Terms and conditions of service and recruitment of the rank and file of the British regular home army, 1856 - 1899
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Date
1975Author
Skelley, Alan Ramsay
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Abstract
The years between the fall of Sebastopol and the outbreak
of war in South Africa in 1899 witnessed considerable changes
in British society and for the British army were years which
heralded reforms in army organization, tactics and weaponry,
and military thinking. There were important reforms which
affected the terms and conditions of service and recruitment,
and these are the concern of this thesis. The conditions of
service are best divided into four main areas: army health;
army education; discipline and crime; and pay, career prospects,
and discharge. Each of these is singled out in a separate
chapter and dealt with in turn.
To set the scene, Chapter I describes the size of the
Victorian army in this period, its constituent parts and its
employment. It also outlines recent historical discussion of
the army and points out how sketchy the treatment of the topics
of this thesis has been partly because of source limitations.
Discussion of the conditions of service begins in Chapter II
with the health of the army. Improvement over the conditions
of 1856 was more marked in this area than in any other. This
was a result of better diet, clothing, physical training, and
most important, a better environment and an improved medical
care. Chapter III deals with the questions of education and
literacy in the army and discusses, since the two were inseparably linked, the educational provisions made for the soldier
and for his children. The army's response to the need for an
educated soldiery was a comprehensive system of education for
man and child which, by virtue of universality, cost, curriculum, and quality of instruction, far outweighed the provisions
society made in general for the education of the working classes
for most of this period.
It is discipline above all else that ultimately distinguishes an army from any other group of men. This is the subject of Chapter IV: discipline, crime in the ranks, and its
prevention. Wholesale reduction in the severity of punishment
and the large scale provision of recreational facilities brought
an over-all decrease in crime by 1900, but failure to ease the
many restrictions of army life and to relax the bonds of discipline meant that minor disobedience, insubordination, and desertion would remain as prevalent as ever.
Chapter V deals with pay, career prospects, and discharge
from the Service, questions which were of the most importance
to army recruits. In contrast to other areas in which considerable success was achieved in bettering many of the conditions
of military service, there was a striking failure to increase
substantially the army's attractions either by augmenting pay,
improving career prospects, or by providing adequately for the
discharge of men from the forces, The connections between the
conditions of service and recruitment are particularly close
in a voluntary-service army since alterations to one can easily
bring about changes in the state of the other. The subjects
of the following two chapters are the recruiting problem and
patterns of recruitment. Throughout this time the army did not
raise enough men to meet its requirements. Chapter VI considers and assesses the attempts to improve recruitment through
altering the terms and conditions of service, and modifying the
recruiting system. Chapter VII explains the nature of the very
considerable changes in the patterns cf recruitment that took
place between 1856 and 1899 without solving the basic shortage
of men.
The final chapter of this thesis concludes with an assessment of almost a half century of reform from 1556 to 1899.
Conditions for the enlisted man and his family had improved
markedly in many respects since the middle of the century, and
in some ways too the image of the forces had changed. If it
was not respectable to become a soldier, it was at least becoming respectable to be one. The disastrous opening of the
war in South Africa forced a new period of discussion about the
question of military reform at all levels.