Introduction

Service life for nineteenth-century soldiers was generally hard, with poor pay, strict discipline enforced by severe punishments, cramped living conditions, inadequate food and a culture of hard drinking. At a time of industrialisation and class formation, such hardship was often the lot of the working class. Whilst much of conflict that resulted from these conditions could be termed criminal, much had a class component. It is argued here that military class conflict merits closer study and can reveal similarities with the civilian labour market.

Resistance in the military could be defined as the classic conflict over wages. A contract culture, with customary rates of pay and set outputs, similar to that of contemporary civilian workers, was defined and defended by regimental tradesmen and skilled artificers with the vigour as members of trade societies – the early trade unions. Both were adapting to the demands of the Industrial Revolution, resulting in go-slows and work-to-rules. Military tradesmen and artificers concentrated on the pace of work, customary outputs and in acts of resistance when their practices were challenged. Evidence for such go-slows and strikes is, though, sketchy and opaque. In addition, though, expertise, regulated by contract, often gave regimental tradesmen the upper hand in their dealings with the Quarter-master, Paymaster and Adjutant, who were meant to organise this work. Wily tradesmen could often hoodwink these untrained supervisors without resorting to conflict. There are parallels with some civilian working lives, such as in agriculture, where, in the absence of formal organisations like trade unions, informal negotiations seem to have taken place about accepted outputs. Similarly, in the army, NCOs often acted as a cross between foreman and shop steward in collective bargaining with management, in the form of the regiment's Adjutant and Quartermaster. Soldiers, like civilian workers, were often able to control their pace and output (the ‘stint’), in a surreptitious way, as described by an officer in 1885: