With their regiments on the march, officers moved from King’s Head to Queen’s Arms, usually dining together at the best local public house and settling their bills as their division marched on. They ate in uniform, and, for it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that mess kit was officially prescribed, took easy and often casual steps towards informality. They had already hung up their gorgets, the fat half-moon of silver or gilt, a symbolic remnant of throat-armour, in their rooms. These, like his broad sash of netted scarlet silk, denoted that an officer was on duty. Gorgets were worn till 1830, and today the cord and button on an officer cadet’s white collar tab or a colonel’s red one are their palimpsest. Sashes, having migrated, with the ebb and flow of fashion, from waist to shoulder and back to waist again, are still worn with No 1 Dress, the elegant ‘Blues’. The sash is now so attenuated, though, that you would never know that it had once been huge, with a channel stitched into both long edges so that two half-pikes could be slipped into them to make an instant stretcher for bearing its wounded owner from the field,
Even in Britain on a Georgian summer’s evening, short white jackets in nankeen, linen or cotton often replaced scarlet broadcloth. Boots and breeches, redolent of a long days’s road, might yield to the knee-breeches, silk stockings, and pumps of the night, and then from the 1820s, to comfortably cut pantaloons. Officers naturally wore knee-breeches and stockings to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball at Brussels in 1815 and, with no time to slip into anything more uncomfortable, wore them at Waterloo as well. It was tempting for an officer to get too relaxed on a warm evening. Senior officers in India tried hard to get the boys out of their chummeries, the multi-occupancy bungalows that housed three or four officers in delightful chaos, and into the mess for dinner. There was every danger that they would take to wearing carpet slippers in the evening, thus becoming slip-shod.
Officers were reluctant to lay aside their blades. For the first century of the army’s life, gentlemen habitually wore swords: slender, straight small-swords were worn about town, and little hunting swords often in the best of Georgian taste, in the countryside. Beau Nash banned swords from Bath in the 1770s, and in 1795 Horace Walpole complained that he would have to be sworded to receive royal ladies at Strawberry Hill, and much dreaded tripping up. The 1796 pattern infantry officer’s sword, or its cousin the heavy cavalry dress sword of the same date, were closely modelled on the civilian small sword. Although neither was much use in battle, both would see off footpads in Piccadilly or the Steyne. As damage to the scabbards of surviving examples often shows, they could also easily come to grief in doorways or sedan chairs. In 1743 the 29th Foot, then serving in Canada, was warned of an insurgent attack at dinner. Thereafter its officers wore swords in the evening, earning the regiment the nickname ‘ever-sworded 29th’, until 1850 when the practice was restricted to the orderly officer and captain of the week. Today, when the officers and RSM of 2/Mercian wear their Sam Browne belts they also wear their sword frogs, the leather sockets that house the scabbarded sword.
The close proximity of swords, pistols, and alcohol, entwined with a strong sense of gentlemanly honour, meant that duelling was common. Some officers of Lord Berkeley’s dragoons were enjoying a convivial evening in Captain Edward Mortimer’s lodgings in Louvain in 1692 when Captain Thomas Lloyd, who had lately left the regiment in disgrace, arrived in drink. As they walked out across the square he blamed Major Giles Spencer for his misfortunes: both men lugged out their swords, and Lloyd was mortally wounded in the thigh. Spencer was court-martialled and acquitted: although this encounter had not met the rules of duelling, it was clearly a case of self-defence. Neither military rank nor social status prevented duelling. In 1711, General the Duke of Argyll heard that Colonel Court of the Foot Guards had refused to drink his health because Argyll was a prominent member of the anti-Marlborough faction. Argyll at once asked him whether this was true. Court replied that it might well have been, although he added that, in fairness, he had been too drunk to remember. The men fought in Hyde Park, and Court was deftly disarmed.
