Tommy (18 page)

Men brawled drunk, and they brawled sober. Within the regiment they were encouraged to settle matters with their fists, but when dealing with outsiders ‘the buckled ends of belts were used, also boots'. John Lucy's Royal Irish Rifles had an ‘old and sworn enemy' in a nearby English regiment, and he noticed how: ‘The Englishmen in our own regiment forgot nationality and beat up their own countrymen in the supposed defence of the honour of their chosen corps.'
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The Essex and Bedfordshire Regiments had a feud dating back to the Boer War, when an encircled Essex patrol had allegedly not been rescued by the nearby Bedfords, who were just falling in for church parade. Percy Croney, who served in 12/Essex, knew that: ‘when an Essex man sees a Bedford badge, in memory of that patrol he must call: “Thou shalt not kill,” and the Bedford man, in honour of his regiment, must fight.'
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Pubs in garrison towns were the scenes of large-scale inter-regmental fights. ‘Christmas always meant a damned good tuck-in,' wrote Frank Richards, ‘with plenty of booze and scraps to follow.' Inter-regimental brawls were common. Highland Regiments could be provoked (though for no easily-discernible historical reason) by asking for ‘'arf a pint o' broken square'; a member of the York and Lancaster Regiment would respond vigorously to a cheery greeting of ‘The Cork and Doncaster, I presume'; and ‘scholars' made insulting translations of high-sounding Latin mottoes and then ducked to avoid the bar stool.

The Welch Regiment had a long-running feud with the Royal Marines, its memory kept green in many a beery den. Frank Richards, as a soldier and Welshman bound to go to the aid of a brother in need, heard the traditional pre-fight patter in a Plymouth pub. A Welshman greeted a marine in ‘a friendly sort of tone':

The subject of women was just as contentious. The army began to build quarters for married soldiers and their families towards the end of the nineteenth century, but soldiers required permission to marry ‘on the strength' and at the turn of the century had to have five years' service and be twenty-six years of age before being considered. ‘A man who married off the strength,' observed Frank Richards, ‘had to keep his wife on his own shilling a day; she lived outside barrack and he inside, and they met whenever they could, but officially she did not exist'.
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Single men in barracks, as Kipling accurately observed, did not grow into plaster saints, and, deprived of much chance of marriage, made other arrangements. Prostitutes thronged about in garrison towns, and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which vainly sought to control venereal disease by medical inspection and compulsory treatment, covered towns like Aldershot, Colchester and Woolwich in England and Cork in Ireland. Also included was the great military camp outside Dublin, the Curragh of Kildare, where girls and women known as ‘wrens' lived rough outside the camp. Occasionally, when girls got into barracks, things got out of control; in 1896 soldiers of a Yorkshire regiment were involved in a gang rape, and three of them were sent to prison. There were more comfortable arrangements for officers, who could not be expected to rough it in huts out on the furze, and the future Edward VII was gently initiated into what became a life-long preoccupation at the Curragh in 1861.
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Regiments stationed in India maintained
lal bazaars,
essentially regimental brothels, and there were also many private establishments. Frank Richards recalled that ‘a magnificently built half-caste prostitute of fifty years of age' decided to celebrate her retirement by giving:

Girlfriends were smuggled into barracks too. One of Richards' corporals briefly kept a woman in his bunk, an arrangement which led to predictable difficulties over an alternative use to which one of the company's tea buckets was put. The architects who designed the ornamental iron railings surrounding Cardwell barracks had inadvertently spaced them so widely that sexual commerce could comfortably be carried out between them.
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It is important that we do not follow the Duke of Wellington and believe that
all
regular soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink …', however. There was a sprinkling of gentleman-rankers, who had joined for a variety of reasons and usually kept quiet about them. Sometimes there were tragedies that we can only guess at. In 1909 Private John Vivian Crowther of the 18th Hussars shot himself in barracks. He was described at his inquest as ‘a cultured and educated Oxford graduate who had inherited a large property'.
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John Lucy tells how:

And there were the properly ambitious. Lucy declared that: ‘Promotion … is my mark' and was speedily made a lance corporal. He found that the first promotion was the hardest to bear, for he was at once separated from his comrades and for the new NCO ‘every order he has to give to an old friend is a pain'.
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Frank Richards decided that the price of promotion was too high, and obstinately declined it throughout his eight years with the colours and the whole of his wartime service. There were many like him: in 1918 young Frederick Hodges found himself in command of Private Pearson MM – ‘a short, sturdy little man … nearly twice my age'. Pearson had a long-running gag about the tinned pork and beans which were a common ration issue (‘I say, where is the pork?'). And he always called Hodges ‘Corp'.
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A hard-working regular soldier, who took his military training and army education seriously, might become a lance corporal in a year or two and corporal in three. He would be unlikely to make sergeant in his first enlistment – although promotion had speeded up during the Boer War – and the prospect of a third stripe and the more comfortable life of the sergeants' mess was dangled out to persuade men to sign on after their first term. It was possible to get promoted from sergeant to colour sergeant (in the infantry) or staff sergeant (in other arms) and on to warrant officer in ten years, though this was fast work.
King's Regulations
specifically guaranteed that warrant officers would be able to complete twelve years' service, which entitled them to a small pension. Senior NCOs and warrant officers were likely to be able to complete twenty-one years' service, increasing their pensions, as long as they remained fit, and could serve even longer with their commanding officer's support. The Northamptons boasted a private soldier who had joined the regiment as a boy and died in harness just before the Boer War at the age of fifty-five. There were always jobs around the battalion which old soldiers like this could do: running the store which held the privately-purchased sports kit, helping break in recruits (‘Leave to fall out, trained soldier, please?') and, of course, looking after the young gentlemen.

