James McConville joined the army in 1899 at the age of 15 and served in it for the rest of his working life. In old age he wrote an account of his early years in the Royal Irish Rifles, leaving a unique record of everyday late Victorian army life. Here his son, Michael McConville, highlights episodes from his father's memoirs, including the initial tribulations of the new recruit and a tour of service in India, giving a fond, vivid and humorous impression of turn of the century soldiering.

IRELAND AND ENGLAND: 1899—1900
Fifteen years before his wedding to my mother in India in 1914, my father came close to being married by mistake in a Catholic church in Belfast. He was 15 years of age at the time, a recently enlisted soldier in the Royal Irish rifles. A creative-minded recruiting sergeant named Birdlime Hayburn had conspired with him to fake his age to join the army. Birdlime's nickname reflected his silver-tongued skills in ensnaring the credulous into the Queen's service. He was an impressively bemedalled old man who had fought in the Crimea and he took his work seriously; as well he might. He was a piece-work operator who was paid by the head. My father's diffident claim to be 18 provoked some weary finger-wagging.

"Too apparent," Birdlime said disapprovingly. "You'd better be 18 years and four months. Date of birth; 24 September, 1880." He wrote it on the form, added the other necessary biographical details, showed my father where to sign, and sent him off to the Recruits' Reception Room in Victoria Barracks. Birdlime the Bounty Hunter, another financial success notched up, filled in his claim application.

The matrimonial near miss came a few months later. By then rifleman McConville had been sufficiently drilled, cajoled into smartness, and threatened with the wrath of God, to be allowed out in public in uniform. A mysterious request by a fellow-recruit named Jack Lappin for help in an undisclosed enterprise led, after some chaotic preliminaries, to the alter rails of St Peter's church off the Falls Road, where both had attended Mass regularly in the past. Lappin, a shy bridegroom had acquired a Best Man.

Lappin knelt with his bride on his right. Best Man and bridesmaid were on hers. The priest read the first part of the marriage service and instructed the Best Man to take the bride's hand. He did what he was told. The bride screamed. "It's not him," she shouted. "It's the other man." Handclasps were readjusted. The boy Best Man, sweating, listened to the pronouncement that the right pair were now man and wife. The celebrations lasted for the rest of the day and throughout the night. The Best Man, 26 hours absent, was confined to barracks for five days and forfeited two days pay. The groom, who had added an extra 24 hours for his honeymoon, increased his wedding expenses by three days pay and drew 10 days CB. Every evening the bride and the bridesmaid came to the barrack gates to talk through the bars to the men in their lives, a social event interrupted at half-hourly intervals by a bugle summoning the menfolk to Defaulters Parade.

"I have never done Best Man since," recorded Rifleman McConville in his old age. You can see his point.

These glimpses into late Victorian military life are drawn from papers left by my father when he died at the age of 86 (or 89, according to the Army) in 1969. There is a 29-page account on foolscap, neatly hand-written but with a few later rather shaky insertions, of his early soldiering days. It is a loosely shaped chronological narrative with gaps, a series of vividly recalled events, experiences, and impressions lodged in his memory. There is no self-pity and not much criticism. It is simply a record of old happenings as he once saw them. A miscellany of short notes, military documentation, letters, and casually preserved odds and ends, completes the collection. It is held by the National Army Museum.

RECRUITMENT
The notion that the Falls Road area of Belfast might once have been a fertile recruiting field for the British Army will possibly raise a few eyebrows among British troops who have served in Northern Ireland during the past 25 years; and among a broader international public with an interest in modern Ireland. But for the whole of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, a very large number of Catholic Irishmen serviced in the old Irish regiments of the Army, and in English and Scottish ones as well. James McConville had precedents, set by his immediate family, to guide him.

His elder brother Johnny, recently returned from a stretch in India with the Royal Irish Fusiliers, would shortly be recalled to the colours as a reservist to fight in the South African War. Uncles and great-uncles, now in retirement in the Falls Road, had been in the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, the Zulu War and a spread of long-forgotten Victorian Imperial campaigns. He describes himself in one of his notes as "unsettled" in his early teens. He had left school at the age of 12. He went from job to soulless job: office boy, a worker in a flax mill and then in a mineral water factory, bottle washer. Soldiering seemed much more attractive.

