Youthful self-will often had its part in the act of enlisting against the advice of those who believed themselves to be elders and betters. John Lucy and his brother Denis went ‘a bit wild’ after their mother died shortly before the First World War:
We were tired of fathers, of advice from relations, of bottled coffee essence, of school, of newspaper offices. The soft accents and slow movements of the small farmers who swarmed in the streets of our southern Irish town, the cattle, fowl, eggs, butter, bacon, and the talk of politics filled us with loathing.
Both joined the Royal Irish Rifles, and found its ranks leavened with ‘scallywags and minor adventurers’, as well as a few rather strange characters:
There was a taciturn sergeant from Waterford who was conversant with the intricacies of higher mathematics … There was an ex-divinity student with literary tastes, who drank much beer and affected an obvious pretence to gentle birth; a national school teacher; a man who had absconded from a colonial bank; a few decent sons of farmers.27
John Miller joined the Scots Guards in the 1960s. ‘I genuinely believed that the army was a man’s life and a man’s life was what I wanted. It would get me out of Motherwell’ and an ‘incredibly dull’ job in the office at a local steel works. He chose the Scots Guards because of its fine fighting record, admired its officers because of their ‘amazing sense of style’, and found in Sergeant Willie McGill ‘what they now call a role model. Or even a father substitute which … is something I have been looking for throughout much of my life.’28 Some men were simply attracted by the prospect of regular food. In the West Riding of Yorkshire eighteenth-century recruiting sergeants brandished havercakes, the oat (hafer) cakes that were a staple of the local diet, on their swords, demonstrating that recruits would not go short of food. The 33rd Foot, eventually to become the Duke of Wellington’s regiment, earned the nickname ‘The Havercake Lads’ in this way – and the shoulder-bag in which soldiers carried their rations was christened the haversack for the same reason.
The majority of recruits were unemployed when they enlisted. Even in 1925, when the dole was available for the out-of-work, 60 per cent of London recruits were unemployed. The picture is far more complex than suggested by Wellington’s assertion that the army was simply composed of ‘the scum of the earth’. Across the army’s history many men did indeed enlist because they had neither a job nor the prospect of one. Yet others yearned for foreign travel, virtually out of the question for the working-class civilian before the end of the Second World War. Some thought that the army offered an easier prospect than life outside. In 1928 the miner Richard Clemens joined up because ‘I was just fed up with the mines, that’s all.’ In 1899 T. J. Hammond enlisted under-age into the Essex Regiment because ‘I’d run away from home. That’s all there was to it.’29 Thomas Pococke, born in Edinburgh in 1790, was ‘tall and well made, of a gentle appearance and address’, and became an actor at the age of 16. Humiliated by a dreadful attack of stage fright, he joined a party of recruits bound for the Isle of Wight, where he enlisted into the 71st Foot for seven years. He received a bounty of 11 guineas, kept £4 for himself and sent the rest to his parents – who had begged him not to go on the stage in the first place. ‘I could not associate with the common soldiers,’ he wrote,
Their habits made me shudder. I feared an oath – they never spoke without one. I could not drink – they loved liquor. They gamed – I knew nothing of play. Thus was I a solitary individual amongst hundreds. They lost no opportunity of teasing me. ‘Saucy Tom’ or ‘the Distressed Methodist’ were the names they distinguished me by.
