“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.