At 14 years and nine months, an age presumably given a spurious embellishment for the occasion, he tried the regular army. He was, he records, five feet four inches high (nearly six feet in later life) and his chest was half an inch too small. It was suggested that he should join the Militia, a precursor of the Territorial Army, to thicken himself up. Six weeks with the Antrim Militia at Victoria Barracks did the trick. It was after that that he presented himself to Birdlime and perjured himself. Birdlime must have been content: soft touch; keen young fellow; no time wasted upon blandishments.

James was a rapidly growing lad, glad that he had recently added an inch to his height when he witnessed the procedure for dealing with the slightly too short in the Recruit's Reception room. A bath was followed by inspection by a medical officer. Measurements were taken. The height scale was a forerunner of the lightweight ones in use today, but of more robust construction. The maximum height of the vertical slide was about seven feet. The horizontal projection that was rested upon the head of the examined was a heavy metal block. A failure to meet the standard by half an inch or so was put right by the medical orderly. The subject was ordered to stand still. The orderly raised the block to its full extent and loosened its retaining screw. The block landed at speed on the hopeful's head. When he had picked himself off the floor and the bump on his skull had matured satisfactorily, he was re-measured. True height plus the lump was a pass.

DAY-TO-DAY LIVING
The issue of clothing, two of everything, "very liberal" to someone of James's frugal background, came next. Satisfaction at the liberality was offset early by exposure to a pervasive low-grade racketeering. The corporal to whom the recruits had handed their civilian clothes for safe keeping sold the lot to a dealer and denied that he had ever set eyes on them. Two old soldiers, put in to share the barrack room with 14 recruits and to give big-brotherly help and advice, were sparing with the help but active in monopolising the best of the food and in enforcing compulsory weekly cash levies on each man for the hire of cleaning kit (everyone already had his own) and the completion of weekend leave passes (filling in a name and the date). The regimental tailor, official alterer of ill-fitting off-the-peg uniforms, made chalk marks, took the uniforms away, rubbed out the marks, and returned the uniforms untouched. He then shifted to private practice and charged a fee for work that he was paid to do. Soldiers' wives, like the tailor paid from public funds, did the recruits' laundry. They dumped it all in one tub of water, wrung it out, dried it, and gave it back. It stank.

The recruits had little time to brood upon this bleak backdrop of life's little injustices. Reveille followed by bed-making, tidying up, and preparation for first parade was at 5.45am. For an hour from 6.45 there was physical drill with rifles, ending with a run of four times around the square. Breakfast – tea, bread and butter, sometimes jam, occasionally a rasher of bacon – came next. Then there was a rushed 40 minutes of barrack-room cleaning, including the carrying of tables and forms down two flights of stairs, scrubbing them with cold water in the open, rain or sun, winter or summer, carrying them up again, and getting ready for the 9am parade and inspection. After one and a half hour's drill on the square came one and a half hour's gymnastics, ‘a hard grind; 14 presses between the parallel bars, 14 pulls to the chest on the horizontal bar, climbing the walls by fingertip and toe grips, walking along a plank in the rafters, jumping to catch a rope hanging from the ceiling and going down it hand over hand to the floor again'. It all sharpened hungers for midday dinner, "meat, potatoes, vegetables, and a pudding. Seldom appetising". It must in fact have been unspeakably bad if a 15-year-old boy found it unappetising after six hours of unremitting hard physical exertion. Inedible or not, it was regarded as adequate fuel for a further one hour's drill in full marching order. Tea, at 4.30pm, was the last meal of the day; "but as we were all young men our 1lb of bread went at breakfast so usually we had only the tea to drink and had nothing to eat until the next day."

If there is such a thing as a physiologist who takes the measurements of comparative strenuousness, it seems likely that he would find that the individual energy consumed under this regime equated roughly to that used up by someone undergoing modern infantry recruit training; and probably considerably less than that of a recruit, say, to the Royal Marines or the Parachute Regiment [1] But there are two notable differences. The modern soldier is well and nutritiously fed whereas, if this account is representative, the late Victorian soldier decidedly was not. The second is to do with the numbing, unimaginative monotony of the daily routine; a repetitive dosage of barrack square drill, gymnastics, the cleaning of equipment and the cleaning of barrack rooms.

