This is just the love at first sight that the regimental system could so easily produce. There were also different currents of emotion, with their own complex expressions, and many misunderstandings, especially in a mess that housed officers from different units within the same garrison. In 1959 Freddie Rawding was a captain in the Royal Army Education Corps. His own mess-kit was dark blue brightened with Minerva-blue facings, although in 1992, after he had retired, the RAEC was absorbed into the Educational and Training Services branch of the Adjutant General’s Corps and took on the AGC’s high-collared red mess jacket faced with dark blue. The RAEC had originated in 1848 as the Corps of Army Schoolmasters, with a few officers as inspectors or headmasters, and more numerous warrant and senior non-commissioned officers. In 1859 its duties were extended from teaching within the regiment to wider functions, including running army libraries, and in 1920 it became the Army Educational Corps. Its role broadened hugely during the Second World War, and critics maintained that as part of its efforts to prepare soldiers for post-war life, it had warmly encouraged them to vote Labour, and it was this, so they waspishly alleged, that had gained the corps its royal prefix in 1946. You will already have guessed the Corps’ quick-march – why, ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’.
Towards the end of the Corps’ independent life its rank-rich structure attracted envy, for there was a major general as Director of Army Education, backed by one brigadier in Britain and another in Germany, and colonels and lieutenant colonels to match. Many officers and soldiers in other regiments and corps owe their subsequent success in life to the painstaking work of RAEC officers, but it was never easy for the latter to strike a happy balance between the military and academic aspects of their lives. Some strove, not always convincingly, to become every bit as exquisite as the officers in the (sometimes very up-market units) to which they were attached as Education Officers. Others, in contrast, retained an unpolished practicality that left some brother officers feeling uneasy.
Sometimes the relationship got the best out of neither of those involved. I recall a College Commander at Sandhurst, a charming Foot Guards colonel (we all spoke of him as ‘father’), conspiratorially catching my eye before he walked across the ante-room to greet the day’s senior visitor, the Director of Army Education. It was clear that they did not share the same tailor, or indeed identical views on the Sam Browne belt. ‘Ah,’ the colonel whispered sideways. ‘It is indeed the schoolmaster-general. Why, I believe that his belt is made of – of – linoleum.’ As their hands clasped in the slanting sunlight of Topper’s Bar, above Old Building’s grand entrance, each would have had his preconceptions reinforced. On the one side: ‘old army … anti-intellectual streak … courteous but so slow-moving … really does think that the company drill competition is more important than getting more graduates into the army.’ On the other: ‘clever, and knows it too … encourages discussion when the youngsters need to believe … thinks that intellect trumps character.’
During National Service the RAEC had taken suitably qualified men and promoted them to sergeant in the corps after basic training, thereby causing irritation in sergeants’ messes of the more traditional stamp. Freddie Rawding, called up into the Rifle Brigade, duly passed WOSB and was sent to Eaton Hall where
My company commander … presided over a regime where Sergeants and Sergeant Majors, drill instructors, bullied, shouted, swore and screamed and went berserk in front of young men who had recently shown that they were competent, smart and eager to do well.
Our collective morale, high when we arrived, was systematically destroyed by blundering fools who, if they had been any good at all, would not have been released by their regiments for duties they so obviously hated … I learned nothing at all at Eaton Hall except the certainty that for an officer or NCO to bully and ill treat subordinates who are bound helpless under military law is inexcusable cowardice.10
Rawding left the army after National Service but took a short-service commission in 1952 and expanded it to a regular commission the following year. In 1957 he was posted to Malaya to help teach English to Gurkhas, and lived in the mess at Sungei Patani. The messes of depots and training establishments often lack the sense of corporate identity enjoyed by regimental messes, and Rawding was soon struck by the ‘directness, lack of subtlety and overweening self-confidence’ of some of his brother officers. Life in the mess was made pleasant by the high standard of Chinese cooking and the
Gurkha component of Mess Sergeant and three mess orderlies [who] kept the ante-room in pristine condition and served drinks quickly and accurately which took some effort of memory when fifteen or so officers came in about the same time to assemble for dinner … There was inevitably an atmosphere of rivalry and competition between officers in charge of recruits. This was usually good-humoured. The only sour note was produced by some of the senior majors, pre-war or Emergency Commissioned in the 1940s, passed over for promotion, who tended to be liverish in the mornings. One of these would be aggressively rude to the younger officers at breakfast without any reason; the other, a self-appointed jongleur, would make offensive remarks about junior officers’ civilian clothes at lunch or teatime.11
Rawding was posted, as Brigade Education Officer, to the Mercian Brigade Training Centre at Whittington Barracks, Lichfield, where the three regiments of the brigade – Cheshires, Staffords and Worcesters – trained their recruits. Here he found none of the ‘supercilious exclusivity’ that had so annoyed him at Sungei Patani. The majors all set a good example, and young officers, ‘polite and considerate in their conduct’, were never picked on. And it was a proper, old-fashioned mess.
