The Soldier's Life For Me: Our family in the service of the Queen

“There is no retreat from here, men. You must die where you stand.”

Sir Colin Campbell addressing Robert Phippen and other soldiers before battle, October 25, 1854

On June 28th, 1838 a 19-year-old girl named Victoria launched an era that has born her name ever since. That morning she rode to Westminster Abbey for her coronation in an ornate carriage drawn by eight magnificent horses, through streets lined with over 400,000 well wishers, visitors, and dignitaries. The entire nation celebrated with street parties and dinners in towns and villages of the countryside and wherever Englishmen gathered overseas.

They had reason to celebrate. At the dawn of the Victorian Era Britain was the most powerful nation the world had ever known. The first industrialized nation, Britain’s factories and foundries in 1838 were the workshops of the world, her goods carried to every corner of the globe on British ships. Her banking system dwarfed any other, financing British enterprise in the United States, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. And even then the sun never set on her still growing empire.

This was the century of relative peace, enforced and policed by British gunboats and regiments, that was known as Pax Britannica.

Yet amongst all the pomp that coronation day, the celebration of all things British, of all things that made Britain great, few understood just how thin the thread on which the British-led global order depended. In 1838, when a voyage to Canada could took a month and to India three, and when letters were six months in the mail, the British Empire and the Pax Britannia depended on a navy of just 25,000 sailors and 9,000 marines, and an army of only 91,000 soldiers, far fewer than are enlisted in the British armed forces today. These 125,000 men were serving on six continents and on every sea, expanding the empire, hunting for slave traders, guarding borders and guaranteeing free access to trade. In 1838 two of them were our ancestors. They and their descendants have served Queen and Country, and King and Country, ever since.

What brought so many of our family to enlist? It certainly wasn’t the money. All through the 19th century a soldier’s basic wage was stuck at around a shilling a day and from this was deducted the cost of food and uniforms. This was less than what even unskilled agricultural labourers could earn. Alan R. Skelley in his book The Victorian Army at Home, quotes a Colonel in 1874 who lamented “You cannot get, or expect to get, respectable men to enter the service upon the wages of a shilling a day when a common mechanic can earn from three to five shillings . . .”

The Colonel was wrong. Amongst the shiftless, unemployed and borderline criminals the army also attracted a few good men. My great grandfather, Alfred Nice, had good prospects and was earning a respectable wage as a blacksmith’s striker when he enlisted. His brother Herbert was working as a Farrier (and continued the same trade in the army). Within five years Herbert had been promoted to Staff Sergeant.

As the popular historian Jan Morris wrote in her book Pax Britannica, “. . . the other ranks of the British Army were still all too often the scum. In many a respectable English home, bowered country cottage or scrubbed tenement of Nonconformists, to admit a son in the army was like confessing a misdemeanour.”

It’s a long told family story that Richard Campbell was disowned by his father when he enlisted in the 17th Lancers in 1888. No doubt the Berryman family were indignant and disappointed when brothers James, John and Harry all signed up, leaving behind their respectable middle class relatives in Chertsey in Surrey.

From there, it seems for much of our family military service evolved into something of a tradition, passed down from father to son. My grandfather Richard Campbell grew up listening to his father’s stories of army life in India and South Africa at the end of the Victorian Era. Richard enlisted at the age of 18 and went on to serve in India himself. My great great grandfather Harry Berryman retired as a Sergeant in the Royal Artillery. His son Hazel Bliss Berryman enlisted in the Royal Artillery in his turn, serving in India and fighting on two fronts in World War I before retiring as a Battery Sergeant Major in 1920. In an interview recorded by the Imperial War Museum in 2000, Hazel’s son Hazel Edgar talked about his father’s love of the military life. With his father’s encouragement he enlisted in the Royal Artillery too, winning a medal for bravery on D-Day, when he landed on a beach in Normandy.

