Under The Lash - A History Of Corporal Punishment In The British Armed Forces

UNDER THE

LASH

A HISTORY OF CORPORAL

PUNISHMENT IN THE BRITISH

ARMED FORCES

By SCOTT CLAVER

Including

A Digest of the Report of

The Royal Commission, 1835–36

and

The First Reprint of

"Certain Immoral Practices in

His Majesty’s Navy"

(1821)

CAT-O’-NINE-TAILS FORMERLY IN USE IN THE INDIAN NAVY

By permission of the Royal United Service Museum, Whitehall, London, where it is on view.

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

Cat-o’-nine-tails formerly in use in the Indian Navy

The Strappado

Riding the Wooden Horse

The Picket

Running the Gauntlet in the Army

Pages from a Court Martial Book, Royal Marines, Plymouth, 1820

Flogging in the Army, tied to the Halberts

Flogging in the Army in India

Punishing a Sailor Thief in the Navy

Flogging in the Navy, tied to the Grating

A page from the Log-book of H.M.S. Immortalité

Starting with a Rope’s-end

Cobbing

Pages from a Court Martial Book, Royal Marines, Plymouth, 1827

Branding a Deserter with the Letter D

Scene on Board a Warship

Pages from a Court Martial Book, Royal Marines, Plymouth, 1827

Brass Instrument for branding Deserters with the Letter D

Pages from a Court Martial Book, Royal Marine Artillery, Portsmouth, 1816-18

Caning in Burma

PREFACE

I have found that there are three subjects over which tempers become strained. The first is religion; the second, politics; and the third, corporal punishment. There are countless books on both religion and politics, but the subject of corporal punishment has not been documented very extensively—at least, not for the last century. The more recent books on this subject—and there are only a handful—have been, for the most part, pseudo-scientific essays primarily intended for a basically uncritical market; directed mainly at a reading public less interested in history than in gratifying personal curiosity.

If the Bible is the holiest, and some political books are the liveliest, then this must surely be the bloodiest book ever written. On several occasions I have paused to consider whether such a volume might not be looked upon as sensational, rather than factual or historical; but the urge to put on record something never before attempted has overcome the urge to stop. Friends who knew I was preparing this volume have said to me, with awe in their voices, "I was reading in the paper the other day about a soldier who received three hundred lashes—have you put that in your book"? When you commence reading here about hundreds of sentences of one thousand lashes, of men tied to guns and flogged senseless, of men shot from a gun, and of men made to sit on wet gunpowder swabs and sharp ridges of wood, I wonder whether you will have the stomach to finish reading this work.

But, I believe, with due modesty, that this book will fulfil a long required need. To the student it will act as the only modern textbook on the subject of corporal punishment, its growth, changes and evolution in the British military forces.

It is designed to make available to those interested in this vital subject (such as judges, lawyers, barristers, magistrates, social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, penal workers, members of Parliament, etcetera)—hitherto unpublished and inaccessible records. To the student of the Army and Navy is presented an accurate portrait of life and punishments never before dealt with, except superficially.

In the following pages, discipline may have seemed severe; but if patriotism is to mean anything at all, then discipline is utterly necessary. Too often, people think of a soldier as a free man. But the facts are the opposite; he is, in fact, a self-dedicated slave to a laudable, respected and admired sense of patriotism; a tiny cog in a huge machine designed to protect the interests of his family, himself, his friends and countrymen; failure to recognise this truth is anarchy—a violation of the essential discipline which is the vital oil to the larger machine, thereby risking its destruction, his own destruction, and the inevitable destruction of all.

It was for the person who by nature was more interested in his own skin than in those of the majority, that the punishment of flogging—the corporal punishment most frequently used and most heatedly debated—was so ironically apt and, because of its aptness, proved such an effective punishment. More important, it proved an effective deterrent to the committal of crimes by the potentially selfish youth, who witnessed its infliction at Drum Head Courts Martial in the barracks square.