We had a formal mess night on Thursdays when all appeared in their expensive mess kit and after a most decorous meal and the Loyal Toast, all hell broke loose. Various, rowdy ‘indoor games’ were played like ‘high cockalorum’, ‘Where’s Moriarty’, and ‘breaking the wall’. The first, like the others, was like a team game where the losers had to buy drinks, Depending on how many wanted to play, it was not compulsory; two equal teams were self-selected. One man from each team got onto his back on the floor to be joined by his opposite number lying head to foot, grasping him close with arms linked at the elbow. On the command ‘Mount!’ each competitor raised the nearest leg to the other and attempted to overturn him. Each couple had the best of three throws to decide the winner. My long legs and superior weight usually prevailed but I was frequently overthrown.12
Mess kit included spurs for officers who would have gone to war mounted in 1914, but they were not strapped on, as they would have been across a riding boot, but ‘boxed’, with an oblong bar that was shoved into a spring-loaded slot in the heel of a mess Wellington or ankle-height George boot. It was as well to slip them off before mess games – though they gave good guarantee of lock-on for ‘breaking the wall’ – and to remember their step-catching propensities when walking downstairs.
In command at Lichfield was the ‘universally popular’ Colonel Lough, who, following a bad head wound, had a steel plate riveted under his scalp, invisible beneath his hair.
At some lull in the proceedings after the usual games had begun to pall, he would call the mess sergeant to produce half a dozen old dinner plates. Since Lichfield market was near the potteries, crockery was cheap and we suspected him of having a stock of imperfect plates bought and kept for these occasions. He would call for attention and challenge those ‘not in the know’ to follow his example and crack a plate on their heads. One plate shattered on the colonel’s head with a loud metallic clang, the volunteer would produce a dull thud on his own head with the next and, no doubt, a headache.13
There is a world of difference between the officers’ mess of an infantry battalion or a regiment of royal artillery, royal engineers, royal signals and say, that of an ordnance, transport or medical battalion. It reflects not simply varying technological specialisms, history, and tradition, but the specific composition of a mess (even of a different battalion of the same regiment) at a given tim
e. Change any tiny part of the mixture, and much else is altered too. A proficient and upwardly mobile CO has just taken over from an officer who never ever wanted to do more than lead his own clan – probably because it was his father’s too. He will set a different style, showing perhaps, that a modest ambition fully attained can be more satisfying than a breath-catching pirouette on each ascending step. There will be any number of personal or professional rivalries and ripples, as lieutenants and captains weigh love against career, juggle the chances of a tour in the special forces against something ‘sensible’.