They were all terribly young: Herbert Street, my great grand uncle, had only just turned 14 when he signed up in 1888. He was 4 ft 9 in and weighed 77 lbs. He served one day shy of 25 years, retiring as a Sergeant in 1913. Hazel Bliss Berryman was just 14 when he enlisted too. We have a copy of the handwritten permission note signed by his mother and father that he provided to the recruiting sergeant. Hazel’s father Harry had waited until he was 18 before he enlisted, but Harry’s brother James was just 16 when he sailed with HMS Bacchante to the Pacific in 1860. He celebrated his 17th birthday in Esquimalt Harbour on the west coast of Canada. The other brother, John, waited until he’d turned 21 before joining, but that meant giving up a career as a shoemaker.

The army life was a hard life. All through Victoria’s time it was more likely for our ancestors to die of disease than of gunshot wounds. Consider my 4th great grand uncle Samuel Lang’s experience in the 64th Regiment of Foot, where he served from enlistment in 1825 until discharge in 1846. According to the regimental history, Samuel was exposed to pulmonary disease and eye problems in Gibraltar and Yellow Fever in Jamaica, which took the lives of half the soldiers in the regiment (an English newspaper account in 1835 claimed that so many soldiers were dying in Jamaica that the cost of wood for making coffins had increased 15%). Samuel retired a broken man. His medical report on discharge reported two hernias and a “Chronic Disease of the Bladder with inability to retain urine.”

My 3rd great grandfather William Tanner enlisted in 1825 and served for 25 years until being found unfit for further service, suffering from severe bronchitis and crippling varicose veins in his legs. Another 3rd great grandfather, John Street, served in the Royal Artillery for 22 years, 16 of them in Canada. When he retired he was deaf and an invalid. William’s daughter Catherine married my 2nd great grandfather Harry Berryman in India in 1879, after her first husband, a fellow soldier, died there. Catherine’s first husband wasn’t unique. Statistics show 50% to 75% of all soldiers sent to India between the 1840s and 1850s died there. Harry’s son Hazel served in India in the 1890s where he was hospitalized for scarlet fever, catarrh and swollen lymph glands, and five times for Malaria.

Accidents were common. Hazel Berryman suffered a severe concussion when he was thrown from his horse in 1898. Many of William Tanner’s fellow troopers were seriously injured when they were riding their horses under a railway arch in 1842, in the infancy of rail service, just when a steam engine was sounding its whistle as it passed overhead. The horses panicked, threw their riders and stampeded through the streets of Birmingham.

Ironically, considering they had enlisted in the army, our ancestors seemed to have a lot of problems at sea. Samuel Lang’s two hernias were suffered when he and others in his regiment were shipwrecked off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1843. When my Great Grandfather Richard Campbell sailed home from India in 1893, six of the men in his regiment were so badly injured when a dockyard crane collapsed that limbs were amputated. Two others died during the voyage and the ship almost hit rocks off the French coast during heavy fog. Alfred Nice was en route to South Africa when his troop ship, the SS Ismore, hit rocks off the African coast. Everyone on board was saved, but many horses died and his artillery battery lost all its guns.

It seems a posting to India was a common experience for Victorian soldiers, but the empire was vast, with many opportunities for other foreign service. The records are spotty and incomplete, but we know our 19th century ancestors were in Bermuda, Canada, the Crimea, Egypt, Gibraltar, Ireland, Jamaica, Malta, St Helena, St Lucia, South Africa and Turkey.

This was an exciting experience for people who had grown up in rural villages and in the narrow streets of London’s east end. The hardships of these postings became a part of the excitement, growing with their retelling. Our ancestors left virtually no record of their experiences, but the two who did, my grandfather Richard Campbell and my great grandfather Hazel Bliss Berryman, both believed their years in the army were the richest of their lives (Richard inspired me to go to India myself to trace his footsteps).

Richard’s romantic memories were seconded by others. In his book Old Soldier Sahib Frank Richards wrote of his time as a soldier in India, recalling “Although (we) were hardened sinners we were also great admirers of all things that are beautiful: on many a night we left the Canteen half cut and journeyed down to view the Taj by moonlight, when it looked three times more beautiful than what it did during the day.”

