Stupid perhaps, but infinitely variable. To fuck might indeed mean to engage in sexual intercourse, but it also means to cheat or victimise, and to kill or destroy. To be fucked about is to be set onto nugatory tasks. The expression features in a song once popular at ‘smokers’, all-male concerts where humour was very blunt. It should be sung in a falsetto, with the singer in as much drag as circumstances permit.
My husband’s a corporal, a corporal, a corporal,
My husband’s a corporal, a corporal is he.
All day he fucks men about, fucks men about, fucks men about
And then he comes home and fucks me.
Chorus
Singing hey jig-a-jig fuck a little pig, follow the band
Follow the band all the way
Singing hey jig-a-jig fuck a little pig, follow the band
Follow the band all the way.
A task or project can be simply fucked up, or right royally fucked up. An exhausted man might describe himself as fucked, and to be down on one’s luck with little prospect of immediate remedy is to be fucked up and far from home. An unserviceable weapon or vehicle is fucked. One can be told to fuck off, generally, though not always, by a superior, and might report the peremptory dismissal of a subordinate by saying: ‘I fucked him off at the high port’.13 Almost anyone can be spoken of as a fucker, usually in a perjorative sense: ‘Ee were a reet miserable fooker’. Fuck intensifies an enquiry, as in ‘What the fuck was that?’ The word forms a key part of more complex phrases, like that used to describe taking on a complex task on the spur of the moment: to take a running fuck at a rolling doughnut. When I was a young private, I attracted the unfavourable attention of a sergeant who informed me with some asperity that I was ‘a four-eyed fuckpig’.
The charades that often formed part of smokers brought that art form to a new low ebb. A man might wear a red tracksuit, rouge his face and fill his bulging cheeks with custard, jetting it out at a suitable moment to reveal that he was a pustule. A soldier might shuffle on stage naked apart from an army boot held steadfastly against his private parts. ‘What the fuck are you?’ yells an accomplice in the audience. ‘Nothing,’ he replies. ‘I’m just fucking aboot.’
The cliché ‘swear like a trooper’ is soundly founded on fact. In the early eighteenth century there were few gentlemanly constraints against using fuck. The word gained ground steadily as swive (‘Thus swived was this carpenter’s wife’, wrote Chaucer) fell into disuse. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who admittedly prided herself on plain speaking, agreed with her son in law the Duke of Montagu that his wife was indeed ‘F[ucking] with Mr Craggs’.14 Georgian plain-speaking was followed by Victorian primness, and by 1850 there were two distinct forms of military English: a suitably bowdlerised officers’ version, and a soldier’s brand alive with earthy Anglo-Saxon. Even the latter, though, lost ground thanks to the influence of Methodism and the temperance movement, both of which identified swearing as one of the perils of army life. Some officers found soldiers’ cursing genuinely unsettling. Lieutenant Colonel the Earl of Airlie was killed commanding the 12th Lancers in a charge at Diamond Hill near Pretoria in June 1900. His last words, to a battle-maddened sergeant, were reported as: ‘Pray moderate your language.’ Officers were indeed expected to mind their language. Even bloody was too strong for some stomachs, and bally became an acceptable substitute.
First World War soldiers might swear horribly but would not tolerate blasphemy. An army chaplain recalled
There was a certain word which to the soldier of those days was an everyday adjective. It was frequently heard in the barrack room and no person seemed to be annoyed. However, should anyone use a blasphemous term half a dozen comrades would immediately tell the offender to shut up … and as likely as not in telling him off the adjective referred to above would be used. ‘Stop your ——— blasphemy.’15
The First World War saw significant erosion of officers’ English, and the Second World War continued the process. Just as schoolchildren often have two vocabularies, one used at home and the other at school, so many officers developed two distinct styles of speech, one laced with epithets and used with the military community, and the other for family and civilian friends. Senior officers addressing groups of soldiers sometimes sought to increase the impact of their words by deliberately including vulgarities to show that they were in contact with the common man. Soldiers often found it embarrassing, and an officer who heard General Sir William Slim addressing troops in Burma reported that his speech was all the more effective because he made no effort to curry favour with his audience, but spoke with palpable honesty using moderate language. Since 1945 the gap between officers’ and soldiers’ English has narrowed to the point where it exists only as a matter of degree: officers use just the same words, though they tend to be more restrained in their frequency and application.
