It was for this—the spectacle of such pageants, the pride of serving in the cavalry of one of the most prestigious regiments in the country, the thrill of sitting tall on a mount and wearing polished boots—that George Smith, just fifteen in 1834, had left his home in rural Lincolnshire and come to London. Three years earlier a recruiting sergeant had come to the nearby village of Fulbeck and enlisted his elder brother, Thomas, in the 2nd Regiment of the Life Guard. As a young boy, George could scarcely wait to join him. When he appeared at Regent’s Park Barracks, he was still underage, but the regiment nevertheless accepted this enthusiastic recruit. They taught him to ride like a cavalry trooper and how to polish his breastplate and clean his helmet. He learned quickly the strict routines of army life—how to stand, march, salute, and discipline his body so that he never slouched or “loafed about.” George and his brother were recruited because they were strong, healthy country lads of sturdy physique, perfect for sitting astride a mount. According to his army records, George stood at five feet, ten inches tall when he enlisted; he had a fair, clear complexion and brown eyes. The regimental barber cut his light-brown hair short, but because George was a trooper in the cavalry, he was permitted to cultivate a fine mustache.
Under the guidance of his regiment, George came of age. His position in the household cavalry secured him a front-row seat to history. He witnessed the passing of the Georgian era and the birth of the Victorian age: in 1837 he served at the funeral of King William IV and in 1838 at the coronation of the new queen. On February 10, 1840, he was there to participate in the ceremonies of state on the occasion of her marriage, guarding his monarch against the crowds.
On that day, when Londoners crowded into the streets and celebrated the marriage of their monarch, it is likely that a twenty-two-year-old servant called Ruth Chapman was among them. Little is known about this Sussex-born young woman, who, like so many others, left home to work in the capital. Her family at least thought it wise to baptize her at fifteen before sending her off into the wide world, with its manifold temptations. What good it did her is questionable; by the time of the queen’s nuptials she had already met and formed an attachment to a trooper of the 2nd Life Guards.
It is possible that she and George met somewhere near his barracks on Portman Street. A relation of Ruth’s worked for a Sussex family who lived at nearby Clifton Place, where she too may have been employed. Hyde Park, a notorious venue of flirtation for soldiers and servants, lay just in between. According to Henry Mayhew, it was here that housemaids and nursemaids walking in the park to and from their place of work often first encountered “the all powerful red coat” and “succumbed to Scarlet Fever.” Soldiers were by no means unaware of the impact their dashing uniforms and well-groomed military air could have on young women, and deployed these features to their advantage. As the army actively discouraged marriage among enlisted men, and low wages meant that the average private “could not afford to employ professional women to gratify his passions . . . he is only too glad to seize the opportunity of forming an intimacy with a woman who will appreciate him for his own sake, and cost him nothing but the trouble of taking her about occasionally.”2 More important, at least from the army’s perspective, a monogamous relationship with a decent working-class girl “was unlikely to communicate some infectious disease” to a soldier and would keep him away from prostitutes.3 Such arrangements may have served an ordinary enlistee well, but it placed the object of his affection in a difficult, and potentially ruinous, position. By January 1841, Ruth found herself in just such a situation.
The precise day on which Annie Eliza Smith was born in September 1841 is unclear. Because she was an illegitimate child, Ruth may have attempted to hide the facts of her birth. The conditions in which Annie arrived could not have been entirely happy for Ruth, who would have lost her employment as her pregnancy advanced and would have found herself dependent upon meager and unreliable handouts from George. In the eyes of society, and the army, Ruth had become a “dolly-mop”: a soldier’s woman. Though such a woman did not quite fall into the category of “professional,” she was deemed a sort of “amateur prostitute.” Fortunately, the army’s position on dolly-mops was a pragmatic one, so long as only six out of every hundred enlisted men in a regiment were permitted to marry. In the field, such women would have been known as camp followers and allowed to earn their keep by taking in the regiment’s laundry; when the cavalry remained in barracks, these women were often called upon to perform the same duties. One trooper’s woman remarked that she made ends meet by doing “a little needlework in the day-time” as well as “some washing and mangling now and then to help it out.” She lived in a room near the barracks, for which she paid a shilling a week.* Ruth’s circumstances would have been similar.