There was, however, one unexpected and welcome break in an extra-curricular part of the sameness, the artificially high cost of living. A recruit names Oates upheld the Rights of Man by refusing to pay his extortionate weekly twopence for the unnecessary use of the cleaning materials of an old-timer named Micky McCrystall. McCrystall hit Oates in the eye. Oates took his black eye to his colour sergeant. McCrystall was charged, sentenced to 10 days confined to barracks, and lost a good conduct stripe and the allowance that went with it. This small triumph had repercussions: "There was great rejoicing among the recruits after this; and the old soldiers were much more cautious."

A NEW ROUTINE
The 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, came back to Belfast from India in the Spring of 1899 and was put into the Lower Square buildings of Victoria Barracks. James was drafted to the battalion in June; and soon found himself among experienced soldiers of a worth and kindliness that had not often been evident amidst the brigandage of the Depot. He and another recruit names Scott were the only novices in a barrack room of old timers. Their first noticeable benign characteristic was that they did not eat much: "with the extra food available we pulled up for the starvation we received in the depot."

There was more to it than a good-natured acquiescence in adolescent gorging. James was detailed for his first ceremonial guard, something of a milestone in his military progress. He looked uncertainly at his freshly-issued equipment of dull, untreated new leather. The old soldiers took the matter in hand. For three days relays of them operated a complicated system involving melted beeswax, a hot smoothing iron, black polish beaten in with a buff pad on a stick, the edge of the base of a wineglass, the flat part of an awl, and a chamois leather. A glittering James, inspected rigorously by his patrons before he was fallen in for guard, was inspected even more minutely along with the rest of the guard by the adjutant. James was selected for ‘the Stick': the Colonel's orderly for the day, excused guard duties, carrier of his regimental cane and wearer of sidearms as his sign of office. The adjutant's choice of best turned-out rifleman on parade was marked by a distant cheer from James's old soldier friends.

His next appearance on a guard was less distinguished. The weary, always hungry, growing 15-year-old boy masquerading as a man fell asleep when standing sentry after midnight at the Trainfield Gate of the barracks. The clinking of the sword scabbard of the approaching officer-of-the-day jerked him into sufficient wakefulness to turn out the guard: but he dozed off again when presenting arms with the guard and dropped his rifle. He said yes when Captain Dimsdale asked him if he were ill. He was told to report to the Orderly Room on the Monday morning. He did so. Dimsdale did not show up. "Captain Dimsdale was shot through the head a few months later at Reddersberg during the Boer War."

TRAINING
Training progressed beyond the development of physical fitness and the perfecting of ceremonial drill. A musketry course was fired on the ranges at Kinnegar near Hollywood in County Down. The targets were of thick metal. A hit produced a satisfying Ping, audible at ranges of up to 800 yards. The young James was enchanted by the penetrating purity of the notes from the battalion's silver bugles. Retreat, played every evening in the camp by the full Bugle Band, echoed for miles across Belfast Lough. At Kinnegar there was a further incident in the genre of the case of Oates vs McCrystall. The troops slept 18 to a Bell tent, heads at its circumference, feet concentrated around the central tent pole. The Orderly Corporal, name of Mick McQuaid, discharged his daily duty of awakening everyone by creeping silently into each tent, grasping the tent pole, and dancing about on the 36 grouped ankles. A large resentful rifleman made clear his objections to this system. McQuaid unwisely challenged him to fight it out. The rifleman won within the distance; for several days McQuaid was led around like a blind man with raw steak bandaged over his eyes; and the procedure for rousing the slumbering returned to a much enjoyed military normality.

War in South Africa was becoming increasingly probable and there was enhanced emphasis on tactical training of a sort that had proved its value in generations of imperial small campaigns again unskilled and underarmed opposition. A shoddily executed movement during Battalion Close Order Drill at Cliftonville drew a fierce rebuke from the adjutant. Before long, he said, they would be sorry about their lack of precision. "Close Order Drill was all right for fighting savages," comments James with hindsight and with an uninhibited absence of political correctness, "but it was of no use against the Boers."