The members of a mess are subjected to constant pressure, almost invisibly discreet at one extreme or crashingly obvious at the other, sometimes welcomed and occasionally resented. It is not just about the quest for superficial conformity in appearance. There is much more to military fashion than the way a man dresses in uniform or in plain clothes. In 1956 the army told its officers that for off-duty wear they must (and one can almost hear Mr Cholmondeley-Warmer’s crisp voice-over) ‘avoid buying flashy or highly coloured clothes’. It was naturally a good deal more specific about what officers should wear in uniform in 1796 when the officers of the 25th Foot were told that ‘they were to wear their coats hooked up in front, facings buttoned back, and the sash … tied around the body, over the coat, the knot on the left side, except for the flank officers, who tie theirs on the right side.’14 Military fashion reflects official regulations, regimental customs, and the way that young men who spend so much of their time together actually like to dress. The confident and self-assured set one style, the more reserved embrace another, and the naturally disorganised (not all of whom are deflected from the profession of arms) select what is apparently cleanest in a room that might give Attilla’s Huns pause for thought, to create style by ambush. Even if you had no idea of a man’s unit or rank, then a glance at half a dozen officers in plain clothes at the Hatchet at Chute on Salisbury Plain, a Sunday curry lunch at the battalion second in command’s, or a memorial service in a darkling cathedral would tell you much. These days it’s not all Sloane Ranger – and none the worse for that.
Styles of dress are one thing, styles of address are another. I was brought up to believe that within a regimental mess officers were all on first-name terms, apart from the CO, who was ‘colonel’. Rising to one’s feet as he entered the ante-room was as much deference as was required. In contrast, I have known messes where field officers expected to be sirred by subalterns at all times: ‘You’d think they wore those bloody crowns on their heads, wouldn’t you?’ The young take time to learn, and it is not only their peers that teach them. Let us say that you have just joined your battalion, and on your first night have discovered that your immediate master, the relaxed officer commanding A Company, is happily known as ‘Dozy’ in the mess. You may not, though, be aware that of the three Oxbridge entrants to the regiment in his year he was the only one not to emerge with a First. It was an amusing jest at the time, but has become a little over-used since. If, the following morning, you herald your arrival at your first Orders Group (a sort of company planning meeting) with him, making free of your new status by a casual ‘Mornin’ Dozy’, then the CSM – who knows, officially, about none of these things, but, unofficially, understands them all – will, just a little later, put you in what is called the picture – ‘The Big P’. There is one way of behaving in the mess and quite another of behaving outside it. Although the CSM may not be the sort of man who naturally uses the phrase formal command structure, at this stage in your life he knows a good deal more than you about what it actually means.
CHAPTER 27
THE SERGEANTS’ MESS DINNER IS WORTH PUTTING DOWN
OFFICERS’ MESSES HAVE had a far longer existence than those used by warrant officers and sergeants. But it was recognised very early on that discipline could be better preserved if there was some distance to it, and that distance said a good deal about the behaviour of, say, rifles NCOs on the one hand and the Guards NCOs on the other. In April 1756 Corporal Matthew Todd was told
that no sergeant should drink with the corporals nor corporals to drink with the private soldiers nor soldiers to drink with drummers neither to keep company with each other but the sergeants and corporals to carry sticks and beat the soldiers but as they so occasion to keep them at a distance in not making things so free with them, so as soon as these orders were out I proposed to the rest of the corporals that we would have a club or meeting every Thursday at night after roll calling at first at the oldest corporal’s quarters so on by seniority and to spend 3d. each and any corporals neglecting coming to be fined 3d. upon duty or sick, etc. and we all signed a paper.
The plan was immediately applauded by the officers, and the sergeants at once established a similar mess, with its 6d. subscription reflecting their status.1
Permanently-established sergeants’ messes were rare in the Napoleonic era, save in the sense of the temporary messing groups just described by Todd. Although some of the newly built barracks did indeed have sergeants’ messes, the majority put sergeants in enclosed bunks in barrack rooms, or partitioned up whole rooms so as to give more space and privacy. As the nineteenth century went on, purpose-built sergeants’ messes were at last included in barrack design. In India unmarried officers would eat and socialise in their mess, and sleep in rented bungalows within the military cantonment, while sergeants would use their mess in the same way but live in what they called ‘cabins’ in a barrack room behind it. Communal eating was regarded as important by COs and RSMs alike, and members of both messes were expected to turn up at the appropriate hour, washed, shaved, and sober. Protocol varied hugely. There were commanding officers who expected nothing more than a quiet ‘good evening, colonel’ as another scapegrace slipped in seconds before dinner was called. Some RSMs required every sergeant entering the mess to do themselves the honour of buying him a drink – and not to leave for the evening until they had asked his permission to fall out.