Hardened sinners they were. William Tanner deserted twice, being court martialled and sentenced to three months’ hard labour after the first incident and to 20 days’ solitary confinement after the second. He appears in the Regimental Defaulters Book many times, repeatedly failing to appear for duty, showing up drunk, being insubordinate, and breaking out of barracks for drinking binges. William’s record was rivalled by that of my 3rd great grandfather John Street, who was court martialled four times, serving a total of 226 days in prison, and appeared in the Regimental Defaulters Book six times. John’s son was treated for Gonorrhoea, as was my great grandfather Alfred Nice. Sergeant Samuel Lang was found drunk on duty in Jamaica. He was reduced in rank back to private. The regimental board that considered the discharge of my grandfather’s foster father Bill Hollywell recorded that his character was “Indifferent, has been addicted to drink . . .”

Sometimes, very occasionally, our ancestors went to war.

They were amongst the last to ride into battle on horseback, armed with lances and swords. Others carried muskets and fired canon little different from those of the 17th century. But by the end of 19th century they were learning to use weapons with devastating destructive power, foreshadowing the carnage of the First World War.

My 3rd great grandfather Robert Phippen fought against the Russians in the Crimea while serving in the Royal Marines. He was there on October 25th, 1854, on a high ridge looking down into the “Valley of Death,” witnessing the doomed cavalry attack forever remembered as the “Charge of the Light Brigade.” He himself fought the same day, part of the small force that stood like a rock against a Russian attack in an action witnessed by the war correspondent for the Times of London. It was in describing this action that the reporter coined the immortal term “the thin red line.”

Harry Berryman’s cousin Charles Thick Eves was a medical officer in India during the mutiny there in 1857. My grandmother Eva Race’s adoptive father Walter Race was a medic in Egypt when the British invaded in 1882.

Bill Hollywell rode with the 17th Lancers in the Battle of Ulundi, the final action in the Anglo Zulu War of 1879. This was one of the bloodiest campaigns the British fought in their conquest of South Africa (part of the story of the war is dramatized in the movie Zulu).

The Boer War of 1899 - 1903 was the defining war for our family. More of our ancestors fought in this war than any other, including both world wars of the 20th century. These included Alfred Nice, Richard Campbell, Walter Race, Herbert Nice, Harry Cyril Berryman, Herbert Street and Thomas Lansdown. Between them they fought in every major engagement of this war, which some have recently called Britain’s Vietnam. In the end the Boers were defeated, but at a cost far higher than the British government ever contemplated. Most of the world outside the British Empire believed the British were wrong and the price was the loss of international goodwill.

Our ancestors typically served for 21 years, retiring after they qualified for a pension. In that time they often married and started families, complicating their lives considerably.

John Street sailed with his artillery battery to Canada in 1845. He met and married Margaret Bowers in the city of Quebec soon after he arrived. When he returned to England 15 years later, he had six children under his wing. William Tanner was serving in Ireland when he married Margaret Hickey, a young girl from Cork half his age. He returned to England with two children. Harry Berryman returned from India with a new wife, Catherine, and Catherine’s two children by her first marriage to another soldier.

Robert Phippen joined the Royal Marines in Plymouth. There he met Mary Ann Took, a young widowed mother who was probably a prostitute. She waited for him while he spent six years at sea and a year in the Crimea. Their daughter, Emma, married a soldier too.

Alfred Nice met his wife Mary Wilcox when he was stationed at Horfield Barracks in Bristol. He was posted to the war in South Africa a year after they were married. She wasn’t a faithful wife, bearing a child while Alfred was overseas, but when he returned, Alfred raised the boy as if he were his own.