Indeed it wasn't. A short while later the battalion, advancing in column through a defile near Stormberg, was caught by sharp-shooting Boers firing from concealment on ether side of the valley. Colonel Eager and a number of men were killed, there were many wounded, and several were captured. Some time afterwards the Rifles lost two companies at Reddersberg. James had no part in these events. Even counting his three endowed years from Birdlime Hayburn he was still under 20, the minimum age for going to the war.

LIFE IN ARMY CAMP
A semi-itinerant tour of England was the lot of those left behind: 7am runs around the square in the snow at Hillsborough Barracks in Sheffield; the pre-dawn clatter of mill workers' clogs in the streets outside Bradford Moor Barracks: attachment to the Louth Militia, 6th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, embodied for the war and brigaded with other militia battalions from the Inniskillings, the Leinsters, and the Royal Irish Regiment. The Irish Militia Brigade was in a tented camp at Cowshot, near Aldershot. "They were all very fond of their beer and they were a rough crowd." They were so fond of their beer that they helped themselves to several 56 gallon barrels of it, left overnight outside the canteen tent by an incautious management, rolled them into the whins by the Basingstoke canal, and set about emptying them. "A number of fellows were absent some days." A round the clock beer barrel guard featured in Camp Daily Orders from then onwards. As for the roughness, the Wexford Militia were particularly bellicose in the settlement of internal disputes. The morning Sick Parade of their walking wounded outside the medical tent was one of the sight-seeing attractions of the camp. "The Army estimates for the provision of bandages must have been increased that year." James himself, a temporary storeman, was infected by the belligerence and got into a fight with the Quartermaster's lance corporal clerk about when the lamp in the stores tent where they slept should be turned out. They made so much noise rolling about amongst the picks and shovels that the sergeant of the guard arrived and arrested them. They spent half an hour with the drunks in the guard tent and were then released by the quartermaster sergeant. Their captivity had left the stores tent unguarded. He didn't want his picks and shovels and the rest to go the way of the canteen manager's beer barrels.

There was more to it at Cowshot than off-duty drinking and fighting. James, at 16, was a non-starter in the first and a one-bout amateur in the second. He was an appreciative eater of cheap fresh fruit sold from horse-drawn carts brought into camp by local farmers. He was much entertained by the ferocious grinding of the teeth of the Belfast Orangemen in his own battalion when they listened to the band of the Wexfords playing their regimental march, the Boys of Wexford, a ballad commemorating the 1798 Rebellion; during which the not too distant ancestors of those present had fought with heart and hand against Orange Yeomanry, forebears of the teethgrinders. And there was, of course, a daily round of hard training. Among James's accounts of the training are recorded a minor farce and a disaster.

The farce came during musketry classification on the ranges at Bisley. A colour sergeant in James's company, who had first issued explicit and menacing instructions to the markers in the butts, lay down at the firing point with a box of ammunition beside him and blazed away at leisure. Only bulls were registered. All other shots, plenty, were disregarded. He accepted the distinction of company best shot with modesty and aplomb; a man who had pushed the dictum about triumph as an imposter one stage further than Kipling had in mind.

The disaster developed during an exercise in which there was a mock battle between a Force from the Cowshot Militia camp and one from the Aldershot garrison. The troops bore full marching order, and were dressed in serge uniforms and either busbies or helmets according to regimental custom. It was an exceptionally hot day. There was a great deal of hard cross-country marching. Five men died from heat exhaustion, more than a hundred had to be sent to hospital, and many more collapsed. The busbies and the helmets seem to have been held responsible for this shambles. There was an immediate issue of colonial style slouch hats, pinned up at one side.

