In the early ’seventies of last century there was staged in London a very amusing musical comedy called The Happy Land, the scene being laid in Paradise. Among the principal characters were extremely skilful and poignant burlesques of Mr. Gladstone, Prime Minister at the time, Mr. Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Ayrton, First Commissioner of Works. The piece had but a short, though brilliant, run in the metropolis; for the Lord Chamberlain ordered it off the stage, not on the grounds of what is usually implied by immorality, but because it brought Her Majesty’s Ministers into contempt by mordant caricature of their features and action.[3] It is not known—to me, at least—which of the three victims set the censorship in motion. Certainly it was not ‘Bob’ Lowe, who was gifted with a fine strain of humour. Probably it was done at Mr. Ayrton’s instance, he being destitute of that saving grace, and, besides, having been more mercilessly satirised in the play than his colleagues. He had outraged public feeling, if not public taste, by some acts of his administration as ædile, notably by painting grey some of the fine stone-work in the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament. I forget the libretto of The Happy Land; but this much I remember, that, whereas in the first act the scenery of Paradise appeared glowing with rainbow radiance and shimmering with gems, in the second act it represented the effect of Ayrton’s régime—everything had been painted ‘government grey.’
All this was brought to mind by the change wrought upon the appearance of the British Army after the outbreak of the South African war in 1899. By a wave of his wand or a scratch of his quill the Secretary of State for War, Mr. St. John Brodrick (now Viscount Midleton) quenched all gaiety of colour in the fighting dress of our troops; the historic thin red line was to be seen no more; the glittering squadrons were doomed to ride in raiment as sombre as the dust of their own raising; henceforward standards and regimental colours were to be returned to store before the troops went on active service.
Had that been all, it would have sufficed to mark a notable era in the operations of war—a wise measure, imposed upon the Army Council by the vast improvement in the range, trajectory, and precision of artillery and small arms. Hitherto it had been the object of the military authorities of all nations to make their fighting men as conspicuous as possible, exaggerating their stature by fantastic headgear and setting them in strong relief to every variety of natural background by means of bright colours and pipeclay. The Brigade of Guards landed in the Crimea without their knapsacks, which followed in another ship. The men had to do without them for some weeks; but the cumbrous bearskin caps were considered indispensable, and offered a fine target for the Russian defenders of the slopes of the Alma. The hint was thrown away upon our military authorities. It required a sharper lesson to convince them of the cruel absurdity of figging out men for battle in a dress that hampered the limbs and obscured the eyesight. The Guards were not more absurdly dressed on that occasion than the rest of the British troops. The late Sir William Flower described to me his feelings when, as surgeon of an infantry regiment, he stepped out from a boat on the wet sands at the mouth of the Alma, dressed in a skin-tight scarlet coatee with swallow tails, a high collar enclosing a black stock, close-fitting trousers tightly strapped over Wellington boots, and a cocked hat!
Two years before that—in 1852—Colonel Luard published his History of the Dress of the British Soldier. Having served as a heavy dragoon in the Peninsula, as a light dragoon at Waterloo, as a lancer in India, and as a staff officer both in India and at home, he had practical experience of the variety of torment inflicted by different kinds of uniform. He advocated many reforms in the soldier’s dress, tending as much to increased efficiency as to comfort, and he supported his argument by extracts from his correspondence with regimental officers. One of these wrote—‘If an infantry soldier has to step over a drain two feet broad, he has to put one hand to his cap to keep it on his head, and his other to his pouch, and what becomes of his musket?’ And this, be it remembered, was the fighting-kit; for no general in those days ever dreamed of taking troops into action except in full review order.
James I. was not a warlike king, but he was a pretty shrewd observer of men and matters. He was not far wrong when he observed that plate armour was a fine thing, for it not only protected the life of the wearer, but hindered him from hurting anybody else! The remark might have been applied with equal justice to the costume of British soldiers in the Crimean campaign, except that it afforded no protection to the wearer’s life or limb. It required nearly one hundred years of painful experience to convince the War Office that it was cruel stupidity to put men in the field in clothing so tight as to fetter the limbs and compress the chest. That was the legacy of George IV. to the British Army.
Although, to one looking back over the history of what is now the United Kingdom, the most salient features seem to be campaigns and battles, invasion and counter-invasion, it was not until the Civil War that any attempt was made towards a uniform dress for any army. It is true that both the English and Scottish Parliaments from time to time prescribed with the utmost care the offensive and defensive armour with which every able-bodied subject was to provide himself or be provided by his feudal chief, and if that chief were a wealthy baron his following would be clothed in his liveries. Thus, in describing the famous scene at Lauder when Archibald Douglas, fifth Earl of Angus, won his sobriquet of Bell-the-Cat, Pitscottie tells us in deliciously quaint phrase how luckless Thomas Cochrane, newly created Earl of Mar, rode down to the kirk where the disaffected lords were in conference, at the head of three hundred men all dressed in his liveries of white doublets with black bands. Cromwell was the first ruler of England who succeeded in what several of his predecessors had failed—in maintaining a standing army. At one time he had 80,000 men under arms. There was a degree of uniformity in the dress of his cavalry and infantry. It consisted mainly of buff coats, with the addition of breast and back pieces, iron caps, and other defensive armour. But that army was disbanded after the Restoration, and it was not until the reign of William III. that a standing army was finally constituted, and colonels commanding regiments, being allowed a sufficient sum for clothing the men, were required to do so according to sealed pattern.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the British soldier’s dress was, on the whole, both picturesque and comfortable. In cut, it conformed pretty faithfully to the fashion prevailing in civilian attire, though there occurred an interval when George II. inflicted upon his Guards regiments the preposterous conical head-dress, copied from the Prussian Guards of Frederick the Great. This disfiguring headgear did not last very long, and gave place before the end of the century to the three-cocked hat of the style called, I believe, Nivernois or Kevenhüller.
The easy grace of the full-dress uniform of an officer of the Guards towards the close of the eighteenth century is admirably shown in Romney’s portrait of John, tenth Earl of Westmorland, now at Osterley Park. It shows a long-skirted scarlet frock, lined with white, faced with blue, with ruffles at the wrists, and without any ornament save a pair of gilt epaulets of moderate size and soft material, very different from the cumbrous, unyielding things now prescribed for naval officers and lords-lieutenant. The frock is worn open over a Ramillies cravat and waistcoat and breeches of white kersey. It would be difficult to devise a dress for a soldier so well combining comfort and dignified distinction. To one feature only can objection be taken. The powdered and curled hair, clubbed in a pigtail, looks charming on Romney’s canvas, but must have proved an intolerable nuisance both to officers and men.
‘During the command of the late Duke of Kent at Gibraltar [1802-3], when a field-day was ordered, there not being sufficient barbers in the town to attend to all the officers in the morning, the seniors claimed the privilege of their rank; the juniors consequently were obliged to have their heads dressed the night before; and to preserve the beauty of this artistic arrangement—pomatumed, powdered, curled and clubbed—these poor fellows were obliged to sleep on their faces! It is said that in the adjutant’s office of each regiment there was kept a pattern of the correct curls, to which the barbers could refer.’[4]
The men wore tunics of a cut similar to those of the officers, but of coarser cloth. They were buttoned up on duty, the skirts being looped back. It was a thoroughly sensible and workmanlike dress, giving perfect freedom to breathing and circulation, together with protection to loins and thighs. The Chelsea pensioners wear a coat of the old infantry pattern to this day.