Some of the following chapters may seem out of place in a work of this kind. The digest version of The Soldier’s Wife is included because of its obvious authenticity as regards recruiting, conditions in the barracks, the realistic flogging scenes, the branding and shooting to death of deserters, and the agitation to do away with corporal punishment which commenced as a murmur about 1810 and grew to a roar by 1844. Certain Immoral Practices in His Majesty’s Navy is included because of exposure of conditions in H.M. Ships at the period; and details of punishments in the Merchant Navy are included as a comparison to those of the Royal Navy.

While anxious to avoid taking sides, by compiling this work—which is by no means a plea for the reintroduction of the birch, whip, or cat-o’-nine-tails—I have perhaps been swayed to a small sympathy with those who advocate the return of flogging. This particular punishment seems the best retribution for those violent crimes committed by individuals whose past character and behaviour show them to be men unlikely to be impressed for the better by any other punishments. These are the thugs who laugh derisively at admonishment, humanitarianism, the psychological approach. We all know these types. A good hiding is, it seems, the only chastisement they understand: an opinion voiced by many experienced authorities, mature brains in the best positions to judge. And it was that very type—for this tough-guy is not peculiar to the twentieth century, whatever some may say about products of modern civilisation—who have been an ageless blot on civilisation since the earliest times of recorded history, though they bore different group-names in each period. Moreover, it was these especially selfish young men who most frequently found themselves bound to the halberts.

Far too many of those flogged, as we shall show, were undeserving of such severe discipline—a disciplinary punishment akin to torture, and, in many cases, a protracted death sentence. But the majority of the thousands who had corporal punishment of that nature inflicted upon them were a type of human closely related to our modern gangster, rapist, gun-man, and those other well-known social misfits of seemingly tender years with minds old in vice, deception and deceit: the sort who are now causing prison congestion all over the country and serving long terms because no alternative punishment is any longer available to our judges.

Nobody would suggest to-day that men should be flogged with hundreds of lashes, but some might feel that a couple of dozen strokes with either a cat or possibly a leather whip, under strict medical supervision, might help these thugs to think twice before using the cosh a second time. Many might think that if these whippings were given in full view of other men of violence in a prison yard and, to increase the humiliation, were inflicted on the breech, it would act, as pointed out and reiterated by members of the Royal Commission over one hundred years ago, as a deterrent by example. It is not argued that punishment should ‘fit’ the crime, but I am, in passing, favourable to any suggested punishment which, though apparently ruthless, might put a halt to waves of violence.

This is the place to point out that any compulsory imprisoning, or shutting up of the body, is in fact a corporal punishment; an important aspect of penal conditions which is ignored to-day. From questions put to a representative number of men in the forces to-day, a great many would sooner have a short, sharp lesson with a minimum of confinement, than a long, demoralising, stagnating, undermining and physically frustrating sojourn in the cells—possibly with hardened criminals who will use their conversational hour to educate the novice in crime; and this echoes the sentiments frequently expressed by privates when examined by the Royal Commissioners in 1835 . . .

SCOTT CLAVER.

Several persons who have read the manuscript of this book have expressed disbelief in the startling facts. The author wishes to reiterate, therefore, that every incident reported in this history is factual and is drawn from contemporary records.

BOOK I

CHAPTER ONE

MILITARY PUNISHMENTS (HISTORY SKETCHED) 1189 TO 1812

I

In the Army and Navy, the end and final aim of Regulations is the complete discipline of the men under arms, the immediate, unhesitating, unquestioning reaction to orders—in one word: OBEDIENCE.

To achieve this discipline, this unswerving obedience, Naval and Military punishment had to be proportionately severe. It had to be adaptable to both the home barracks in days of peace and the battlefield in times of war. Fear of punishment, the example of suffering for crime as a deterrent to potential offenders, had to come even before justice in a military body that depended on its very existence and for the success of all its enterprises upon the strictest discipline. And it is Upon this unpalatable truth that military punishments were designed and enforced. There was justice, of course, but only as much as could be afforded, a secondary matter to that of deterring by example and of punishing offences to maintain unquestioning discipline.