LEARNING DISCRETION
Another brief move took James to Salamanca Barracks in Aldershot, where the relief of Mafeking was celebrated by a torchlight parade, led by bands, through the streets; and then it was back to Ireland, to Elrington Barracks n Londonderry. Here James was nearly in serious trouble. He took a day's leave to see his family in Belfast, enjoyed himself, over-stayed by four days, and would have stayed longer but for the insistence of his sister Mary, a young woman of wisdom. Before she personally escorted him to the railway station, he had the sense to call on a flexible doctor named Aitken, who practised in the Falls Road. Aitken, kindly or possibly subversive, gladly certified that his patient had been incapacitated for travel by neuralgia. Marched before Colonel Stewart on the following morning, James was instantly sentenced to 72 hours imprisonment with hard labour. He produced his medical certificate just in time. The Colonel, who clearly had a long and unhappy familiarity with Dr Aitken's medical diagnoses, stared at the certificate with distaste, stared at James hard, and amended the sentence to admonishment and the forfeiture of four days pay. James was "pleased". Had the hard labour sentence stood, his hair would have been cut in ridges by horse clippers, he would have worn prison clothes marked with broad arrows, his non-working time would have been in a cell, and his diet ("perhaps") bread and water.

This narrow deliverance, courtesy of the compliant Dr Aitken, coupled with an earlier description in his manuscript of prisoners doing pack drill in Victoria Barracks wearing full marching order, rifles at the shoulder, chests pressed into the packs of the men in front of each, being marched for an hour in a circle at 160 paces to the minute, seems to have given him pause for thought. There were doubtless other considerations too. But he makes no further mention of blemishes on his conduct sheet. On his 17th birthday (the real one, not the Army's adjusted one) he left Derry with a reinforcement draft for the lst Battalion, Royal Irish rifles. They were stationed in Calcutta.

INDIA: 1900—1901
The SS Zamania sailed from Queenstown, now Cobh, the port of Cork. The Bay of Biscay was rough and James was seasick, uncaring if the ship went down. In the Mediterranean there was agreeable swimming in a canvas tank of sea water, minor dabbling in gambling on Crown and Anchor boards operated by fluent and untrustworthy Old Sweats, getting to know fellow soldiers from the different drafts to other regiments, and a further three-day storm during which everyone was battened down below decks. So too were the live cattle, carried for slaughter for food as required. Fresh vegetables ran out early and were replaced monotonously by sweet potatoes. Lime juice was drunk daily under supervision as a precaution against scurvy. The ship was averagely filthy. By the time they reached Bombay after three weeks "there were few who were not infested with vermin". It was probably not an unrepresentative sample of the trooping circumstances of the time.

A long, hot train journey, travel by night, days in Rest Camps along the route, brought them at last to Howrah Station in Calcutta. The Rifles were in Dalhousie Barracks, a component of Fort William, a large military complex, self-contained, that also housed an Indian infantry battalion, gunners, sappers, and assorted administrative people. There was an arsenal, a prison, and Protestant and Catholic churches. Parade grounds doubled as sports fields. [2] The second part of James's manuscript, shorter than the first, gives a young man's look at life in the ranks nearly 100 years ago in this one establishment of the Raj with another half century of life still ahead of it. It was an existence that would not attract much of a queue of modern applicants. Of its several disabilities, boredom was the most corrosive.

The troops lived n big barrack blocks with wide verandahs surrounding each floor. The day began with two spurious luxuries, unknown in Victoria barracks, Belfast. An Indian barber shaved everyone while they still slept. He was followed by a char wallah (who brought round Gunfire, morning tea). The barber used the same water for all his customers and his shaving brush smelled horribly. The tea tasted "as if the cook had dropped his hubble-bubble into it".

James soon abandoned both. A brief first parade preceded 8am breakfast, taken on verandahs shielded by Venetian blinds. Sweating Indian cooks crossed the yard from the cookhouse bearing dixies of tea and shallow baskets of tough steaks, waving ladles to beat off swarms of enterprising kitehawks, whose enthusiasm for gristle outmatched that of the intended consumers. Most of these ate bananas, small and succulent, bought privately if what was left of the week's pay still ran to it. After breakfast came barrack-room inspection; defaulters and requestmen paraded at the Orderly Room; and that for most, in a hot, sticky, and debilitating climate, was the end of the official day. The rest was a matter of filling in time.