For five months after Annie’s birth, Ruth’s position remained a precarious one, especially as she soon found herself pregnant with a second child. Regardless of George’s affection for her, there remained the ever-present possibility that he might be posted abroad, a circumstance known to be the death knell of many romantic attachments between soldiers and the women they hadn’t married. Had fate taken this turn, Ruth would have been left with no financial support, two children, and a soiled reputation. When placed in such a position, it was conventional for dolly-mops to remain loyal to the regiment and seek another protector within it, or from within the barracks. However, this remedy was not without consequences; in doing so they committed themselves to a career in prostitution. Fortunately, on February 20, 1842, two years after the commencement of their relationship, George received permission to marry his sweetheart. Whether it was George’s expressed wish or the thoughtful intercession of his commanding officer, the date of his nuptials was backdated by two years on his military records. Anyone who inquired would learn that George and Ruth’s wedding had taken place in the same month and year as that of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
From the day of the couple’s first acquaintance through their subsequent years together, the army would completely define the lives of George, Ruth, and their children. Although marriage ensured that Mrs. Smith was now “on the strength,” meaning that she was included as an official regimental wife, this did not necessarily make life more comfortable for her. The army provided Ruth and her children with half rations and permission to live within the barracks, but these arrangements were not pleasant, nor even healthy. Designated married quarters were not provided until the 1850s, and so newlyweds like George and Ruth had to make do with corners of the communal barracks room, screened off with sheets and blankets. Women dressed and undressed, lay in bed, washed, gave birth, and breastfed their babies surrounded by single men, who often strode about half-naked, swearing, jeering, and singing lewd songs. Sanitation was not much better. When a national inspection of barracks was made in 1857, the dwelling spaces were revealed to be in appalling condition. Many dormitories were set over the stables and ill-ventilated. Dampness and poor lighting were the norm, as were insufficient washing and latrine facilities. In some barracks large barrels were used as communal chamber pots; these same receptacles were emptied and then used for bathing. Kitchen facilities too were found wanting. Most contained no ovens, which had a significant impact on the diet and health of military men, who subsisted largely on boiled food.
There were, however, some benefits for families who “lived on the strength.” Army savings banks were established to allow soldiers to put aside small sums, medicine from regimental supplies was made available to sick men and their families, while all ranks and their dependents were given access to the barracks’ library. Most important, by 1848, families “on the strength” were allocated a small allowance for suitable accommodation outside the barracks; though the amount did not ensure many comforts, it did at least permit soldiers and their wives some privacy and a home of their own. This would have proved especially timely to the Smiths, whose number continued to expand over the decade. Shortly after Ruth and George’s marriage in 1842,
a brother, George William Thomas, joined Annie and her parents. He was followed by Emily Latitia in 1844, Eli in 1849, Miriam in 1851, and William in 1854, bringing the number of children to six.* Annie and her siblings would enjoy one of the greatest benefits of “life on the strength”: the regimental school.
More than twenty years before a British system of mandatory state schooling was implemented, in 1870, the sons and daughters of families on the strength were required to attend organized lessons funded by the army. This was meant to counteract the possible negative effects of growing up in and around the barracks, an environment thought to be “incompatible with decency.” Many believed that children might acquire habits of “idleness and vice” there; girls in particular were to be shielded from “the more masculine habits of drinking and swearing.” These schools were also meant to assure soldiers that the sovereign cared about the education and welfare of their children, and to help the children of enlisted men “acquire the means of making themselves useful and earning a livelihood.”4 Having been instilled with military ideals that included discipline and respect, most regiments regarded this school attendance as compulsory; families that hesitated to enroll their children were threatened with being struck off the strength. Of course, the regiment also expected soldiers to pay for this privilege. George would have been charged two pence a month for Annie to attend, and then one penny for each sibling who joined her.
The curriculum of the regimental schools was similar to that of civilian charity institutions. The schools were divided into those for small children and those for grown ones. The younger children were taught by a schoolmistress in the morning, while the elder children were instructed by the schoolmaster. Following lunch, the sexes were separated for more gender-specific occupational instruction. The boys remained with the master, and the girls joined the schoolmistress. Considering the instructional standards of the first half of the Victorian era, these children received a fairly rigorous education. The small ones were taught spelling, reading, and singing, a curriculum that would expand to include lessons in writing, diction, grammar, English history, geography, arithmetic, and algebra. Under such a regimen, Annie would have received an education far superior to that of most of her working-class peers, both male and female. As a girl, she would also benefit from afternoon lessons in “industry”—specifically, in every type of needlework, from embroidery to making clothes, crocheting, and knitting. Girls thus acquired skills that would render them useful to the regiment, in mending and making garments, and also assist them in finding paid work when their schooling was complete. The only complication in this arrangement was that army life was mobile and necessitated frequent moves between barracks and postings, which regularly interrupted the children’s instruction.
Although George and his family never had to endure the hardships of a foreign posting, neither were they able to grow too comfortable in their domestic surroundings. Regiments were rotated between barracks, often with little notice. Moving to and organizing new lodgings near barracks on Portman Street, Hyde Park, and Regent’s Park in London involved inconvenient relocations a few miles in one direction or the other; the larger upheaval of traveling to a posting in Windsor, more than twenty miles outside the city, required great effort and expense. Over the course of George’s service with his regiment, from the 1840s through the early 1860s, the family lived at no fewer than twelve addresses between London and Windsor.