He eventually secured his position by knocking down one of his tormentors and offering to fight him, but still found his comrades an uncomfortable crew: ‘Their pleasures were repugnant to my feelings.’30
Some young men had profitable alternatives to enlistment but signed on anyhow. Walter Mitton was born in Burton-upon-Trent in 1877, to a family that ran a large and successful plastering concern. All but one of his brothers went into the family business, but he briefly became a signwriter at a local coach-builders, and enlisted into the South Staffordshires as a drummer as soon as he was 16. His father disapproved and bought him out. As soon as he was 18, he signed on again, this time into the Royal Field Artillery, leaving a letter at home urging his parents to let him follow his chosen profession. He remained in the army for the next twenty-two years, keeping a well-written diary of his service in the Boer War, recording in May 1900 ‘what a glorious time I had, reading my letter and papers dad sent to me. I was fairly reconciled again.’31 He became, in the slang of the age, ‘as regimental as a button-stick’, and when he married Agnes McEvoy in Kilkenny in July 1908 he had gun-horses pulling the bridal carriage and mounted gunners as outriders. Mitton’s enlistment expired in 1917, by which time he had earned a Mention in Dispatches and become a battery sergeant major. However, he felt that he should see the war out, re-enlisted at once, was killed as a sergeant on the fourth day of the great German offensive of March 1918, and is buried in Noyon New British Cemetery. Whatever the period, families were often not prepared to let their young men depart without a fight, and when Benjamin Harris’s recruiting party was ready to embark for England
We were nearly pestered to death with a detachment of old Irish women, who came from different parts (on hearing of their sons having enlisted) in order to endeavour to get them away from us, following us down to the water’s edge, they clung to their offspring, and, dragging them away, sent forth such dismal howls and moans that it was quite distracting to hear them … At length we got our lads safe on board, and set sail for England.32
Sometimes a husband would enlist during a drinking spree after a row, leaving his distraught wife to seek him at the barracks or even to follow the drum herself in order to find him. In October 1807 a Lambeth wheelwright named Pearce enlisted in the Guards because of ‘a life of idleness and extravagance’, and then shot himself after a row with his wife.33
Some men were easy targets for recruiters. John Shipp was raised as an orphan by his parish, and knew that the army was for him when he saw his first recruiting party: ‘It was all about Gentleman soldiers, merry life, muskets rattling, cannon roaring, drums beating, colours flying, regiments charging and shouts of Victory! Victory!’ He found the boy drummer’s smart dress irresistible, and his heart kindled when he heard a band strike up ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. He enlisted in the 22nd Regiment in 1797. We must never underestimate the appeal of uniform, ritual and reputation, especially to the young. The anonymous Irish author of Memoirs of a Sergeant came from a Roman Catholic family beggared when his father, steward to the Nevens family of Portarlington, died. He spent a year as a servant and then, in 1806, saw the 43rd Light Infantry on the march:
The roll of the spirit-stirring drum, the glittering file of bayonets, with the pomp and circumstance of military parade, not unmixed perhaps with undefined thoughts of ultimate promotion passed in review before my imagination, in colours rapidly changing: resistance was in vain.34
Timothy Gowing admitted that as a youth he had ‘admired the appearance of a soldier. Little thinking of all that lay behind the scenes’. In January 1854 ‘I enlisted into one of the smartest regiments of our army, the Royal Fusiliers … I selected this regiment for its noble deeds of valour under Lord Wellington in the Peninsula. They, the old Fusiliers, had made our enemies the French shake on many a hard fought field.’35 Some thirty years before, Alexander Somerville had made the same connection between sartorial elegance and military reputation, though in his case it was the Royal Scots Greys that appealed:
The grey horses, their long white tails, the scarlet coats, the long swords, the high bearskin caps and the plumes of white feathers encircling them in front, the blue overalls with the broad yellow stripes on the outside, the boots and spurs, the carbines slung at the saddle side, the holster pipes and the pistols, the shoulder belts and the pouches with ammunition, and, in the wet or the wintry wind, the long sca
rlet cloaks flowing from the riders’ necks to their knees … the trumpets sounding, the squadrons charging, Napoleon’s columns broken by the charge.36
It may not be far wrong to take an infantry staff sergeant’s 1846 assessment of motives for enlistment as having a broader validity, though there were substantial variations: Wellington’s men were undoubtedly better material.
Indigent. Embracing labourers and mechanics out of employ, who seek merely for support – 80 in 120.
Indigent. Respectable persons induced by misfortune or imprudence – 2 in 120.
Idle. Who consider a soldier’s life an easy one – 16 in 120.
Bad characters. Who fall back on the army as a last resort – 8 in 120.
Criminals. Who seek to escape from the consequences of their actions – 1 in 120.
Perverse sons. Who seek to grieve their parents – 2 in 120.