Our ancestors were loyal to each other even after they retired from the army. When Richard Campbell returned from South Africa to find his wife had passed away, his old friend from the 17th Lancers Bill Hollywell (he who had been “addicted to drink”) provided a home for Richard’s young son Dick. When John Street’s daughter had an illegitimate child (my grandmother), his friend Walter Race and his wife Mary adopted her, keeping her background secret for thirty years.

The authorities weren’t sympathetic to the complications of family life. It was almost impossible for a soldier to take a family overseas. For the first half of the 19th century families were most often split apart, with wives and children left behind at the wharf when fathers sailed away, sometimes not to return for decades. This was an era when the average Private couldn’t read or write, and there were no provisions or encouragement for soldiers to forward their pay back to England to support their families.

This only began to change with the Crimean War in the 1850s, when sympathetic newspaper reports and public concern forced the government to start doing more for military families. Even so, change came slowly. 

Even as late as 1910 Herbert Street was punished for refusing a long term posting in Jamaica, which would have meant leaving his wife and three children behind in England. He had already spent three years on St Helena, a desolate island in the South Atlantic that is so remote that it can still today only be reached by monthly mail ship. He also served a year in South Africa and two years in St Lucia in the Caribbean. Although he had reached the rank of Company Sergeant Major and was described in his service records as a man of exemplary character, “. . . Thoroughly sober and reliable . . .” and “Painstakingly industrious,” he was barred from reenlisting beyond 21 years.

The family’s military traditions endured into the 20th century. Our ancestors fought in both world wars and in India, and served all through the cold war that followed. I was one of the last of them, and clearly remember British training films of the late 1970s, teaching us how to continue fighting despite the radiation sickness in the 24 hours or so we would have left to live after being attacked by Russian tactical nuclear missiles. Thank goodness we live in a better world today.

Bravery and Babies: The Destruction of the Troopship Alert

Practically forgotten today, the sinking of the troopship Alert in 1843 was in its time considered an astounding story of leadership, widely cited as an example to all soldiers in the British army. This little-remembered adventure is particularly interesting to me because one of the soldiers aboard the Alert when it was wrecked was my 4th Great Grand Uncle, Samuel Lang.

Born the son of a thatcher in Ugborough, Devon in 1804, Sam “took the King’s Shilling” in Plymouth in 1825 (he actually received two shillings and sixpence on enlistment), enlisting in the 64th Regiment of Foot. After training in Jersey he joined his regiment in Gibraltar for three years. The regiment returned to England in 1830, but was then posted to Jamaica in 1834 and from there to Halifax in Canada, in 1840.

Life in a British infantry regiment in early Victorian times was treacherous; not because of the dangers of battle, but rather the risk of disease. The regimental history, written in 1883, records that “After the arrival of the Regiment at Gibraltar, they suffered considerably from pulmonary complaints, particularly when occupying the barracks on Windmill Hill, and subsequently ophthalmic cases were numerous, owing to the arduous services the regiment had to perform at the North Front, where they were much exposed to shifting sands, when strong and often fatal Levant winds prevailed.” It goes on to report on the terrible loss of life in Jamaica to Yellow Fever, which killed off the majority of the officers and many of the men. An English newspaper report from 1835 claimed there were so many deaths amongst the soldiers serving there that the cost of the wood for making coffins had increased by 15%.

In contrast, Sam’s period in Canada was quiet and uneventful. He and the other soldiers in the regiment faced harsh winters, which were a shock after six years in Jamaica, but their only excitement came when they fought the many house fires afflicting Halifax in that time. He must have been happy, then, when he and the rest of the soldiers of the 64th drew up in three ranks on the dock in Halifax on June 30th 1843 to receive a formal farewell from all the town’s citizens as the regiment prepared to sail back to England. The ceremony ended with a proclamation from the mayor in which he thanked the regiment for their service as an unofficial fire brigade. The ceremony over, the first contingent of the soldiers embarked the same day for the voyage back home.

Sam was in the last contingent and had to wait until July 9th, when he and 200 other soldiers and 95 women and children finally boarded the Alert, a 500 ton sailing ship newly built and untested, making ready for its first trip across the Atlantic. It departed Halifax harbour in favourable weather the next day.