Most of the officers came from what Edward Spiers has called ‘the traditional sources of supply', and even that arch-traditionalist the Duke of Wellington would have been struck by how little the officer corps of 1914 differed from that he had taken to Waterloo 101 years before. The peerage, gentry, military families, the clergy and the professions provided its bulk, with a minority coming from business, commercial and industrial families.
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In practice social divisions were more flexible than they might seem, with families who had made good in trade setting the seal on their gentility by buying land, marrying their daughters into the aristocracy and sending their sons into the army. Many a young man with a good education, crested signet ring and commission in a smart regiment was only two generations away from the shovel or the counting house.

Military families played as important a part in the army of 1914 as they had in Wellington's: no less than 43.1 percent of the fathers of cadets entering Sandhurst in the summer intake of 1910 were ‘military professionals'. In the winter of 1917 this had sunk to 17.9 percent, but by the winter of 1930 it was an astonishing 62.4 percent.
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The future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, commissioned into the Black Watch in 1901, remembered that:

Alan Brooke came from a long line of soldiers originating in Ulster, and initially wanted to be a doctor, but military blood was thicker than medical water, and off he went to Woolwich to become a gunner. It was as well for Britain's conduct of the Second World War that he did, although even at the height of his powers the slight, bespectacled Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke had, perhaps, a touch of the consulting room to him.

Just as Wellington's officer corps contained a good many young men whose only fortune was their sword, so too the army of 1914 had many officers who were just on the right side of the borders of gentility. This often made for an uncomfortable life, for although the purchase of commissions had been abolished a generation before, being an officer in the British army was an expensive business. In 1903 a War Office Committee reckoned that an officer needed a minimum of £160 a year in addition to his pay to be able to survive in the infantry. Life in the cavalry was more expensive, for a subaltern needed to provide himself with at least one charger and could hardly avoid hunting and playing polo: he could just scrape by with £300 a year, but the average private income of cavalry officers was £6–700. In 1912 Major General M. F. Rimington warned that it had once been possible to find rich young men to join the cavalry because they were not expected to work hard. But now they were expected to work till 1.00 or even 3.00 in the afternoon: who would pay to serve in the cavalry and have to work too?
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The Hutchinson Committee of 1905 was inclined to agree. It believed that many young men would like to join the cavalry if only they could afford it, and urged that the government should make it cheaper for young officers to maintain themselves in the cavalry by providing chargers and saddlery at public expense.

Alan Hanbury-Sparrow joined the Royal Berkshires in 1912 with just £175 a year, and found it hard going. In the following year E. G. W. Harrison survived in the Royal Artillery with only £18 a year which brought his total income to £92. ‘Mess bill without a drink or a cigarette [was] £6 monthly', he wrote, ‘soldier servant and washing £1 monthly, so a penny bus fare was a matter of deep consideration'.
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Towards the other extreme, Osbert Sitwell's father (advised by the wonderfully-named Major Archie Gowk) gave him £530 a year in 1912 as a Yeomanry officer attached to a regular cavalry regiment, but stressed that if young Osbert received any pay he would expect to be given it. But some officers survived despite the odds. William Robertson had joined the army as a private in 1877 despite his mother's declaration that she would rather bury him than see him in a red coat. He reached the rank of sergeant major before being commissioned, and managed to survive on his pay, though he acknowledges the kindness of his brother regimental warrant officers who clubbed together to buy him his saddlery. He became chief of the imperial general staff during the First World War, making the British army unique amongst allies and enemies in having as its professional head an officer commissioned from the ranks.

Officer training reflected old traditions. Officers destined for the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, the ‘gentlemen of the Ordnance', went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, known as ‘the shop', which had trained them since the eighteenth century. Entry was by competitive examination: the young Alan Brooke sweated blood at an army crammer's, eventually passing in to Woolwich 65th out of 72. The entrance exam included compulsory papers in English, French or German, and mathematics, and a choice of two papers from further mathematics, history, German, Latin, French and science. Those who passed out with the highest places in the final order of merit tended to go to the Royal Engineers, and the remainder to the Royal Artillery: in the December 1909 list numbers 1–11 became sappers and 12–36 gunners.
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