Discontented and Restless – 8 in 120.
Ambitious – 1 in 120.
Others – 2 in 120.37
CHAPTER 13
PRESSED INTO SERVICE
VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENT WAS unlikely ever to keep the army’s ranks filled. Although, in strict terms, the British army was not recruited by conscription till early 1916, in time of war the feckless, unemployed or indebted could find themselves pressed into service. In 1695 the law relating to insolvent debtors was modified to require a man under forty to enlist in the army or navy, or to provide a substitute, before he could be discharged from bankruptcy. After Queen Anne’s accession similar arrangements applied to prisoners released for debts under £100. The 1702 Mutiny Act decreed that men pardoned for capital offences were to be handed over to a recruiting officer, an arrangement which remained in force till 1814. Successive Acts of Parliament – the Press Acts, operating in the years 1701–12, 1745–6, 1755–8, and 1788–9 – ordered that ‘able bodied men who had not any lawful calling or employment or visible means for their maintenance or livelihood’ were subject to enforced enlistment. Detailed procedure varied from time to time, but usually the bounty that such a man might have received as a genuine volunteer was shared out between the village constables who presented him to the recruiting officer, the churchwardens administering the poor law in his parish, or his poor relations.1 In April 1758 Corporal Matthew Todd found himself in the Berkshire town of Reading:
We got a great number of impressed men into our regiment, for the constable brings them in every Saturday, the market day, where we have an officer and a sergeant and a corporal and 12 men waiting at the Town Hall where a bench of Justices of the Peace sits, and any man that is so brought by the constables, if our officer approves of him, asks him to enlist. If he is inclined the officer gives him a guinea and a crown, if he won’t enlist the corporal takes him to the gaol and puts him in the Black Hole and he has nothing to subsist upon but one pound of bread per day and water, a sentry being planted there to hinder any thing from coming to him. As soon as he is wearied of this confinement and will take one day’s pay he is let out and if he deserts or behaves unruly he is punished the same as though he had enlisted. There is an Act of Parliament for that purpose. Any young fellow that’s out of place, or has got a girl with child, or has any loose character, is sure of being brought, for the constables receive one pound for every man they take up, and several of them will take up any one, etc.2 …
During the Napoleonic wars the British garrison of the notoriously unhealthy West Indies – from 1793 to 1801 roughly half the 86,000 rank and file sent out died there or in transit – was partly kept up to strength by the impressment of convicted felons and prisoners who had pleaded not guilty and were awaiting trial. A man might avoid trial and the prospect of a capital sentence if he agreed to volunteer ‘for general service’. Such service was for life until 1803, when it was reduced to seven years, providing the man had been of good behaviour. By 1820 over two hundred offences attracted the death penalty, although it was inflicted comparatively rarely, with transportation to Australia becoming the fate of the majority of pardoned felons in 1787–1868. Deserters, especially if they had deserted only once, and had done so in Britain, were fair game for unpopular postings. At this time deserters were rarely executed unless they had joined the enemy, made a profession of desertion, or had unwisely chosen to abscond at the very moment that the authorities were seeking examples to discourage others. In August 1813 Wellington’s judge advocate general maintained ‘Desertion is terrible … We have only as yet tried five out of sixteen sent for trial: they are all sentenced to death, and all shot! This will, I think, have a good effect on our new reinforcements.’3
During the Napoleonic wars those deserters in Britain judged to have ‘eradicable bad habits’, were simply posted off to keep normal units up to strength. Units in the Windward and Leeward Islands Command – a detachment of Royal Artillery, some Royal Military Artificers, and twelve battalions of foot – had 1,290 ‘criminals, culprits and deserters’ amongst the 8,736 men in their ranks between January 1799 and October 1802. 1st Battalion The Royal Scots managed to collect an astonishing 223 (a high proportion of its 926 rank and file), while 2nd Battalion 60th Regiment, with 534 rank and file, had a mere seven. Two fortunate battalions had none at all.4 In December 1783 an inspection report on 1/60th Foot, reviewed at Spanish Town, Jamaica, described the battalion as made up of ‘Foreigners … Draughts received from the 92nd Regiment … [and] British and Irish sent from the jails in England.’5