Few soldiers went out of barracks. "They were looked down on by the civilians", the civilians in this context being exclusively European; friendships with Indians were almost unheard of. There was productive employment for a small minority: rehearsals for bandsmen, specialist training for signallers, study for necessary educational certificates by aspirants for promotion. Of the others the drinkers, a shifting but always strongly-manned contingent, put down six pints of beer whilst the wet canteen was open from noon until 1pm, slept the afternoon away, watched a game of soccer or hockey in the relative cool of the evening, and were back in the canteen again when it opened at 6pm. By closing time, 9.15pm, they had added another six to eight pints to their scores. For the non-drinkers, the Army Temperance Association Room provided iced minerals and a billiard table. A third main category, ‘the clean soldier and careful man', passed a great deal of time in polishing up their black leather equipment and scrubbing and creasing their khaki and white uniforms – less taxing on the system than the roisterers' personal programmes, but some way short of fulfilling. Soccer and hockey kept some fit and interested, but seemingly only those good enough to challenge for a place in a battalion team – the Soccer X1 was outstanding locally. [3]

James's own obsession was with the food needed to fuel his growth: cakes and pastry in the Temperance Room; a fourpenny supper in the coffee shop, where the bill could be debited against pay. He recalls these delights in detail a long lifetime later. An early friendship in Calcutta foundered because of food. It was with Bill Tynan, "a big chap with an enormous appetite". The two of them pooled what there was of their pay to supplement their rations. Tynan was a fast and thorough eater who ate his way through about half of James's share in addition to his own. "I looked around for another pal who might be half-dying and with a lesser appetite than myself."

* * *

ONE WAY OUT
Some soldiers found the stupefying tedium intolerable. Dan Bradley, a childhood friend of James in the Falls Road, engineered a dishonourable discharge as his only way out. Normally a quiet and well-behaved man, he one night made a thoroughgoing job of smashing the plate glass windows of Scott Thompson's, a fashionable Calcutta chemist. He made no attempt to evade arrest. His Court martial sentence of 84 days' imprisonment in the Fort William gaol was a disappointment and he improved upon it from inside. He was washing out his cell when the Field officer of the Day, a Major in the India Army, arrived on his rounds, opened the shutter on each cell door, and called out a routine "any complaints?" When he put the question at Bradley's shutter Bradley replied that indeed he had and let fly with the dirty wet floor cloth at the major's white uniform. To make sure that this time there would be no further frustrating leniency he seized his heavy earthenware water chatti by the neck and threatened to brain all-comers. He was given time to cool down and was then secured. His second Court Martial sentenced him to 15 strokes of the cat o'nine tails, [4] and the discharge with ignominy that he longed for.

There was a touching sequel, evidence of a humanity that ran side by side with the brutalities of the military discipline of the times. James heard about it only years later when he was on leave in Belfast and dropped by to see Dan Bradley, by then a happily married man with a family and in steady employment. The disgraced (a planned and calculated disgrace) Bradley had been sitting in his railway carriage at Howrah station in Calcutta, prior to departure for Bombay and his long dreamt of troopship journey home, when a visitor arrived to bid him goodbye. The Indian Army Major, victim of the wet floor cloth, presented him with a large basket of fruit, other foodstuffs, and books to tide him on his journey; and wished him good Luck. Bradley for a moment felt almost suicidal with remorse. "But," he told James, "I had no spite against any individual. Anyone who appeared that day would have got the same treatment. I wanted my discharge."

HEALTH RISKS
Bradley chose his drastic remedy in frustration at a life of seemingly endless futility. Futile or not, soldiers' lives were threatened by an abundance of risks to health. Tropical diseases, cholera, dysentery, ‘plague' were endemic. [5] A combination of physical idleness and heavy drinking was fatal to some. Before James's time, when the battalion was at Dum Dum, there had been 59 cases of abscess on the liver. Fifty-eight of them died under surgery.

The fifty-ninth, named Watson, refused to be operated upon. He lived. The count of the dead may possibly have swollen in regimental folklore, but even halved the figures are startling enough. James's comment is nicely understated: "There was little confidence in the RAMC of those days."