The wind strengthened soon after they set sail, and by that first evening, it had blown into a strong gale, accompanied by torrential rain. The passengers had a terrible sleepless night below decks, wet and seasick and cold. Then, according to newspaper reports, at 2.00 AM the ship struck a rock just 80 miles from Halifax.

There was widespread panic on board (“the greatest state of excitement” as the newspapers reported), with the passengers all crowding onto the deck and risking the foundering of the ship. Captain Daley, master of the Alert, and Captain Draper, the officer commanding the troops, struggled to bring calm and restore discipline. They ordered some of the soldiers to the pumps and convinced the rest of the men and their families to go back below decks. Draper ordered all his officers to set an example by staying below with their men.

Daley steered the ship toward the nearest land, which he could just make out in the distance. The water was now coming in so fast that the pumps couldn’t keep up. Soon it was above the knees of the soldiers below decks. It must have been terrifying down there: overcrowded, rolling, dark, noisy, people throwing up, and strange things floating in the rising sea water flowing in through the splintered hull; and yet amongst the soldiers there was now absolute silence and calm. Children and wives may have been crying, but the men uttered not one word until after a long, agonising hour the Alert violently collided with tiny Goose Island.

The force of the impact forced her almost on her side, before she righted herself and started to subside. The newspapers reported that there was now “great confusion” and “excitement among the troops increased to an alarming extent” as the soldiers’ discipline broke again. Believing the ship to be breaking up and sinking, the soldiers and their families rushed for the ship’s boats.

Captain Draper and his officers and NCOs struggled to stem this widespread panic and then to organise the evacuation. Somehow, during that violent night, three soldier’s wives had delivered babies, and now all three were brought up from below and lowered into the boats still on their beds, with their newborns clutched to their bosoms. Other women and children were evacuated too, before the soldiers themselves began climbing down into the boats. For almost two hours they plied the broken ship’s boats to the beach and back, ferrying all the passengers just a handful at a time. The sun had risen over the wreck when the last of the survivors were brought ashore. 

Everyone was forlorn, soaked and cold, but they were all safe. Not a single life had been lost, although now they were shipwrecked on a desolate, uninhabited island just 300 ft wide by 1,500 ft long.

Now Draper kept everyone busy. The sailors made more trips back to the wreck to recover spars and canvas sails and food and water. The soldiers began surveying the island and building cabins with the materials scavenged from the ship. Draper imposed a daily routine and everyone responded well to his discipline.

After ten days the survivors were rescued by the sloop HMS Rose, and by a lighter dispatched from Halifax. As was later reported, they ended their ordeal “without a sick person, or any flagrant breach of discipline.”

This was a remarkable feat of leadership, for which Captain Daley and Captain Draper were later both praised. Many lives would have been lost if the officers hadn’t restored discipline at the height of the confusion. The Duke of Wellington himself claimed that the behaviour of all the troops “throughout the transaction is praiseworthy, and by its result must render manifest to all the advantage of subordination, and the strict obedience to orders under the most extraordinary circumstances in which men can be placed in the performance of their duty in the service of Her Majesty.”

The survivors arrived in Halifax with only the clothes on their backs. The people of that town who had just a few weeks before been thanking these soldiers for their unofficial fire fighting duties, now took up a collection to pay for enough clothing and bedding for their second voyage back to England. The 64th re-embarked on the troopship Premier, for an apparently uneventful 17-day trip to Portsmouth, arriving home on August 22nd, 1843.

Much was subsequently written about the heroism of the officers in this incident, but nothing about the individual soldiers. We can only guess at the role Sam played: the only record is in his medical report on discharge three years later, which reported that he had suffered two ruptures caused by lifting heavy weights during the shipwreck.

For all his sickness and disease and his ruptures, Sam survived into his old age, passing away only in 1875, at the age of 71. No doubt the story of the wreck of the troopship Able won him many a pint along the way.