Major-General Sir Charles Napier wrote in 1837: Military laws have for their object to force an unhesitating and instant compliance with whatever the military chief chooses to issue, and to sustain a constant and unnatural state of irksome existence in obedience to rules which interfere every instant with our wishes and time: all this inconvenience being endured for a small pay, for which the soldier gives up a home and domestic comfort . . . Our military law changes daily, as circumstances demand; every order issued from the King, or from a Lance Corporal, is part of our law. OBEY! that is our law.

Tytler thus describes the military code of this country: A British soldier, enjoying in common with his fellow subjects, every benefit of the laws of his country, is bound by the military code, solely to the observance of the peculiar duties of his profession—a code which is simple in itself, reasonable in its enactments, easy in all its obligations, level to the meanest understanding, and more effectually promulgated and better known than any of the ordinary statute laws of the realm.

Sir Charles Napier, a later writer on military law, and a much better authority on the usages of the Army than Mr. Tytler, gives a somewhat different account of the British military code: Dreadful, says he, is the calling of a soldier, and dreadful must be the means by which that calling is fulfilled during war. A state of war is the natural state of an army, and military institutions must have war for their object, or they are without sense.

As a soldier, OBEDIENCE is ‘the Law and the Prophets’. His religion, law, and morals, are in the ‘orderly-book’. If that says ‘spare’, he spares: if that says ‘destroy’, he destroys! The conscience of a good soldier is in the keeping of his General, who has the whole responsibility before God and man for what the soldier does in obedience to his orders. Perfect obedience is a yoke which every soldier of the British Army voluntarily places upon his own neck when he enlists.

Those alone, says Count Alfred de Vigny—a retired officer of the French Army, who have been soldiers, know what servitude is. To the soldier alone is obedience, passive and active, the law of his life—the law of every day and of every moment; obedience not stopping at sacrifice, nor even at crime. In him alone is the abnegation of his self-will, of his liberty of independent action, absolute and unreserved; the grand distinction of humanity, the responsibility of a moral agent, being made over once for all to superior authority. In fact, nothing short of this severity has been found necessary, in order that one individual might be master of one hundred thousand armed men. Passive obedience from grade to grade, is a condition essential to the existence and efficiency of an army. When the clock-maker has made a clock, it goes without asking why. Soldier, you must be like the clock; march, turn, halt, and, above all, not a word.

It is essential that the reader should continually bear in mind that the object of military law is not to punish moral delinquencies, in other words, to make men virtuous and good, but to produce prompt and entire obedience; hence, a military offence may not be a crime in its moral sense.

Military crimes were usually arranged under the following classes:—

1. Mutiny.

2. Desertion.

3. Violence to a superior; Insubordination.

4. Disobedience and neglect of duty.

5. Quitting or sleeping on post.

6. Drunk on duty, under arms.

7. Habitual drunkenness.

8. Disgraceful conduct.

9. Absent without leave.

10. Making away with necessaries.

11. Miscellaneous crimes (see Article of War, 70).

Crimes of civil or social life were commonly classed under two heads, namely: 1st, offences against the person; 2nd, offences against property. The difference of the character of the requirements of social and military law, is therefore obvious.

Military law (obedience) has in all ages been enforced by more rigorous penalties than the punishments of civilian law.

II

The first regulation on record which refers to punishment in the Army is the Charter, as it is called, of Richard I, which was addressed to all his men going by sea and land to Jerusalem, and purports to have been made in the first year of that monarch’s reign, for the emergency described. The ordinance being short, it is here inserted verbatim:—

CHINON. 1ST RICHARD, 1189

"Richard, by the grace of God, King of England, Duke of Normandy, etc., To all his men going by sea to Jerusalem, greeting: Know ye, by the common counsel of all good men, we have made the underwritten ordinances.

He who kills a man on shipboard shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea [this punishment was still being used for the same offence six hundred years later]; if the man is killed on shore the slayer shall be bound to the dead body and buried with it. Any one convicted by lawful witnesses of having drawn his knife to stick another, or who shall have drawn blood of him, to lose his hand; if he shall have only struck with the palm of his hand, without drawing blood, he shall be thrice ducked in the sea. Any one who shall reproach, abuse, or curse his companion shall, for every time he is convicted thereof, give him so many ounces of silver. Any one convicted of theft shall be shorn like a champion, boiling pitch shall be poured on his head, and down of feathers shaken over it, that he may be known, and he shall be set on shore at the first land at which the ship touches."

