Officer-Man Relations and Discipline in the Regular Army, 1902–14

Abstract

The social composition of the prewar Regular army had a major impact on the nature of the officer-man relationship. Broadly speaking, ‘Kipling’s army’ recruited from the highest and lowest strata of British society. The social gulf between officers and Other Ranks was very wide.¹ Edmonds, the British official historian of the Great War, claimed that recruitment was aided by ‘the compulsion of hunger’.² Various estimates of the proportion of unemployed men enlisting in the army ranged from 70 per cent in one area to more than 90 per cent for the country as a whole.³ Skilled and unskilled labourers accounted for 24 and 44.5 per cent respectively of men joining the army in 1913 and a further 25.5 per cent of recruits came from other working-class occupations such as carmen and carters, outdoor porters, and domestic servants. Professional men/students and clerks constituted only 1 and 3 per cent respectively.⁴ Thus the intake of recruits in a not untypical year came almost entirely from the working classes, with labourers, rather than artisans, predominating.