Was Mary Anne Took a prostitute?

Mary Anne Took lived in the 1840s on Barrack Street, one of the most notorious areas in the naval town of Plymouth. This street was described at the time by the more well-to-do as a “rookery” (defined by George Galloway in 1792 as a “cluster of mean tenements densely populated by people of the lowest class”). It was home to beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes, vermin and disease. How did Mary Anne, a widow with a young daughter, find a way to survive?

Born Mary Anne Bartlett in 1816 in Ermington, a rural parish in Devon, my great great great grandmother hastily married John Took, a farm labourer, in May 1840, when she was three months pregnant. She was left widowed with a baby daughter when John succumbed to consumption in September 1841.

What was she to do then? The widow of a farm labourer with a baby girl, she could have relied on her husband’s family for support, or perhaps for parish relief in her husband’s parish of Exbourne. She could have returned to her own family, or even to Ermington, to rely on relief from the parish where she was born. Instead, she chose to move to Plymouth.

We know this because this is where she married Robert Phippen. Serving in the Royal Marines, Robert returned to Plymouth in May 1847 after six years at sea. He married Mary Anne on January 20th, 1848 and sailed again eight days later. Their marriage certificate lists Mary Anne’s residence as Barrack Street, just outside the Royal Marines Barracks gates, in the district of East Stonehouse.

We have to wonder what brought Mary Anne and her baby daughter to Plymouth after her husband died in 1841, and how she survived once she got there. Plymouth was a rough and tumble sea port and army town, known for its pubs, prostitution and disease. Mary Anne became just one of thousands of single women surviving on piece work and charity. If she was like the majority of these single women, she drifted into prostitution whenever a ship returned to port from an overseas voyage, or when a new regiment arrived. Most of these women ended up marrying a sailor or soldier, having children and settling down to raise their families. Some turned again to prostitution when their husbands were sent overseas, not out of choice, but because they had no other means of supporting their children.

Although the city’s middle classes righteously condemned prostitution, the people in Mary Anne’s neighbourhood passed no judgement on the “loose” women on Barrack Street. Her neighbours had their own struggles, and they also did whatever they had to do to survive.

At the time of the 1851 census (after Mary Anne had moved away), 397 people lived in the 26 houses on Barrack Street. The most crowded house, Number 4, was home to 39 people in 13 families. The heads of these families included three charwomen, two soldiers, a pensioner, two seamstresses, a dressmaker, a tailor, a shipwright and a shoe maker. 

Thirty three people in ten families lived at Number 10, even though the main floor was taken up by a beer parlour. The residents included 23-year-old Jane Pedrick, a very enterprising lodging-house keeper whose three lodgers were all single women, one a dress maker, another a seamstress, and the last a laundress. In another room lived an older woman, the wife of a marine away at sea. She had four visitors on the night of the census. One was a 23-year-old unmarried girl, the other three all young unmarried men – two marines and a sailor.

The street was home to some 30 marines and their families, and 16 retired soldiers. Other people were working as masons, carpenters, shoe makers, errand boys and in a dozen other occupations. Businesses were established on the main floors of more than half the houses on the street, including two shops, three bakeries and a total of ten beer houses, probably all catering to the marines in the barracks at the end of the road.

Robert was at sea in 1849, and Mary Ann was alone in Plymouth with her daughter, when cholera swept through the city. It disproportionately attacked the poorest, most crowded neighbourhoods, killing 1,600 people – almost two percent of the population of the city. The epidemic arrived on an immigrant ship that docked in February. It reached its peak in the second week of August, when the disease took 127 lives.

It was no wonder that the epidemic struck Plymouth so hard. The city had some of the worst overcrowding in the country. The cholera spread through neighbourhoods like Barrack Street in hours, leaving a swath of the dead in its path.