Harder cases, including some civil prisoners pardoned for capital crimes, found themselves in units raised specifically for garrison duties in Africa or the West Indies. Sergeant Tom Morris of the 73rd Foot recalled that Private Hardy, his rear-rank man at Waterloo, had falsely reported himself wounded and, in consequence, been denied the medal for the action. He was ‘ashamed to return to his quarters without the medal … deserted … and was eventually sent to a condemned regiment in Africa for life.’6 In 1808 Fraser’s Corps of Infantry was raised for the defence of the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal. It was designated the Royal African Corps in 1804, and detachments were soon deployed on the African coast. O’Hara’s Regiment was stationed in Senegal from 1766 to 1784, when it was disbanded. In the West Indies, the Royal West India Rangers and the Royal York Rangers were formed out of drafts from the Royal African Corps in 1806 and 1808. The York Chasseurs were assembled from deserters corralled on the Isle of Wight and sent to the West Indies in 1814. After the Napoleonic wars the army tried to do away with ‘penal corps’ altogether, and all had gone by 1821. But in 1822 part of the Royal African Corps was re-embodied, brought up to strength with convict volunteers from Britain, and styled the Royal African Colonial Corps. It immediately generated a flurry of non-purchase promotions for officers who could not expect to buy advancement within their own units and were undeterred by unhealthy postings. The corps soon took to recruiting its rank and file locally, and the Ghana armed forces now counts it as one of its predecessors.
It is impossible to be sure of the proportion of criminals or deserters in the army in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. J. A. Houlding argues that insolvent debtors and pardoned felons were ‘few in number’ in most regiments, and the figures for the West Indies, where most of these folk were sent, do indeed bear him out. He argues that most of those impressed came from ‘the next category in the current scale of values’: the ‘able-bodied, idle and disorderly persons’. Houlding maintained that the main purpose of this impressment was not primarily to take up these socially undesirable elements, but to persuade others to enlist (thus pocketing the bounty) for fear of being pressed.7 In contrast, Richard Glover’s Peninsula Preparation emphasises the number of criminals in the army, suggesting that it was full of ‘appalling thugs’. Edward Coss’s All for the King’s Shilling: The British Soldier under Wellington argues cogently that the majority of Wellington’s soldiers were unemployed farmworkers, tradesmen, and artisans who decided to soldier rather than starve. Arthur Gilbert maintains that our view of the rank and f
ile is coloured by the fact that officers, most of them middle-class and, until the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our main source for comments on the rank and file, confused ‘the economic plight of these men with depravity’. His own work on recruiting records suggests that ‘the army did attract men who had identifiable trades,’ and even the rapid expansions of wartime were ‘not accomplished simply by sweeping the jails’.8
The trades and occupations of recruits were subject to wide regional variation, and enlistment was very much dependent on the prosperity of each trade at the date in question. The infantry of the Napoleonic era was highly reliant on weavers from Lancashire and the West Riding, and ‘framework knitters’ from the Midlands. Areas without a developed manufacturing industry tended to produce a high proportion of labourers amongst their recruits. In 1825–7, of every 1,000 men enlisted in Dublin there were 645 labourers, 65 servants, 63 weavers, 43 shoemakers, 31 clerks, 24 tailors, and eighteen each of carpenters and blacksmiths. In contrast, at Waterloo in 1815 the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers had 332 labourers but 100 textile workers, 39 metalworkers, 38 shoemakers, 32 clothing makers, and 19 woodworkers, a pattern reflecting unemployment in the regiment’s recruiting area.9 Although, as its title suggests, the 23rd was in theory Welsh, in 1807 only 146 of the 1st Battalion’s 991 rank and file actually hailed from Wales. Its recruiting parties had been busy in Lancashire, the Midlands and, like so many regiments regardless of their notional regional affiliation, Ireland. In 1806 the 2nd Battalion actually had more Irishmen than Welshmen in its ranks.10
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