first ironclad warship. The conversion to steam was followed through, slowly and late, for the same reason.

When Victoria came to the throne, the British Army was largely still a relic of the Napoleonic Wars, its recruits drawn, in the Duke of Wellington’s much-quoted phrase, from ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink’. Fully a quarter of its manpower came from the poorest part of the United Kingdom – Ireland – and one of them described it as: ‘the dernier resort of the idle, the depraved and the destitute’, adding that ‘the larger part . . . make good soldiers, and useful, if not valuable, servants of the state.’
⁶

The Queen’s reign would see constant warfare, though most of it would be minor. Only in a single year – 1862 – would her soldiers not be involved in conflict somewhere in the world. These actions would accustom British troops to fighting on all continents and in all conditions, and render them the world’s most battle-hardened army. There would be a steady evolution in their tactics, weaponry, organization, planning and quality throughout the Victorian era, though the reign would end in military ignominy with the Boer War, and the quality of the British soldier – in terms of initiative rather than bravery or doggedness – would still leave something to be desired. Only two years before the outbreak of the South African conflict, Besant wrote what he may have assumed would be an end-of-term report on Victoria’s Army. His choice of battles is interesting, for several of those he mentions were embarrassing debacles, while others are entirely forgotten. One of them, the landing at Tel-el-Kebir, was not even opposed:

If, during this period, our Navy has proved our ‘first line of defence’, it is equally true that of our Army that it has been employed as our ‘first line of offence’ in almost every quarter of the globe., and in no era of our history of the same length have our soldiers reaped so many laurels. They have had their reverses, their checks and their disasters; but their colours have also been blazoned with some of the proudest victories in history. Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman, Sevastopol, what heroic memories do these not recall! They have quelled the unruly tribes of the Niger, broken the military power of the brave savages south of the Zambesi, subdued an Egyptian rebellion on the Nile, and inspired with a wholesome dread of the British name the death-despising hordes of the Soudan; and the Queen’s troops are prouder of no victories than those of Tel-el-Kebir, El-Teb, Tamai, Abu-Klea, Kirbekan, and Tofrek.
⁷

In peacetime the Army was scattered throughout the world, manning garrisons in colonies and protectorates and spheres of influence. The forces involved varied in size from the vast armies (mainly native) in India to the single soldier – a bombardier – garrisoning Tristan da Cunha in 1841. Like other armies in colonial situations, they were not only soldiers but policemen and engineers, creating roads, towns and bridges and surveying territory. Units would be sent around the world as circumstances required, postings perhaps including Ireland, Canada, India, South Africa and Bermuda as well as spells at home in stations like Aldershot, Colchester or Hounslow.

In 1854 the total number of men in the British Army was 140,043, of whom 29,208 were in India and 39,754 in other colonies. From the 1870s onward, local forces in the self-governing colonies took a more prominent role in the defence of their territories, freeing British troops from some of this
duty. In 1860 the members of Volunteer units totalled 124,000.

At the beginning of Victoria’s reign the Army was reduced to the level at which it had been after the defeat of Napoleon. It was to be built up again only when circumstances made this necessary, at the time of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, and when the Boer War broke out. In between, many regiments were reduced to a single battalion.

Any notion that British armies took success for granted was disproved almost as soon as Victoria became Queen. The first conflict of her reign took place in Afghanistan between 1839 and 1842. Indian Army troops, on the orders of her Government, invaded the country, seized its capital, Kabul, and installed a pro-British native ruler. They then occupied Afghanistan through a series of garrisons. Two years later, rebellion against their puppet ruler, Shah Shuja, broke out and spread. The country was too dangerous for a small and scattered British force, and their commander negotiated with the rebels the safe withdrawal of his men. They retreated south towards India, through freezing mountain passes, but rebel promises regarding their safety proved worthless and their numbers were reduced by constant attacks (the last stand of the 44th Regiment at Gandamak provided the subject for William Barnes Wollen’s heroic painting with that title, done in 1898). Only one man – Dr William Brydon – out of a force of 4,000 succeeded in reaching the safety of British-held territory in January 1842. Losses included almost 12,000 camp followers, though not all were killed. The Afghans took both soldiers and civilians hostage, and these were held throughout most of the year until a punitive force was able
to release them. Though Britain won the war, the retreat from Kabul and anxiety over the hostages had been a major humiliation.

The Crimean war broke out in the autumn of 1853, and Britain joined the following spring. While the nation’s armies could fight successfully against ill-equipped natives, they were inadequate to take on the forces of the Russian Empire – even though these too were ineptly managed and badly equipped. Once again the difficulty was not with the quality of the soldiery or the leadership of junior officers but with the bureaucracy.