Many of these punishments lasted for over five hundred years.

King Richard’s articles of war were obviously framed after the original idea of punishment, which was to inflict pain on a person as a satisfaction or atonement for some offence which he had committed. The law of retaliation, lex talionis, was recognised by the Mosaic law, the punishments awarded by which are: 1. Death by the sword, or by stoning, followed in some instances by gibbeting the corpse of a criminal for a few hours (Deut. xxi. 23). 2. Exile from the congregation. 3. Corporal punishments, the maximum number of stripes being fixed at forty,* while the amount of the sentence, which could not legally exceed that number, was left to be determined by the circumstances of the case and the discretion of the judges. 4. Fines. 5. Offerings to make atonement for sin.

For the five hundred years following the first Richard’s Charter, not only the capital but the secondary punishments were of a most ferocious and sanguinary description, such as dismemberment, maiming, or fracturing of the limbs, boring of the tongue with a red-hot iron, and burning or branding the cheeks and cutting off the left ear.

Grose (Military Antiquities) informs us that in many instances where a corps, or a considerable body of men, were guilty of a crime for which the established punishment was death, to prevent too great weakening of the army the delinquents were decimated, every tenth man being executed; sometimes corps were decimated by ranks and files. In cases where only a few were condemned to suffer for the sake of example, the whole were ordered to cast dice on the drum-head, sometimes under the gallows, and the requisite number of persons who drew the low numbers were doomed to death. In India, 1790, in consequence of marauding, the majority of a corps were prisoners to the minority. In this case a few delinquents were selected by ballot from the whole number, and flogged at the halberts.

The ordinances of war, during the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth century, contained a minute enumeration of military crimes, and a clear denunciation, so far as they admitted of precision, of their correspondent punishments. Death, fines, and forfeitures appear to have been very common punishments. The income of the Earl-Marshal depended in a great measure upon the fines which were imposed in this way. Under such a system of temptation, where officers had a beneficial interest in the delinquencies of soldiers, neither honesty nor humanity could be expected to prevail.

The punishments mentioned in the Lawes and Ordinances Militarie of Robert Earl of Leicester, Captain-General of Her Majesty’s Army and Forces in the Low Countries, etc., etc., 1579, are as follows:—

Death with torments. Death. Loss either of life or limb. Banished the Army. Fines. Loss of place and wages. Imprisonment.

The Lawes and Ordinances of Warre, etc., were promulgated by His Excellency the Earl of Northumberland, who commanded the Royal Army in 1640. An article in these is as follows: "No man shall resist, draw, lift, or offer to draw, his weapon against an officer correcting him orderly for his offence, upon pain of death". Resistance to a Commanding Officer, or contumacy in a soldier, such as taking hold of an officer’s rod, or cane, wherewith he was beaten, was by the Romans deemed a capital offence.

In 1642, the Earl of Essex, who commanded the Parliamentary Army, published a code of Lawes and Ordinances of Warre, etc., which seems to have been the foundation of the present Articles of War. This code enumerates certain crimes which are to be punished with death, while the punishment of all other offences is left to the discretion of a council of war. There were from forty to fifty delinquencies mentioned in this code for which death might be awarded. The Secondary Punishments, specially enumerated, were, "Boring the tongue with a red-hot iron; loss of pay; confinement in prison with only bread and water; riding the wooden horse (see illustration p. 12); and degradation to serve as pioneers and scavengers".

The offence of blasphemy, namely impugning the doctrine of the Trinity, was treated with a much heavier penalty, the blasphemer being liable to have his tongue bored through with a red-hot iron, even at so late a period as the reign of King James II. Vide: Fourth Article of War, James II.

We are informed that "a soldier of Okey’s Regiment was on the 26th July, 1750, sentenced by a court martial to be bored through the tongue with a red-hot iron, and to run the gantelop through four companies, for uttering blasphemous words, he being at the time in a ranting humour with drinking too much".

