By Lar Joye
By the 1830s over 30% of those serving in the British Army were Irish Catholics. Most joined for the regular pay and meals, but for most of the nineteenth century they were subject to an extreme disciplinary regime that was not seen in other armies. Unlike in the military, for civilians the criminal law began to be reformed, first by Sir Robert Peel in the 1820s, followed by more reforms under various Victorian governments. The death penalty for theft ended; branding was abolished in 1829 and gibbeting in 1834, and by 1841 there were only fourteen capital offences. The British Navy and Army, however, remained a world apart, hidden behind the barracks wall and aboard their ships. Flogging with a whip called the cat-o’-nine-tails was used by officers in charge of regiments and ships to impose discipline. Between 1839 and 1843, 10,743 sailors received the cat, while 659 soldiers were flogged in 1845. Flogging had its supporters among the generals and admirals. In 1804 Captain Hardy on the Victory had 105 sailors out of 800 flogged in the first seven months. In 1816 Wellington, during the occupation of France, confirmed 999 lashes for one soldier for passing a counterfeit two-franc note in Versailles.
As one historian has written, the aim of military punishment was not to deter or reform the soldier or sailor but to sustain subordination and terror. That is why flogging was performed in a time-honoured procedure in front of the whole regiment, with the reading of the court martial, the tethering of the offender to a triangle or ladder and the counting of the strokes. Opposition to flogging led to an investigation by a royal commission in 1835, which recommended that it continue. Field Marshal Wellington supported this: in his opinion, ‘There is no punishment which makes an impression on anybody except corporal punishment’.
In 1846 the issue of flogging was raised again when Pte Frederick White of the 7th Hussars died in Hounslow after receiving 150 lashes on the orders of Lt. Col. John James Whyte, a landlord from Carrick-on-Shannon. This incident led to a protracted scandal and a coroner’s inquest in which the jury decided that Pte White died as a result of flogging and not from ‘inflammation of the heart’, as the military doctors insisted. Again there were renewed calls for the abolition of flogging, but it only finally ended in 1881 after a protracted debate in the House of Commons led by Charles Stewart Parnell and the Home Rule League. The army reforms at the end of the nineteenth century abolished flogging and the purchase of commissions, and improved the conditions and housing of soldiers and their families, but the harsh discipline lingered in the network of military jails, where flogging was not ended until 1907. During the First World War c. 3,000 soldiers were condemned to death in the British Army and 306 of those (10%) were executed, including 28 Irish-born soldiers, while there was even a case of flogging in the British Army during the Second World War in Burma, nearly a hundred years after the death of Pte Frederick White.
Lar Joye is Dublin Port Heritage Director and current chair of the Irish Museum Association.