I cannot leave this discussion of military English without reflecting on Lord Raglan, commander-in-chief of the British army in the Crimea. Raglan had not only served throughout the Peninsular War and so knew just how soldiers talked, but spoke good French into the bargain. So when he found himself speaking to the French general, Pierre Bosquet, in the early stages of the battle of Inkerman, when things looked bleak for the Allies, he was caught in a gentlemanly bind. ‘Nous sommes … Nous sommes …’ he said, hesitating about that dreaded word. ‘Vous avez un mot d’argot qui exprime bien ce que je veux dire.’ ‘Nous sommes foutus, milord?’ said the helpful Bosquet. ‘J’espère que non.’16
Hair – on the head and face – like language, helps identify soldiers. For the first four decades of the army’s existence, officers sported great full-bottomed peruques, and their soldiers either wore shoulder-length hair loose, or in a short ponytail. By 1710 officers’ wigs were becoming less elaborate, and soldiers’ hair was worn in the ‘Ramillies tie’, combed to a straight pigtail and bound with leather, or clubbed – with the pigtail doubled up and held in place by a leather strap. As the century wore on, gentlemen, and so army officers, wore tie-wigs with a fabric ribbon around the short pigtail; or bag-wigs, with the pigtail vanishing into a black taffeta bag. Wig styles defined professional status. The Marlburian veteran, ‘Captain’ Peter Drake, kept the Queen’s Arms tavern near St Clement Danes in the 1720s. He ‘provided bob-wigs, blue aprons etc. proper for the business of a vintner; these I wore at home, but could not yet leave off the tie-wig and sword when I went abroad.’17
Members of conservative professions, like lawyers and doctors, retained the wig after it went out of fashion at the end of the eighteenth century. Within the army a similar process was at work. George Augustus, 3rd Viscount Howe, eldest of a trio of talented brothers, was commissioned into the decidedly traditional 1st Foot Guards in 1745. He played an important part in the development of light infantry in North America. On campaign there he wore a simple uniform, slept in a blanket, and wore his own hair cut short, rather than a wig. James Wolfe thought him quite simply ‘The best officer in the British army’, but he was killed as a brigadier general in 1758, while taking part in Sir James Abercrombie’s failed attempt to take Fort Ticonderoga. With the gradual disappearance of wigs, officers wore their own hair, pomaded and powdered, with the side-locks curled – or ‘frizzed and rubbed up with the palm of the hand’ in fusilier regiments – and hair at the back plaited into a shoulder-length pigtail.
Pitt’s 1795 hair powder tax struck a fatal blow at powdering in the civilian community, but the army did not formally abolish it till 1808. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Donnellan of the 48th Foot was mortally wounded at Talavera in 1809 dressed, for all the world, like an eighteenth century officer in white buckskin breeches, tricorne hat, and powdered hair. Hard hit, he handed over to his second in command with a courtesy as old-fashioned as his dress: ‘Major Middlemore, you will have the honour of leading the 48th to the charge.’ There were some merits to the wig. Hair could be kept short, and louse free, beneath it, and at the end of a long day it could be jettisoned in tent o
r quarters. It was not always easy to keep wig and headdress firmly anchored. When the Marquess of Granby led the cavalry charge at Warburg in 1760 he lost both hat and wig, originating the term ‘going at it bald-headed’. The portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds shows him, as colonel of the Blues, proudly shiny of pate.
