One day, in March 1843, a young man by the name of William Adams was walking through the streets of Spitalfields, in London, in search of a job, and chanced upon a smartly dressed soldier.
‘Do you feel disposed to join the Army?’, the soldier asked, and Adams replied, ‘instantly, and without one moment’s hesitation, ‘Yes I do!’. The soldier promptly pressed a shilling into to Adams’ hand, the infamous ‘Queen’s shilling’, a bounty offered to new recruits into the British Army, and the moment he accepted it Adams found he had entered into a binding legal contract to enlist for a minimum of fifteen years.
In the 1840s many of Britain’s cities were undergoing a radical transformation powered by the Industrial Revolution which attracted thousands of unemployed workers from the economically depressed countryside. Most found themselves squeezed into Dickensian tenements with little hope of long-term employment beyond casual work which might, if they were lucky, buy them a night’s rent on a single room for their entire family. Many more found themselves on the streets.
The British Army during the Victorian period struggled to find the necessary manpower to fulfil its role in an Empire which was expanding steadily in the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. Not only was Army life harsh but it was held in low esteem in cvilian society, where it was regarded as the last resort of scoundrels and the desperate. Yet the Army knew that the mean streets of the teaming cities offered a fertile recruiting ground, and that ‘Jack Frost and unemployment’ were the best recruiting sergeants. Having taken his shilling young William Adams was whisked off to a public house by his new friend to celebrate; he soon found his Queen’s Shilling spent, and overheard a nearby customer comment ‘Foolish young fellow; sold a life’s liberty for a glass of ale.’ At least he was sober when he enlisted; many recruits were swept up drunk by recruiting sergeants and found themselves enlisted before they had time to sober up and realis what they had done.
Adams was taken off to a magistrate to be sworn in, and then to a cursory medical examination whose real purpose was to ensure that recruits did not have the scars from floggings which might indicate a previous deserter, or a sexually transmitted disease so advanced that they might soon be incapacitated. From there he was taken to join his regiment – in Adams’ case the 7th Dragoon Guards. Appointed a rickety bestead with a sparce mattress in a crowded and smelly barrack room, he had entered the strange and claustrophobic world of Queen Victoria’s soldiery. He would soon learn to live a life of brain-numbing routine, of daily parades which taught him to march and fight, without question, in the same mass formations which had defeated Napoleon, and in which any infringement of discipline was likely to be harshly punished. Flogging before the assembled regiment remained a common punishment, a spectacle so gruelling that Adams fainted the first time he witnessed it; in 1846 a Private White of the 7th Hussars was sentenced to 150 lashes for striking a sergeant. White had borne the punishment well enough, but had collapsed a few days later, and died.
Private Adams saw little enough of his officers, who were drawn from a very different class of society. Although there were a scattering of aristocrats among them – like the haughty and irascible Lord Cardigan, who would lead the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ in the Crimean War – most were the second or third sons of minor rural gentry. They had purchased their commissions, an idea which seems absurd today and which, even then, was coming under scrutiny, but which the Duke of Wellington believed ensured that officers had a stake in their profession. For the most part officers shared a common background the Public School education system, and the values it inculcated; they lived in their own quarters, dined in their own messes, and had only limited contact with the men under their command. Yet for all there were undoubtedly cruel and callous men among them, many took a genuine interest in the wellbeing of their soldiers, and a bond existed between them which is difficult to define today. Despite the social gulfs between them, officers and men alike were bound by a sense of belonging to a regimental family, an identity encouraged by common allegiance represented by Regimental Colours – flags – and fostered by distinctive badges and past battle honours.
And Adams found there was a sense of community, too. In his first night in barracks he was surrounded by his new comrades, who pressed their own rations on him, and were keen to hear his story. If military life was harsh it at least offered regular food, regular pay – albeit subject to a surprising number of deductions known as ‘stoppages’ – and a roof, of sorts, over their heads. As harsh and brutal as life in the Victorian Army seems to modern sensibilities, life among the civilian poor was often much worse.
And it offered, for those inclined to take it, a sense of escape and adventure. Most ordinary soldiers could not read or write, and had little concept of a wider world beyond the confines of their villages or slums. A Victorian regiment might be sent overseas at short notice to garrison the Empire, thrusting its men into a world that was alien, dangerous – and yet often alluring. Sometimes they didn’t get there; on the night of 26 February 1852 the steamer Birkenhead, carrying reinforcements for a war against the Xhosa people in southern Africa, was sailing in calm conditions around the Cape of Good Hope when it ran into a submerged rock about two miles offshore. Worried that a sudden rush might swamp the lifeboats, the senior officer ordered the men to parade on deck as a handful of women and children were taken off first; before the rest could be disembarked the Birkenhead suddenly broke up, and the men went into the water. Most could not swim, and a thick belt of kelp lay between them and the shore. Many became entangled and drowned while others were taken by sharks; of 650 men, women and children who were aboard the ship when she struck the rocks, only 193 were saved. None of the women and children were lost, and the wreck of the Birkenhead established the tradition of ‘women and children first’.
If they did arrive safely, the men found themselves in strange landscapes and among very different cultures. Richard Ellis, who had enlisted at the age of eighteen in County Wexford in January 1841 – Ireland provided a disproportionate percentage of recruits until the potato famines of the 1840s depopulated the countryside - would spend eight years in India, and remembered one day his regiment passing by a holy man ‘seated on the side of the roadside in front of a charcoal fire, roasting his knees by way of a penance’.
In the nineteenth century the empire was a dangerous place, even during peacetime. There were few cures for a wide range of exotic diseases, and the fundamentals of hygiene, and the importance of clean drinking water, were poorly understood. Water-borne diseases such as cholera ravaged both cities at home and troops overseas; in India a man might be healthy in the morning, doubled up with stomach cramps at lunchtime, and dead by the evening, and cholera could incapacitate a regiment in a matter of days.
Warfare too was common. In the Crimea the British Army fought Russian troops in conventional battles that had changed only a little since the Napoleonic era, while in India British dominance was challenged by the Westernised Sikh army of the Kingdom of Lahore, and in the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ by Indian troops trained and armed by the British themselves. Yet in many ways it was the often-overlooked small colonial campaigns of the period, largely forgotten now, that pointed the way forward; in campaigns against the Xhosa people on the Eastern Cape frontier the British Army groped towards an understanding of bush warfare, and in New Zealand they faced challenges from Maoris who quite easily adapted their traditional methods of fighting to accommodate British firepower.
And when their years of service were up, most soldiers like William Adams found themselves uneasily back in civilian society, either too institutionalised, too warn out, or too shaped by the Army’s drinking culture to fit back productively into ordinary life. Some wars, in India and China, had resulted in huge material gains, looted money, jewels and treasures to which ordinary soldiers were entitled to a share as official ‘prize money’. Few, however, were able to benefit from it in the long term, and many drank it away long before they retired. Instead, they found themselves subsisting on a meagre pension of 8d a day.
Many would be haunted by the experiences of ferocious fighting which they had endured - but they might at least have looked back fondly the extraordinary sights and sounds and they had endured, and which would always set them apart from the civilian world swirling noisily and unaware around them.
Warriors in Scarlet; The Life and Times of the Last Redcoats is my latest book, and is published in hardback and paperback by Macmillans.