Tommy Read Free Page A

cracking 22d in 1918, while his colleague in London drew 43s 9d a week at the start of the war and 88s at its end. Farm labourers, earning a broad average of 19s a week in 1907, took home 31s 9d in 1918. George Ashurst pocketed 12s 6d a week as a clerk in a Lancashire colliery. In 1914 J. B. Priestley, a clerk with literary ambitions, received 4s for a long day’s work: his whisky was 3s 6d a bottle and his pipe tobacco 3½d an ounce. William Shotter, who lived in Wimbledon, got 6 shillings a week as a trained draughtsman and then 17s 6d for a seven-day week as a milk roundsman. A tailor-made suit cost him 17 shillings and a ‘big dinner, roast beef, potatoes, pudding’ was sixpence. A middle-class professional man could expect around £500 a year, and Sir George Sitwell, a well-to-do baronet, thought that £530 a year was quite enough to keep young Osbert in the cavalry, with horses, servant and groom. There was certainly serious money about: Sir John French, never a safe pair of hands where cash was concerned, had borrowed £2,000 off Douglas Haig, then his brigade major, in 1899.
    A Lancashire mill worker might pay 6s a week for accommodation and, at the other social extreme, a sizeable family house in London could be rented for £100 a year. Even Sir George Sitwell only had to pay 12 guineas a week for a decent London house. Osbert, recovering from mumps at Scarborough, thought 4s 9d a day far too much for board and lodging. Many families lived in rented property: the national obsession with house purchase was still to come. But for those who wanted to buy, an attractive house in the Home Counties might cost £550, although a prospective purchaser noted that a water rate of £8 a year was ‘not very satisfactory’.
    Army officers had to buy their own uniforms. I. G. Andrew, commissioned from the ranks into the Cameronians in 1916, was delighted to get a uniform grant of £50 and to find himself on 7s 6d a day. The Bond Street outfitters Pope and Bradley (‘By Royal Appointment to HM the King of Spain’) charged from £3 13s 6d for a service dress jacket and £2 12s 6d for Bedford cord breeches (buckskin strapped). A waterproof trench coat cost £5 15s 6d, though there was a running debate as to whether a Burberry was a better bet than a stout oiled cotton coat. Maxims of London compromised, advertising a coat interlined with oiled silk for just £4 10s. A British warm, a square-cut knee-length coat with leather buttons, could be had for three or four pounds.
    It was understood that most pre-war regular officers would not be able to live on their pay: an infantry officer in an unfashionable regiment might rub along on a private income of £160 a year. In 1909 a territorial infantry subaltern, training part-time, pocketed 5s 3d a day and the lieutenant colonel commanding his battalion 18s, both rather less than their regular equivalents. In 1918 a gunner lieutenant received 10s 6d a day, and ‘with field allowances, etc, as long as I’m out here, I’ll be getting nearly £250 a year’. 7 Officers habitually carried cheque books into battle so that they could pay for home comforts if they were captured: often a cheque drawn on Cox & Kings, in Germany, would find its way back via Switzerland, providing families with welcome news.
    Soldiers’ pay was low, with an infantry private beginning on 1 shilling a day and a Royal Horse Artillery Warrant Officer picking up 6 shillings. A complex system of additions, via proficiency pay and suchlike, and deductions for things like ‘barrack damages’ complicated army pay, and Gunner Bill Sugden ruefully told his fiancée that at the end of the process ‘you end up with nothing at all’. He was fortunate because his employer, the decent Walter Heppenstall, topped up his army pay by sending his mother 5s a week.
King’s Regulations
established fines for drunkenness at 2s 6d for the first