The war was a disaster in terms of organization. The public, accustomed to effortless British supremacy at home and abroad, was horrified by the muddle and incompetence, and filled with resentment at the generals – who, like their naval counterparts, were relics of an older generation, a forgotten war and an antiquated mindset. Men like Lord Lucan, Lord Raglan and the Earl of Cardigan owed their positions to aristocratic influence and the sense of entitlement that the upper classes cherished for higher state positions. Commissions in the Army could be purchased, and most regiments looked with disdain on middle-class applicants. As in other European armies, the cavalry, infantry and guards regiments were aristocratic in tone. Only the artillery and engineers, in which technical ability was necessary, were open to a wider range of background, as were navies for similar reasons. (In the British Army there was no purchase of commissions in the technical branches.)

The emerging middle classes, who were used to running their businesses with punctuality and efficiency, were scandalized
by the incompetence with which the War Office carried out its tasks. They hated the Army, too, for its unreformed aristocratic nature – since the 1832 Reform Bill that had restructured a similarly moribund political world had had no effect on military affairs – and for the fact that their own sons were kept out of its smart regiments.

The Crimean War was the only European conflict in which Britain was involved between 1815 and 1914. It was caused by the designs of Nicholas I, the Russian tsar, on the Ottoman Empire. Nicholas claimed the right to protect Christians in Ottoman territories, which included the Holy Land. Though the cause of the outbreak was trivial, the wider issues – who was to dominate the eastern Mediterranean? – were more serious, and both France and Britain decided to come to Turkey’s aid. Less than thirty years after fighting the Turks at Navarino, Britain was their ally. Enthusiasm for the war built up in Britain, which saw Russia – a former partner against Napoleon – as a natural enemy and a bully who needed to be faced up to. Britain declared war on 27 March 1854. Queen Victoria – and many of her enthusiastic subjects – saw off the soldiers and the ships as they set out.

The public, expecting swift victory, was disappointed. It took almost ten weeks to get an expeditionary force of 18,000 troops to the Dardanelles, and the men were felled in droves by cholera. The British plan was to cross the Black Sea to attack the Crimea and capture the port of Sevastopol. Having landed the troops, the allies enjoyed some quick successes, expelling the Russians from the heights above the Alma River within six days, and setting off a burst of triumphalism at home. Instead of following this up by attacking Sevastopol, which might well have fallen quickly, the armies proceeded to dig siege positions around the city. There was a notable lack of cooperation between the allies, or even the two British services. The Navy
began bombarding the city, and the Army commander asked them to stop.

The most famous event of the war, from a British viewpoint, took place on 25 October 1854 at the small port of Balaclava, where the supplies were landed. A Russian force tried to seize it but were repulsed by Highland troops. A cavalry unit, the Heavy Brigade, counter-attacked but its counterpart – the Light Brigade – misunderstood orders to attack and advanced straight into the fire of enemy artillery. The operation was a disaster – about a third of the 673 men involved were casualties – but the public thought it a magnificent example of British courage, and it was quickly to pass into legend.

Winter came, and the war ground to a halt. The weather was extremely bitter, supplies were inadequate, especially in terms of uniforms, greatcoats and boots, and were not efficiently distributed. Men suffered, and died, in the siege-lines through lack of equipment, blankets or medicines. One of the most famous cartoons to appear in
Punch
– which was an unrelenting critic of the War Office – depicted two ragged, starving and bandaged soldiers in a snow-covered landscape. One says: ‘Well, Jack! Here’s good news from Home. We’re to have a medal.’ The other replies: ‘That’s very kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on.’
⁸

The commanders came in for a great deal of public ridicule. Lord Raglan, the British commander-in-chief, was a one-armed veteran of Waterloo who had never even commanded a battalion in the field. He wore civilian clothes, and repeatedly referred to the enemy as ‘the French’, so much was he stuck in the thinking of a previous era. However out of touch with reality he may have been, he was aware of the criticism that was heaped on him by press and public at home, and of the mutterings of his men. Through the bleak winter of 1854, morale plummeted. When, the following July, Raglan died of
dysentery at the age of sixty-five, he was replaced by another Napoleonic relic, Lieutenant General James Simpson, three years his junior.

The Navy did not fare much better. It too was run by men in their sixties who had had to wait decades to achieve command rank, and who had come to prominence too late. The Navy played no significant role in the conflict other than transporting men and supplies, and bombarding enemy territory. Their ships were embarrassingly outdated in comparison with those of their French allies, for they had no steam-powered vessels. Government refusal to spend, as well as nostalgia in the Admiralty, had prevented any modernization of the fleet. For the same reasons there was no rifled gunnery and there were no ironclad ships.

The uniforms worn in the Crimea, like those worn everywhere on campaign by the Army, were the same tight-fitting, conspicuous and impractical ones in which they mounted guard at home. Only under the stresses of battlefield conditions and prolonged living in the field did this begin to change. Officers, in particular, improvised warm clothing – the Balaclava helmet and the cardigan – that have seen service among both the military and civilians ever since. After the harsh winter of 1854, Highlanders were at least given permission to abandon the kilt for tartan trousers. Soldiers were, however, still required to wear a tight leather stock that severely restricted movement.