barracks

 I've written about proximity to my roomies when we worked at The Institute. Back then I was told that the minimum area for offices was 4 sq.m. for each drone. On Tuesdays when both the part-timer staff were at their desks we were possibly the most crowded [within allowable Heath&Safety limits] office in the EU. The HSE has something to say [not our Health Service Executive but the UK Health and Safety Executive]: unless employers allow 11 cu.m. for each person, they are in breach. Assuming a ceiling height of 2.4m, this requires a floor area of 4.6 sq.m. including desk and chair. I thought at the time that this was cramped for professionals working in third-level education and was much less than any office I had in universities. I didn't feel oppressed though because I went to boarding school to acquire a very expensive education . . . and a lot of tics and psychological baggage.

What brought that on? Reading another pop.hist. book by Richard Holmes : Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (2001) [Guardian review]. I read his The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) when it came out: it describes what happens when Science mugs The Arts Block;  as when Keats references William "Uranus" Herschel [whom prev - and his sister Caroline!] ". . . deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: / Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken . . ."

Anyhow, back to 19thC soldiers. In 1842, a General Order of the British army decreed that, in barracks on home station, each soldier should have 450-500 cu.ft [13-14 cu.m.] of space: to sleep, eat, chat and maintain his kit. But this ideal fell short in at least Brighton [412 cu.ft = 11½ cu.m. each] and Kensington [363 cu.ft = 10cu.m.] barracks. In 1857 a Royal Commission into the Sanitary Condition of the Army optimistically recommended 600 cu.ft. but it was another 20 years before a barrack-building programme, as part of the Cardwell Reforms, came close to achieving this aspiration. 

This all brings to mind Samuel Johnson's quote about going for a sailor: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." Apart from the drowning the same calculus applied to soldiering. And in barracks close packing and lack of washing facilities, let alone hot water and flush toilets was surely bad investment as trained soldiers got sick and died before they could be deployed. And on active service, microbes killed more than "the enemy": Peninsula War 25,000 from disease to 9,000 KIA. Crimea: 17,000 from disease to 4,000 KIA + died of wounds. Although obvs before Koch's Postulates and Pasteur, septic issues were involved in died of wounds,. Hat-tip to Florence the Statistician of the Lamp.

Redcoats is a good read if you like that sort of thing. Plenty of sources and footnotes, although Holmes claims he is not an academic historian. But lots of evocative tales and anecdotes which give a sense of what it might have been like after taking the King's shilling 200 years ago. 

Maybe the last word should go to Thomas Hood's Ben "was a soldier bold" Battle:

'O Nelly Gray! O Nelly Gray!
For all your jeering speeches,
At duty's call I left my legs
In Badajos's breaches.'