Private soldiers and NCOs, however, did not enjoy the comparative luxury of the wig. For most of the eighteenth century their hair, allowed to grow about a foot long, was greased thickly with tallow or lard, and tugged back into a queue held in place by a polished leather strap: fusiliers adorned theirs with a silver grenade. The whole ensemble was then powdered – often with flour. In 1741 a German author complained that the practice constituted an avoidable waste of foodstuff. It is impossible to be sure quite how much flour the average soldier used, although in the 1790s officers of the 10th Light Dragoons each got through a pound of powder a week. A man could not dress his own hair, and so soldiers paired off to help one another, working in barrack rooms if the weather was cold or wet, or sitting astride benches outside and perhaps enjoying a pipe of tobacco if it was sunny. Married men had their hair dressed by their wives, and a woman who was adept at her clubbing and powdering would not lack for suitors if she was widowed. Regiments often gave up powdering when they went on active service. Queues needed up to an hour’s treatment two or three times a week; it was not easy to lay hands on sufficient tallow and flour in the field, and vermin, especially rats, were attracted by the smell.
Captain Thomas Browne of the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers told his readers that they might imagine that clubbing and powdering was ‘a tedious and troublesome operation, and how much of the Soldiers’ time was needlessly occupied in this formidable preparation for parade’. Yet when his regiment received the order ‘for the discontinuance of the use of powder in the hair … and directing that … heads should be closely cropped’, neither officers nor men were pleased about it. The commanding officer, with his ‘luxuriant plait’, was particularly vexed. The officers discussed the matter over dinner,
and having perhaps taken an extra glass, by way of softening our vexation, one of the Officers proposed, that we should, then and there, cut off each other’s plaits with a carving knife, and make a grand friz of them, in the fire. The first part of the proposition was acceded to, and I can vouch for it’s having been a rough and painful operation. The question of burning and frizzing our precious locks, was off a much more serious nature, and acceded to only by one or two old Subalterns whose heads time had taken its usual liberties of thinning and bleaching. The rest of us wrapped up our discarded tails in pieces of brown paper or pocket handkerchiefs, and carried them to our barrack rooms.
When word reached the men the result was ‘very little short of mutiny’. Wives announced that ‘they would murder the first operator who dared touch a hair of their husband’s head,’ for ‘this cruel docking innovation’ would inevitably damage the ‘caste of wives’. The commanding officer ordered the battalion to form up, a company at a time,
and sending for benches from the barrack rooms he had them placed behind each rank, and commanded the men to sit down. This they did in perfect silence, he then ordered off their foraging caps, and sent for half a dozen hair cutters … They were set to work and in less than ten minutes, nothing remained but the stump of the favourite club.18
The officers decided to retain the ribbon with which their pigtails had been tied, and the distinctive ‘flash’ of five black ribbons sewn into the collar, worn at first by officers and senior NCOs and latterly by all ranks of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, was the result.
The end of powdering did not mean that officers and men could do as they pleased with their hair. Most regiments, especially on active service, took a practical view, insisting only that hair should be clear of the collar and not visible beneath the front of a shako or forage cap. Officers with sufficient hair sometimes teased locks over the forehead, and sideburns began their steady advance towards the bottom of the ear and then onto the cheek. But there were martinets for whom this was not enough. General Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of George III and father of Queen Victoria. He was appointed Governor of Gibraltar in 1802, with orders to restore discipline, and produced a 300-page set of Standing Orders. These decreed that no officer or soldier could disembark until they had received the duke’s regulation haircut, and the first man aboard a newly-arrived troopship was his personal barber. Kent’s rigidity provoked a mutiny on Christmas Eve 1802, and when the Duke of York heard of it he summoned his brother back to England. Kent characteristically refused to leave until his successor arrived, and he remained titular governor until his death in 1820, although he was never allowed back.
Thin moustaches were fashionable in the 1660s, but for most of the eighteenth century the army was clean-shaven, although it was rare even for officers to shave every day, and most soldiers got by with two shaves a week, one of them on Sunday. As the century wore on there was a close connection between facial hair and broader military fashion. Light dragoons had originally been clean-shaven, but soon their officers and men took to wearing their sideburns well below the ear, jetting forward towards the mouth, with substantial moustaches. Captain the Hon Charles Somers Cocks, Eldest son of John, Lord Somers, arrived in the Peninsula with the 16th Light Dragoons and showed great aptitude for reconnaissance work, serving as one of Wellington’s intelligence officers and becoming his particular favourite. In 1812 he bought a majority in the 79th Highlanders, and assured his mother ‘I shall make a very respectable figure with the bonnet and tartan.’ He told his brother ‘I have shaved off my moustaches and most of my beard and turn out a smooth regular infantryman.’19 Wellington attended Cocks’s funeral when he was killed at Burgos that year leading the light companies of the Highland Brigade in an assault, and was evidently so over wrought that nobody dared speak to him.