One curious aspect of growing up as the child of a soldier in a socially prestigious regiment involved straddling two disparate worlds. The cavalry, with its aristocratic officers and its proximity to the royal family, brought opportunities to glimpse, from afar, a realm of status, privilege, and wealth. Annie’s girlhood was spent between Knightsbridge, with its elegant stucco-fronted villas, and Windsor, in the shadow of the royal family’s residence. The sight of landaus, filled with ladies in expensive silk bonnets and titled gentlemen whose uniforms clanked with medals, would have seemed ordinary, as would a glimpse of Queen Victoria or a royal prince trotting on horseback through Windsor Great Park. When Ruth and her children stepped out from the door of one of their temporary homes, they walked along clean, broad, well-lit streets, comparatively free from signs of want. They inhaled the fresh air of Hyde Park alongside the perfectly attired, parasol-twirling members of high society. From a young age, Annie would have been taught to take pride in her father’s position and to adopt his love of queen and country as her own. The regiment’s values of honor and dignity would have been inculcated in her as well. How Annie stood and spoke and comported herself, while not making her appear privileged, would have demonstrated that she understood the rules of appropriate conduct and was aware of her place within her surroundings. These skills and discernment would remain with her into adulthood, so that she always gave the impression of having come from a good family.
Yet Annie also experienced life as a child of the working class. Despite the privileges of her father’s position, his salary was meager. While the family lived in Windsor, they rented lodgings on Keppel Terrace, a road whose houses had been constructed and decorated “at considerable expense,” in order to appeal to “small, genteel families.” Each three-story property, with its “Portland stone mantels,” “rich cornicing,” and “fine views over the River Thames,” was comprised of “two parlours, three bedrooms and servants’ quarters” in which three army families lived, while sharing a kitchen and lavatory facilities.5 The quality of some of their housing in Knightsbridge was at times even worse. Hidden between Knightsbridge’s “fine mansions and respectable abodes,” and no more than a moment’s walk from its exclusive shops, existed a small pocket of “insalubriousness” across the road from Hyde Park Barracks. “From Knightsbridge Green all along the High Road stood a succession of music halls, taverns, beer-stores, oyster saloons, & cheap tobacconists” deemed “a disgrace to any portion of London.”6 Here also was situated some of the only housing that the families of enlisted men could afford. When possible, the Smiths lived at a distance from these establishments. In 1844, they took a small cottage on Rutland Terrace near the Brompton Road, but as the century progressed, rents in the better areas increased and pushed regimental families into the densely populated streets between two of the most notorious music halls: the Sun and the Trevor Arms. Raphael Street ran east to west, just on the fringe of this carnival of iniquity, and although its housing stock had been completed only in the past couple of years, its homes had already been carved up and portioned out to multiple families on lower incomes. In 1854, the Smiths were living at number 15 with at least two other families; each occupied two rooms.
In the late spring of that year, just when the weather had turned milder, the London newspapers began to write of an alarming rise in the number of cases of scarlatina, or scarlet fever, recorded by the London Fever Hospital. Soon outbreaks were reported in Islington, Knightsbridge, and Chelsea, though journalists attempted to offer some reassurance to the wealthier part of the population by confirming that: “the disease is principally among the labouring classes.” On May 3 the Daily News wrote that a coachman who lived near the very wealthiest of society in Eaton Mews South had watched as “malignant scarlatina carried off all five of his children in nine days.” The paper warned readers that the outbreak “was very bad in this district.” Tragic stories of what was now declared an epidemic continued through the summer. “Scarlatina increases weekly,” wrote theMorning Post on July 27; “the . . . disease has visited some families with severity, and . . . an instance is reported in which three children died of it in the same family within 6 days.” In early June, the London Fever Hospital hit a crisis point, when “upwards of 100 patients” were admitted for scarlet fever alone. The situation was exacerbated by the arrival of a second epidemic: typhus.
Whereas scarlet fever, a flu-like streptococcal illness characterized by a red rash, predominantly affected children, typhus attacked both young and old alike. Commonly known as “camp fever” or “gaol f
ever,” the disease was communicated through the bites of fleas and lice. These insects were present in the clothes, blankets, and bedding shared among people in close quarters. Like those afflicted with scarlet fever, typhus sufferers also experienced a high fever as well as a rash, which spread across the body. Eventually, in fatal cases, the infection moved to the brain.
In mid-May, both epidemics arrived at Raphael Street. An infant named John Fussell Palmer, not quite eighteen months old, was the first to die of scarlet fever. How rapidly the disease crept through the porous plaster walls and crowded rooms along the street is unknown, but shortly after the Palmer child fell ill, sickness came to settle in the Smiths’ home. Annie would have helped care for two-and-a-half-year-old Miriam when their mother was busy with her newborn, William. Little Miriam would have been toddling about the family rooms, giggling and prattling, turning over chairs and getting underfoot. A fever and sore throat, flu-like aches, and much crying suddenly replaced these activities. When the rash appeared, there was no doubt as to what had befallen her. She suffered until May 28, and was buried quickly on the following day. While Ruth and George were nursing their youngest girl, William too was afflicted by the rash and fever, and five days later, he died at the age of five months, on June 2. After carrying away the two youngest, seven days later, scarlet fever took its next victim, Eli, at the age of five.
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