He makes no mention of Venereal Disease, another prevalent killer and destroyer of health, in his own writings. Lord Kitchener, the Commander-in-chief in India does, at length, in a memorandum apparently distributed to all troops and preserved among James's papers. The Kitchener starting point is his regret at the very serious extent of the ravages of VD among British troops in India. He goes on to give advice on how they should protect themselves. The advice steers well clear of the practical preventative measures later common in all three British Services. It is an exhortation to self-restraint, regimental pride, and the need to set a good example to fellow soldiers. There is a gruesome paragraph on symptoms: hair falling out, noses falling off, stinking ulcerations, blindness, and voices reduced to hoarse whispers. In case these disabilities failed to frighten the wits out of the readership, there were further penalties in store for those who failed to control their imprudent and reckless impulses: reduction in rank, forfeiture of proficiency pay, stoppage of promotion, liability of diminution of pensions for those invalided out. Families were brought into it too; suffering wives and infected children, shamed mothers and sisters.

It was all doubtless horribly accurate. Whether an ill-educated army with a high proportion of illiterates could understand most of the prose is open to question. Senior NCOs presumably rendered it into barrack-room English for the benefit of the puzzled. How effective it was is uncertain. Looked at from nearly a hundred years on there is an unreality in an approach that relied entirely upon words and eschewed the provision of down-to-earth prophylaxis; but unlike Lord Kitchener and his staff, late 20th century critics do not have an invincibly high-minded moralistic British public opinion to contend with, wedded to entrenched precept and indifferent to facts. The facts were enough to dishearten any commander. In 1895, a few years before Kitchener issues his memorandum, more than half the British troops then serving in India had been treated for Venereal Disease. As disabling in its various effects as battle casualties would have been. [6]

IMPERIAL ATTITUDES
The memorandum also carries some generalisations that today would attract both medical and political comment. Thus: "...diseases passed on from one race of men to another always increase in severity." "The common women as well as the regular prostitutes in India are almost all more or less infected with disease." These blanket slurs on the bulk of the Indian population reflect an attitude of sometimes violent superiority that seems to have been prevalent all down the line among many British solders. James gives two examples. The first is to do with punkah wallahs, low-paid menials who without the work would starve. The punkah was a heavy strip of cloth suspended from the ceiling over every two beds in a barrack-room, a primitive form of fan used to agitate the humid still air by night. All the punkahs were connected by ropes to a distant engine. When the engine broke down, which it frequently did, manpower was substituted. Each barrack-room's ropes were connected by a string to the big toe of the punkah wallah, an Indian ancient, who sat in the corner all night waggling his foot. When he fell asleep, ventilation ceased, sweating soldiers awakened, and a stream of Hindustani obscenities, boots and anything else throwable was directed at the poor old man until service was resumed. This was bad enough. The second instance was much worse. "It was always said at this time," writes James, "that no European would get hanged for killing a native. Some excuse would be found to minimise the murder charge." A rifleman named Sullivan shot the regimental tailor dead. Sullivan was declared insane. "But all who knew Sullivan said he was quite in his senses."

WORKING TOGETHER
A matter scarcely touched on in James's narrative, presumably because it assumed no great significance, was the condition of relations between Irishmen of different religions, associated with rival politics, and all in one battalion. Catholics and Protestants served side by side in the Royal Irish Rifles and shared barrack-rooms, platoons, companies, experiences and corporate prejudices. There must inevitably have been resentments and dislikes. But if animosities had gone beyond the personal to collective friction between rival groupings of differing religion, the keen-eyed young James would surely have noted them. He doesn't. (More recent political and religious Northern Irish leaders would benefit from a detailed study of how people got on with one another in the old Irish regiments of the British Army). He does, however, give an account of a St Patrick's day in Calcutta during which old, ingrained, habits of mind were given an airing.

