Introduction

As discussed in earlier chapters, we have seen that soldiers were a huge occupational group which has rarely been studied by labour historians. This chapter looks at male common soldiers pursuing pre-enlistment employment within the army from the period of the Industrial Revolution and class formation to the mature late-Victorian economy. It argues that soldiers were proletarians with their military phase often forming only part of their working lives.

As suggested in the section ‘“Scum of the earth”?’, in Chapter 1, historians of the eighteenth century, like Peter Way, have previously argued that the British military was recruited largely from working-class men. Eighteenth-century recruiters tried to avoid enlisting sedentary or ‘effeminate’ trades who would not be up to the demands of campaigning. As late as 1803, one military commentator could write, ‘No printers, bookbinders, taylors, shoemakers or weavers should be enlisted, as from their business they contract habits of effeminacy, and are unable to support the fatigues of war.’ Such were the manpower needs, though, that even in the smaller peacetime army these warnings were thoroughly ignored. Labourers and tradesmen adversely affected by trade cycles or mechanisation would still be the backbone of the rank and file and this became more apparent in the mass mobilisations of the French Wars, but it continued as the post-1815 army gradually grew under the impact of empire.

Gradually, employment opportunities – some of extraordinary complexity – began to be opened up in which soldiers could use their pre-enlistment trades or develop new skills. In the infantry regiments, which were the backbone of the army, some tradesmen were recruited to carry out official duties. The technical corps, which became typical of the twentieth-century British army, did not exist for most of the nineteenth century. So most necessary trades were based on the regiment, giving a wide variety of potential occupations for ambitious soldiers. Teams of armourers, blacksmiths, butchers, clerks, cooks, musicians, schoolmasters, shoemakers and tailors, each led by a tradesman NCO, were ‘on the strength’ and were excused nearly all military duties to carry out their skills on behalf of the regiment. They were paid more than other privates, through complicated and published price lists for goods made and supplied, with the money being deducted from their comrades’ pay accounts. They also earned extra money through bills which they could submit to officers.