The Whig grandee Lord Mohun, who had already been tried twice for murder by his peers, met the high Tory the Duke of Hamilton in Hyde Park in 1712. Both men – regimental colonels and figures of the highest political importance – were mortally wounded in an exceptionally savage encounter. The Duke of York duelled with Colonel Lennox; and the Duke of Wellington – when prime minister – took on Lord Winchelsea. Lord Cardigan wounded Captain Harvey Tuckett, late of his own regiment, the 11th Hussars. The conduct of Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Aston of the 12th Foot had so vexed his officers that he agreed to let them challenge him in turn: the major’s pistol missed fire, but the senior captain duly killed him. The duel between Lieutenant Munro of the Blues and his brother-in-law Lieutenant Colonel Fawcett of the 55th Foot in 1843, originating in high words in the presence of a servant, saw Fawcett shot dead and Munro forced to flee abroad.
By this time neither the military authorities nor civilian lawyers were inclined to look favourably on duelling. To kill a man in a duel had always been murder, and simply to fight one was attempted murder. If participants were gentlemen, then juries (in their perverse way) might refuse to convict, or a literate man might be given ‘benefit of clergy’ for a first offence. The House of Lords traditionally showed remarkable benevolence towards duelling peers. In 1813 four subalterns of the 100th Foot were found guilty of the murder of a fifth during a minor disagreement. They were sentenced to be cashiered, although the proper rules had been obeyed and those involved were gentlemen. The Prince Regent actually pardoned Ensign McGuire, who had fired the fatal shot, presumably on the grounds that he had no alternative but to fight, and the seconds should have done more to settle the quarrel sooner.
In the early eighteenth century officers tended to fight with ‘sharps’ (swords) rather than ‘snaps’ (pistols) and well on into the nineteenth century many an officer had a cased pair of Joe Manton’s finest duellers ready for that fatal morning, competing for space in his already-overloaded quarters. When Georgian barracks were constructed, an officers’ mess formed an integral part of them, perhaps closing one side of the square of buildings round the parade-ground, or standing apart from a row of company blocks. The design of a mess changed little over the years: although the description that follows summarises the messes of my own day, officers returning from, say, Martinique in 1808 with the familiar thud of jettisoned kit and pleas for a cleansing ale would not have found this layout puzzling. The front door, usually up a few steps, would open into a hall containing some of the best furniture and pictures that the regiment could muster. Officers were sometimes discouraged from chucking caps, swords, sticks, and belts onto the hall furniture, or abandoning Jezebel the lurcher there to defend her virtue against Archie the terrier, but messes, then as now, were as idiosyncratic as the rest of the tribe’s stamping-ground.
On one side of the hall was the ante-room, furnished with sofas, armchairs, and tables, with enough space for all officers to gather for drinks before lunch or dinner, read newspapers and magazines, and chatter. On the other was the dining room, with polished mahogany tables that could be arranged to cope with everything from everyday breakfast to a formal dinner night. A long corridor ran along the back of the mess, with the kitchens at one end, and the usual administrative and sanitary offices at the other. A staircase, curved and sweeping for many Georgian barracks, but rectangular and vitreous-tiled for the Victorians and Edwardians, led up to two floors of accommodation, with single rooms for most officers and perhaps a small suite at the end of each floor for visiting dignitaries. Plumbing was once primitive, with washstands and chamber pots in some Georgian messes, but from the 1850s there were big bathrooms with duck-boarded floors. En-suite arrangements are comparatively recent, and even today it is easy to forget that to be comfortable in a mess as a visitor you need to take towel, soap and dressing-gown – there are limits to the absorbent qualities of curtains. Officer cadets’ rooms at Sandhurst
are very like rooms in messes, containing just a washbasin, with baths and lavatories down the corridor. Male cadets are sweetly asked by jutting-jawed colour sergeant instructors ‘There are two sorts of officer cadet, ones that piss in the basin – and liars. Which sort are you, sir?’
The mess was run by a small committee – wines, food, games members, and so on, with a president, universally abbreviated to PMC, and almost always as universally, the unit’s second in command. At the end of dinner the PMC initiated the loyal toast by asking the vice-president (traditionally the most junior member dining) to propose it. An officers’ mess was an association of gentlemen (and latterly of ladies too) with regimental rules to define behaviour and War Office regulations intended to ensure probity. A mess was not the commanding officer’s in any proprietorial sense. At mess meetings his vote counted for no more than anyone else’s, but it would be a rash PMC who did not pay attention to his wishes. In an age of forceful commanding officers plying huge patronage the PMC could become a simple appendage to a commanding officer who saw the mess as a symbol of his regiment’s cachet and his own good taste, and even now a CO might need to be reminded that although subalterns would not wish to furrow his brow by saying as much, formal dinners might not feature as high on their list of priorities as they do on his.
Lord Cardigan bought command of the 15th Hussars in 1832, apparently paying a non-regulation excess of £35,000. Removed by the king’s direct order because of his bullying ways, he was given command of the 11th Hussars, and proceeded to turn it into the most stylish regiment in the army. He banned porter from the mess table at dinner, and when Captain John Reynolds ordered a bottle of Moselle for his guest, Cardigan promptly confused one black bottle with another and duly put Reynolds under arrest, launching another of the scandals that laced his career as gold braid embellished his pelisse. In sharp contrast, when the surviving officers of the 28th (North Gloucestershire) Foot dined together after the Battle of Barossa in 1811, the president rose and made the customary request for the loyal toast: ‘Mr Vice, the King.’ Mr Vice, painfully aware that only two of them were still on their feet, knew that the customary ‘Gentlemen, the King’ would not be appropriate, and so, reflecting, no doubt, on those gallant and convivial friends who were supping on a more distant field, replied ‘The King, Mr President.’
Given that there was no specific career path designed to produce a mess sergeant – a twentieth-century one might have been promoted from platoon sergeant and have CSM in his sights – it is perhaps surprising that so many mess sergeants were so good. The best were a cross between omniscient maître d’hôtel and Jeeves, with dashes of indulgent uncle and stern father. Georgian gentlemen had been breezily encouraged to retire to a nearby sideboard to avail themselves of an array of chamber-pots, but in Victorian times dinners became formidably starchy, with nobody allowed to rise, however pressing the reason, until the loyal toast was safely drunk. Many young officers came to regret their pre-prandial libations, appealing at 8.00 p.m. but appalling three hours later as the PMC’s gavel seemed rooted to its base. The actor David Niven was commissioned into the Highland Light Infantry in 1930, and maintained that he had actually requested ‘anything but the Highland Light Infantry’. At his first dinner night catastrophe seemed close when the mess sergeant materialised to whisper that an empty champagne bottle stood ready beside his right foot.
Behind the scenes in the mess kitchen, up to half a dozen cooks would normally be working. Early on, these would have been civilians privately employed by the officers, but by the end of the nineteenth century they were replaced by army cooks. Talented chefs, like skilled bandmasters, were lured from one regiment to another. Generals ran their own little households, and Wellington, cooked for by James Thornton in the Peninsula, switched to French chefs when he went to the Paris Embassy in 1814. He re-employed Thornton for the Hundred Days, and wrote ‘Cole gives the best dinners in the army; Hill the next best; mine are no great things; Beresford’s and Picton’s are very bad indeed.’8 Many officers brought private servants with them (some regiments insisted on this), and were also entitled to a soldier-servant, paid for by the army but with his income reinforced by his master. Private servants would often wait at table, and it was customary for them to wear a simple regimental livery when they did so. The mess sergeant had a small team of full-time military mess-waiters, but for a large dinner night he would have to trawl for volunteers or pressed men from the battalion at large.
Volunteers could be attracted by extra cash and rumours of food and wine. Many a slab of Beef Wellington was slapped between thick slices of bread and carried off for private consumption, and many was the bottle of Dow’s ’27 that slid unheralded into a barrack room, its drinkers muttering unkindly about a certain sludginess towards the end. There was the sheer bloody pride, even for private-soldier-turned-waiter, of seeing the old mob quite simply excel itself. The band, perhaps sitting towards the back of the hall, for it needs to be audible but not numbing, strikes up ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ after the mess sergeant announces that dinner is served, and keeps at it, bar after rolling bar, as the myopic or idle shuffle around and peer, with growing hopelessness, for their place-card.