The punishment of the gantelop will be better understood by the following sentence, which was passed on two soldiers for deer-stealing; the punishment took place in September, 1649: That they be stripped naked from the waist upward, and a lane to be made by half of the Lord General’s regiment of foot, and half of Colonel Pride’s regiment with every soldier a cudgel in his hand, and they to run through them in this posture, every soldier having a stroke at their naked backs and breasts, arms, or where it shall light; and after they have run the gantelop in this manner, they are to be cashiered the regiment. A hundred years later, we find the cudgels replaced by whips, lashes, rope’s ends and canes.

It may be mentioned that commissioned officers were as liable to be sentenced by a court martial to the corporal punishment of having the tongue bored with a red-hot iron for blasphemy as were privates. This punishment remained on the military statute-book until the reign of Queen Anne, 1710.

III

Markham, who published his Epistles of Warre about the year 1622, gives us the following account of the duties of a Provost-Marshal, from which the nature of the military punishments then inflicted may be inferred. "The Provost-Marshall hath the charge of all manner of tortures, as gyves, shackels, bolts, chains, bilbowes, manacles, whips, and the like, and may, by his officers, use them either in case of judgment or commandment from a marshall court or otherwise upon unruliness at his own discretion; he is, by his officers, to see all places of execution prepared and furnished with engines fitting to the judgment whether it be gallows, gybbets, scaffolds, pillories, stocks, or strappadoes, or any other engine which is set up for terror and affright to such as behold it."

Sir James Turner furnishes us with a fairly full account of the military punishments of the seventeenth century, in his Pallas Armata, a work which was published in 1683. In one chapter he treats of military laws and articles, of courts of war, of the Judge Martial, and of the Provost-Master General: in another chapter he describes our modern military punishments and rewards.

The fairest and justest way of punishment, says Sir James, is by courts of war, if the case do not require a present animadversion. As to capital punishments, the most honourable death, says Sir James, for a delinquent soldier, is beheading, the next to that is shooting—if he be a horseman, with pistols—if a foot soldier, with muskets.

The Secondary military punishments, according to the same authority, are the strappado, hanging up by the thumbs, so that the delinquent’s toes can only touch the ground, laying muskets on their shoulders, more or fewer, for a longer or shorter time, according to the quality of the fault; to be kept in prison so many days or weeks, with irons on them, and sometimes to be fed only with bread and water while in prison. "There is also riding the wooden horse, on which sometimes he hath his hands tied behind his back, and sometimes muskets, or other weights, tied to his feet. As likewise to be turned out of the Army by the hangman, to have their ears cut off by the hangman, and to be whipped by the hangman. I have known some who thought that soldiers who are whipped at Gatloupe should be turned out of the Army, which is a gross mistake, for they are appointed to be whipped by their comrades, that they may be kept in the Army; for after an officer or a soldier is put into a hangman’s hands, he should serve no more in any army." Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, first began it (the Gantlope) in imitation of the customs of the Roman centurions to whip their soldiers.

THE STRAPPADO

When the punishment of the gatloupe, gantelope, or gantlope, was inflicted, the Provost-Marshal furnished the rods, and gave the delinquent the first stroke; but if there was neither Provost nor Deputy Provost present, then a drummer gave the rods.

The punishment of the strappado, etrapade (French), was as follows: The delinquent is hoisted up by means of a rope fastened to the arms behind his back, and then suddenly dropped down with a jerk, by which process his shoulder joints were generally dislocated. He was sometimes hoisted up, and again let fall two or three times. (See illustration, p. 8.)

Sir James next discusses some nice questions regarding the mode of beating soldiers; for example, a corporal, he says, must only beat with a musket rest; and if he broke one of them in beating a soldier, who should pay for it? the corporal or the soldier, is a hard question. Sir James does not attempt to resolve this difficulty.

It does not appear that drummers were specially employed to execute the sentences of courts martial before the beginning of the eighteenth century. Sir James Turner says, When regimental hangmen are wanting, capital crimes must be punished by harquebusiers, and scourging must be converted into the gatloupe.

The cat-o’-nine-tails appears to be an invention of a later date than the reign of William III.

The duty of carrying the sentence of a court martial into effect belonged, during