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.
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Notes
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H. Benyon, Working for Ford ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ) p. 36.
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R. van Emden (ed.), Tickled to Death to Go ( Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1996 ) p. 26.
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© 2000 G. D. Sheffield
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Sheffield, G.D. (2000). Officer-Man Relations and Discipline in the Regular Army, 1902–14. In: Leadership in the Trenches. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596986_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596986_1
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