By the 1830s cavalrymen, heavy and light, were fiercely hairy. When young Buck Adams joined the 7th Dragoon Guards in 1843, his first mentor was a giant Irishman, ‘not a particle of the upper part of whose face was distinguishable for the amount of hair which covered it’.20 Elsewhere chins and upper lips were shaved, but sideburns had now matured into substantial mutton-chops. In 1843 the shaving of the upper lip was forbidden, and the army took on the hirsute appearance that was to characterise it for much of the century. Although hair had become shorter, and sideburns much more restrained by the time of the First World War, the ban on shaving the upper lip remained in force and all regulars, officers and men alike, were expected to have at least the makings of a moustache. Many NCOs favoured the lion-tamer look with pomaded moustaches curled horizontally into sharp points.
The army did not enforce the no-shaving rule strictly as far as the Territorials and New Armies were concerned, although many officers and men experimented with new suitably martial growths. These were not always a success. Alan Sugden volunteered for the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1914, and that autumn, while stationed at Newhaven, he grew a moustache. In a letter that included complaints about the tea (‘there is some stuff in it that makes men so that they do not want women’) he declared:
My tache is a swanker now dear. I am going to be photographed with it on. I want you to see what you think about it. If you say it has to come off then I shall shave it off.
Every picture tells a story. The new growth evidently did not meet with Amy’s approval, for a photograph of a moustachioed Gunner Sugden is followed by one of a clean-shaven lance bombardier.21 Captain Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoon character ‘Old Bill’, profane and lugubrious, sported a great soup-straining walrus moustache, but ‘Young Bill’, his nervous and gullible comrade (Q. ‘What made that ’ole?’ A. ‘Mice’.) was smooth-faced. And that, in its way, had always been what the moustache was about: it marked its wearer out as veteran and warrior.
In mid-1916 an officer was court-martialled for shaving the upper lip. He argued, not wholly persuasively, that he was an actor in civilian life, an
d if he grew a moustache its removal at the war’s end would leave a rash that would make it hard for him to get work. He was convicted and sentenced to lose his commission. When the findings passed through the hands of the adjutant general in France, Sir Nevil Macready, on their way for confirmation, Macready – who had never liked his own moustache – not only suggested to Haig that the business was absurd, but got the rules changed. However, almost all generals remained moustachioed, and amongst the corps commanders of 1918 only one, Sir Arthur Currie of the Canadian Corps, an insurance broker and estate agent in civilian life, had a clean-shaven upper lip. Most officers and men wore their hair in short-back-and-sides, but there was a fashion, especially among infantrymen, to have back and sides viciously clipped but to leave a bushy forelock: on the march the steel helmet could be pushed back to reveal it.
The half-century following 1918 saw little change in military hairstyles. Many regular officers and NCOs were moustachioed, and short back and sides remained the rule for hair, as National Servicemen remembered. Just as military hairstyles tended to reflect, albeit with a time-lag, civilian fashions, so the longer hair of the 1960s made its presence felt in the army. There was a period of stiff competition between adjutants and RSMs, and young officers and soldiers who fancied themselves more Sergeant Pepper than sergeant major. By the mid-1970s there was a comfortable compromise, with the army accepting longer styles provided they were off the collar. A Northern Ireland veteran recalled ‘outrageous sideburns and long hair’ in the province in the 1970s, and a distinctive image created by ‘NI boots, skin tight lightweights, and short 68 pattern smocks and the lovely S[elf] L[oading] R[ifle]’.22 Photographs and newsreel clips of the Falklands show a bushy-topped army, with moustaches, sometimes with a ‘Mexican Pete’ downturn, popular amongst NCOs of the Parachute Regiment.