The battalion had both a full brass band and a bugle band. On compulsory Sunday church parades, the Protestants were normally led to their church by the brass, and the Catholics to theirs by the bugles. On St Patrick's Day the Catholics got the full brass band and marched off to Mass, James among them, to the strains of St Patrick's Day, a rousing Irish air that is also a Catholic hymn. An audience of Protestants looking on disapprovingly from the verandahs were given cheerfully mocking waves by the Catholic faithful. When later in the day the Protestant parade fell in, also with the brass band, the band struck up some ordinary run-of-the-mill military march. The parade commander, Major Jacky Brown, would have none of it. He halted the parade, reminded the bandmaster that it was St Patrick's Day, and ordered him to play exactly that, St Patrick's Day. A tactless muted cheer from Catholics who in their turn were watching from the verandahs generated further discontent in the ranks; and the more intractable Orangemen expressed their feelings by marching out of step for the rest of the way to church. No-one seems to have come to blows after these on the whole affable ritual manifestations of hereditary tribal rivalry.

The shape of James's future life was determined, almost casually, at Fort William. He was detailed off, no question of volunteering, to become a signaller. Every morning, the signallers under instruction were marched out of the Fort to the shade of a grove of trees. There they absorbed the fundamentals of their trade; semaphore and Morse sent by hand-held flags; Morse only by heliograph. James clearly enjoyed the mental as much as the physical exertion. His eye still roved to register sights not customarily in evidence in Belfast: the view through the Treasury window, immediately below a heliograph transmitting from the Fort ramparts, of piles of rupees "lying in thousands like potatoes on the floor" before they were shovelled on to weighing scales by closely guarded Indian labourers; the training of Indian Police recruits, "big country yokels from the Punjab", with coloured tapes fastened around one ankle to help them identify left from right when marching. Leather chokers held their chins up. Backs were kept straight by a rod held across the shoulders and grasped at each end.

James's manuscript ends abruptly with an impenetrable regimental joke that must have been thought to be funny in 1901.

POSTSCRIPT
By 1905 my father was a sergeant and the captain and centre-half of the (unbeaten) battalion Soccer team. He served in a number of stations in India and Burma, went in 1911 as a Company Sergeant Major to the Indian Army when Indian Signals were first formed, and embarked for Mesopotamia n November 1914. He was in every action during General Townshend's over-ambitious advance towards Baghdad; was commissioned in the field, awarded the MC and twice mentioned in Despatches; and went into captivity with the survivors of 6th (Poona) Division when imminent starvation forced Townshend to surrender to the Turks after a protracted siege in Kut el Amara. After release at the end of the war he went back to India, He returned to the British Army in the early 1920s. The rest of his service was in the Royal Corps of Signals in the UK, broken briefly by a stretch in France with the British Expeditionary Force before Dunkirk. He retired as a lieutenant-colonel in 1941, aged fifty-eight; or, since the ghost of Sergeant Birdlime Hayburn still haunted his records, sixty-one by the Army's calculations.

[1] I did my own recruit training in 1943. Have since read and observed, but will plead guilty of any accusations of being out of touch.
[2] The nucleus of Fort William dated back to the early days of the Bengal ‘factory' of the Honourable East India Company.
[3] The softness induced by this sort of living was clearly redeemable. A succinct entry on another of the papers about the battalion's later move from Fyzabad to Meerut reads: "Battn. Moved on change of Station by Route March 350 miles."
[4] There s a puzzle about this punishment of 1901. Corporal punishment was abolished in the Army in 1881 (Information: National Army Museum). It may be that an earlier exception that prescribed flogging for "…insubordination accompanied with personal violence" still prevailed; or that my father had gone temporarily gaga when he wrote this bit — unlikely in view of the detailed clarity of the rest.
[5] The Report of a Royal Commission of 1863 gave relative life expectancy figures for British men aged 20 in England and in India. England: 39.5 years. India: 17.7. (Quoted in The Sahibs and the Lotus, Michael Edwardes, Constable, 1988)
[6] VD figures from Younghusband, Patrick French, Harper Collins, 1994. Moralist influence on this issue persisted into the Second World War. In early 1940 Maj Gen B L Montogomery of 3 Division, BEF, was in danger of being sent home from France after two senior chaplains complained about a forthright Divisional Order of his on prophylactic and centres. He was saved by the intervention of his Corps Commander, Lt. Gen. Alan Brooke. (The Turn of the Tide, Arthur Bryant)