A SOLDIER’S LIFE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 43, 30 November 1937, Page 2

A SOLDIER’S LIFE.

THE BAD OLD BARRACKS. . The remarkable improvement '.n barracks accommodation now dcs’gned must have seemed fantastic even to army reformers of seventy years ago, says a writer in the "Manchester Guardian.” Earlier still, about the time' when Victoria came lo the throne, the conditions of barracks accommodation were almost unspeakable. Then, and for a long time afterwards, there was no ablution, rooms, no recreation rooms; nothing but the one room in which the men slept, took their meals, and, it was said, did. everyth ng except drill. The sanitary arrangements were horrible. It was thought that cOO cubic feet of air space were ample for a soldier, and there -were barracß-rooms 30ft to 32ft by 20ft by 12ft v says Forescue in his "British Army”) with only five inches between the beds and nine inches between the foot of o.ie bed and the eating table; and in such a room twenty men spent much of their lives. Even that wds an improvement, for a few years earlier there had been no beds and men had been her lea together by fours in wooden cribs. In the barrack-rooms married men had to live with their wives, and there their children’ were horn. In 1856 Paxton complain:! bitterly of a system which was spending at the rate of £l5O per man for new convict prisons and yet grudged a toidier elementary decency. In 1858 the Duke of Somerset contrasted the millions lavished on the Houses of Parliament with the niggardliness to soldiers. Lord Sbrington tdok more practical steps by making a survey of barrack-rooms and, military hospitals; through ophthalmia he lost an. eye in the process, but he came down to the Lords with facts and figures. Very slowly things moved; in 1862 there was a vote of £7OOO for reading-rooms and gymnasiums, and in 1864 —but "grudgingly”—a vote of £SOOO for recreation rooms. Can one wonder that the tradition. of the army as not offering much of a career to the rank and file takes a long time to depart.