It can now be seen how Knacker Knight the silver-man’s grubby fingers are rewarded by those bowls, statues, and centrepieces glistening in the candlelight, and how the uncased colours look so glorious on their stand behind the commanding officer’s chair. One’s own officers are in their well-brushed best, middle-aged tums cinched in and youthful thatch damped down. There are the tacksmen of allied clans, the brigade major, a pug-faced Coldstreamer with little curls of gold lace on his cuffs downplaying his rank, and a scattering of officers from other battalions in the brigade, green-jacketed riflemen who show no rank at all (why advertise what insiders already know?), and Highlanders with broad buff turnbacks to their scarlet. Difficult soldiers, mind you, with reports of another downtown punch-up and attendant ‘Glesga’ handshakes’ smouldering in the brigade commander’s in-tray, but big, bonny officers. Here is a gunner or two in blue faced with red, there a sapper in his red and blue (his presence generally presages loud bangs, though we may hope that tonight will be different), and there a cavalryman, floppy of hair and so easy of manner that he seems more host than guest. On top table sits an ordnance officer from the brigade staff, again in blue and red, here tonight because we can all blot our equipment ledgers but cannot always find somebody to help us as readily as this kindly friend at court.
There are other distinguished guests on top table, a lord-lieutenant here and a peer there – an officer of the regiment in his youth, who may yet be transformed into a defence minster and remember his friends – and the last but one commanding officer, now a full colonel in the rather ordinary staff mess kit, with something new and shiny at his neck. It evidently makes him happy, for he as frequently as discreetly reassures himself of its continuing presence, and so it makes his old friends happy too. Then there is an ancient gentleman in a lumpy black jacket with a splash of ribbon on his lapel, bright colours fading into the quiet purple of the VC. His knighthood came, much later in life, from a different profession altogether, and tonight, when he would happily drop such nonsense, the young could not be more assiduous in reminding him of it, for on this of all nights they share his lustre and he their pride.
Soldiers pressed into service for a night’s work in the mess, especially in the days of National Service, often wrote to their MPs about the sheer rotten archaic class-ridden irrelevance of it all, and loudly objected to being cast as extras in some Jane Austen drama. Some occasionally managed to get their retribution in early: ‘Waiter, your thumb’s in my soup!’ ‘That’s all right, sir, it’s really quite cool.’ Ghosting in the dreary drizzle behind the kitchens in their denims and plimsolls, fags on and fingers crinkly, are the stagehands, the GD (general duties) men, ‘bodies’ hauled in from the rifle companies for mass washing up and humping bins of pig-swill. Nobody can leave the ante-room before th
e last guest and the commanding officer have departed, and from before midnight there is a lengthening queue of cars in front of the building, once largely official, but after successive defence cuts, now largely minibuses (‘Anyone else for the King’s Royal Hussars?’) and taxis, and private cars driven by wives or girlfriends. For some there is something uniquely romantic about the imminent struggle with skin-tight overalls, spurs and mess Wellingtons. But for others, retrieving one’s man, bat-faced, rich-breathed, and already somnolent, is not a good end to a day with its own uncharted minefield of grumpy children, bank statements, and biopsy results. Livers-in, and married officers who have taken the precaution of booking a room for the night, now stay on as the evening changes key.
The official departure of guests (some of whom, having left formally now creep back by arrangement, amongst them, alas, a Highlander with his pipes) warns a wise mess sergeant that this is the moment to begin damage limitation, although the best that he will manage, these days, is clearing away colours and silver. Things were different when Second Lieutenant Francis Yeats-Brown joined his regiment on the North-West Frontier in 1906 and managed to pick a dinner night to arrive on. After the meal
Well-trained servants appeared by magic to remove all the breakable furniture … replacing it with a special set of chairs and tables made to smash. Senior officers bolted away to play bridge; the rest of us, who were young in years or at heart, began to enjoy ourselves according to the ancient custom.
Somebody found an enormous roll of webbing and swaddled up a fat gunner subaltern in it. A lamp fell with a crash. Wrestling matches began. A boy in the Punjab Frontier Force brought in a little bazaar pony and made it jump sofas …
Hours afterwards, I left the dust and din and walked back under the stars to the bungalow in which I had been allotted a room. I was extraordinarily pleased with myself and my surroundings. Everyone in my regiment was the best fellow in the world – and that first impression of mine has not been altered by twenty years of intimacy.9