Reverend George Prynne, newly arrived in the city, wrote about it afterwards: “For three months we seemed to be living amongst the dying and the dead. A large wooden hospital for the whole of Plymouth was erected in our parish. We set up an altar in the largest ward, in order that everything might always be ready for communicating the dying. As the visitation reached its climax the deaths became very frequent and rapid. I was walking out one morning about nine o'clock. I met a woman hurrying along, and in answer to my enquiry she said she was going to fetch the doctor for her husband who had been seized with cholera. In the evening both she and her husband were in their coffins; the woman had died first!”

Robert spent seven of his first eight years of marriage at sea. He had occasional shore leave, and it was the result of a short visit home that he and Mary Anne had a baby. Emma Elizabeth Phippen was born on October 11^th, 1850, in a room the couple had rented at 57 George Street, a quarter mile from the barracks.

It’s hard to imagine how Mary Anne made it through the first years she was alone. Robert was only being paid a little over a shilling a day and much of this was held back for his rations and uniform, so very little of his money made it back to her. Robert didn’t have his regiment’s permission to marry – such permission was given to only four in a hundred private soldiers – so Mary Anne wasn’t permitted to live in barracks while Robert was at sea. She needed at least three shillings a week just to pay for a single room in the poorer areas of Plymouth. She had two girls to feed and clothe. She was illiterate and had no trade to fall back on.

The War Department expected soldiers’ wives to turn to the parish for relief. This meant going into the workhouse, or, if the parish was generous, receiving a few shillings to continue living at home. Plymouth was notorious for its parsimonious attitude, doing everything within its power, including trying to send families back to the parishes where the women were born, to avoid accepting responsibility for them. At one point the Plymouth Authority simply refused to pay poor relief to soldiers’ wives at all.

Emma was just 21 months old in July 1852 when Robert embarked on HMS Queen for a tour of duty in the Mediterranean. He was gone for more than four years, including a year and a half in the Black Sea, fighting in the Crimean War.

The Black Sea is reached from the Mediterranean by sailing through the Bosporus, a narrow channel of water that divides Turkey into its European and Asian halves. The Crimea is a peninsula that reaches into the Black Sea from the Ukraine. This was Russian territory in 1854, when the war broke out.

The war was a successful attempt by Britain and France to halt Russia’s expansion into the Balkans. They allied with Turkey, which in those days controlled much more of the Balkans than it does today. An attack by the Russians on the Turkish Black Sea fleet gave the British and French the justification they had been waiting for, and they declared war.

This was the first “modern” war, characterised by combined arms operations, new weapons technology, and trench warfare. It set the pattern for the US Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the Great War of 1914. The Crimean War was also fought at the dawn of modern medicine: new theories of hygiene, surgery and post operative care were all tested in the field. It was a modern war in another way too: two-thirds of the English population was now literate, widely reading the newspapers that vied to be the first to report on events in the Black Sea. The first war correspondents, steamships, telegraph lines and primitive photography all meant a steady stream of timely news eagerly read by a hungry audience ready to analyze every decision taken by the government and its generals.

Editors looking for new angles soon took up the cause of the women left behind. The plight of army wives sparked the compassion of the public. Benefiting from a wave of charitable donations, the newly created Central Association in Aid of the Wives and Families of Soldiers Ordered on Active Service supported 6,700 families with weekly allowances, clothing, bedding and medical aid. Responding to this wave of popular concern, the War Office implemented a new 6d per day field allowance, encouraging soldiers to remit all of this back to their families. With the Association’s support and the proceeds of the field allowance, Mary Anne might barely have had the money she needed to survive.

Robert finally returned to Plymouth in August 1856. He never went to sea again, spending the last years of his military career at the marine barracks in East Stonechurch, before receiving his discharge on March 4^th, 1864 after 22 years of military service. He and Mary Anne retired to the town of Buckfastleigh, the home of Mary Anne’s father’s family.

Robert and Mary Anne lived well into old age. Robert passed away in 1901, Mary Anne in 1909, at the age of 93. Whatever the circumstances of the first half of her life, they seem to have done her no harm.