No sooner had officers acquired a regulation mess kit than sergeants had one too. Their mess committee had its PMC and Mr Vice, and the sergeants’ mess caterer did, for his mess, just what the mess sergeant did for the officers. Their watch chains might be silver rather than gold, just as in their mess the best silverware might be EPNS rather than hallmarked. If the officers had a ball, the sergeants must have one too, usually with suitable title like the ‘Albuhera’ or ‘Lucknow’ Ball. A stiff invitation card from ‘The Warrant Officers, staff sergeants and sergeants of the – Regt’ invited guests for 10.00 p.m., and attentive hosts, already warned that one-third of the costs of the evening will be met from mess funds and the remainder prorata, with the RSM contributing £1. 10s. and the lance sergeant 12s. knew that they were to be in the hall at the appointed hour ‘in their best tunics and new pumps’. Versailles could not have shown better ton.
First-Class Staff-Sergeant and Foreman of Works Simpson, Royal Engineers, requests the favour of a dance with you, Miss Robinson … Thus, while the colonel dances with the sergeant-major’s wife, that excellent warrior pilots his commanding officer’s ‘good lady’ though the maze of the cotillion.
The first sitting of supper was at 12.00 midnight, and the colonel and senior officers had mostly flown by 1.00 a.m. Subalterns were expected to be away by ‘Reveille’, indeed, most had left long before, ducking beneath that penumbra of disappointed hopes, with a lance sergeant asking a friend whether those new pumps had really been a wise investment.
She said she loved me, Jim, this very afternoon … and I saw her a squeezing the hand of the Rifles’ master-tailor in the corner of the supper-room only an hour ago.2
It is quite as misleading to speak of a British NCO corps as of an officer corps, for we have already seen that the real complexities of social structure make these terms the most unreliable of guides. But, like it or not, from 1800 the expression sergeants’ mess meant a good deal more than four brick walls and a tiled roof.
In one sense the burgeoning of the sergeants?
?? mess was as much about social class as military discipline. Attempts to improve the sergeant’s lot and reinforce the status of the warrant officer by the creation of what we might call an artisan class gave rise to a social life that half-mirrored that of the officers’ mess. Success was increasingly dependent on mastering basic skills of literacy and numeracy and moving on to a system of tiered educational qualifications. The mess that housed John Fraser and the sergeants of 5th Fusiliers at Agra, had a dining room, billiard room, and ‘refreshment bar’. There was a ‘quadrille party’ once a month, and sergeants were encouraged to entertain members of nearby sergeants’ messes and, of course, guests of suitable status from the civil lines. A more subtle change of status than the acquisition of those three broad white stripes on one’s upper arm was eating the main meal of the day a little later than corporals and privates, almost as if a man became more respectable the later he dined. In 1900 one military writer thought that the process was satisfactorily complete, with three natural levels of military-social structure, so that ‘no sergeant now has to go to the canteen for a glass of beer; in fact, such an action would lead to trouble, as great store is laid on the regulations forbidding non-commissioned officers to associate with private solders.’3
Yet, in many regiments, there was almost as much contact as separation. Reciprocal mess visits on national and regimental days brought officers and sergeants together. There were company or battery ‘smokers’, informal concerts that might be held in barracks, camps or on the line of march to give the naturally talented, or the eternally optimistic, the chance to sing, recite or play an instrument. They were certainly not events to which women were invited, although their style, to us at least, looks comparatively innocent. In India soldiers enjoyed collecting butterflies and selling the carefully mounted results to officers on the way back to England. Some soldiers there shot game on their own account, and others might set off with an officer or two in a little group where, listening to the sounds of an Indian night around the camp fire, it did not much matter whether a man was smoking Navy Cut or a Jermyn Street cheroot. ‘Gurning’, or face-pulling, was a popular party act, although there were complaints that nature had given some men an unfair advantage.