ABSTRACT
About that period [1848 or 1849], I think through some troubles in the financial world, an exceptional number of better-class men joined the service, and struck with the indecency of the arrangement [in barracks] then in force, not a few sent in anonymous complaints to the Horse Guards; others, through the press, stimulated public opinion to demand a change, and the authorities sluggishly complied. The reform was not carried through with any great promptitude, for I have heard of women living in the barrack-rooms after the Crimean war. But the change was made in the regiment to which I belong in the year 1849. It was no great change for the better. Into one attic in Christchurch Barracks seven families were huddled pell-mell. No more arrangements for privacy were made than had existed in the common barrack-rooms. Each separate menage was curtained off by what may be styled private enterprise. There was but one fire-place in the room, and the women squabbled vehemently over their turns for cooking, and were forced to have recourse to the fires in the men’s barrack-rooms. The moral and social tone was visibly deteriorated under this arrangement below that which had characterised the common barrack-room. The women, congregated as they were, and with no check upon them, were too prone to club for gin, and conviviality was chequered with quarrels, into which the husbands were not unfrequently drawn. There was a perceptible growth of coarseness of tone among both the women and the men, that became actual grossness; and I question if a young woman, with some of Nature’s modesty clinging to her, did not have it more violently outraged in this congeries of married couples than would have been the case in the old corner-of the-barrack-room arrangement. Of this at least I am certain, that with ominous rapidity she learnt to talk, and would submit to be jeered, on subjects which were ignored under the old system. The over-crowding also, which was all but universal, was physically injurious to both adults and children. The latter did not count in allocating quarters. I have known ten families in one long room in Weedon Barracks. Eight families in a hut in the North Camp at Aldershot was nothing uncommon. But a better regime is now rapidly obtaining. There are few barracks now which do not contain married quarters; where each couple have a room to themselves. I know not whether the inception of this new system was due to our gracious Queen, but the rapidity with which married quarters have become all but universal is certainly owing in the main to her womanly sympathy with her sex. Still, however, these married quarters in many cases do not afford sufficient accommodation, and the surplusage have to fall back on the old system. The summer before last, in Aldershot, more than one troop-room was occupied by four families, and as I write, I doubt not that about a third of the married strength of the home forces are still unaccommodated with separate rooms. In civilian estimation a single room for a man and wife and their family,—day-room and bed-room in one,—seems no great boon; but the soldier and his wife have been so little used to mercies of any kind, that they are thankful for very small ones. Yet a second room, if not for the married private, at least for the non-commissioned officer of the higher grade, might with advantage be conceded. A squadron sergeant-major is a non-commissioned aristocrat; his position in the military cosmogony being roughly analogous to the managing foreman of a factory in the civilian world. But how would the latter relish having to pay his hands, the head of the concern sitting with him at the pay-table, while his recently-confined wife lay in bed in the same room, sequestrated only by a curtain?
