Gentleman ranker facts for kids

In the British Army, a gentleman ranker is an enlisted soldier suited through education and social background to be a commissioned officer or indeed a former commissioned officer. Rudyard Kipling titled one of his poems, which was published in 1892, "Gentlemen-Rankers".

British Army

The term "gentleman ranker" suggests that the soldier was born to wealth and privilege but disgraced himself and so has enlisted as a common soldier (or one of the other ranks) serving apart from the society that now scorns him. That fate was similar to that of a remittance man, often the black sheep of a "good" family, who was paid a regular allowance to stay abroad, far from home, where he cannot embarrass the family.

The gentleman rankers also included the soldiers who signed on specifically as "gentleman volunteers" in the British Army to serve as private soldiers with the understanding being that they would be given a commission (without purchase) at a later date. The men trained and fought as private soldiers but "massed" (dined and perhaps socialized) with the officers and were thus afforded a social standing of somewhere in between them.

Perhaps the most famous gentleman ranker of the 20th century was T. E. Lawrence. He retired from the British army after World War I with the rank of colonel but rejoined the military as an enlisted man by using an assumed name.

With growing social mobility and the rising standard of education for army entrants, the term is becoming archaic. Soldiers from a titled, landed or privately-educated background may still be considered gentleman rankers.

Kipling's poem

The term appears in several of Rudyard Kipling's stories and as the title of a poem that he wrote; it appeared in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses, first series, published in 1892, and T. S. Eliot included it in his 1941 collection, A Choice of Kipling's Verse.

See also

• Artists Rifles (which included artists and other professionals)
• Temporary gentlemen (officers, particularly wartime, from outside the usual "officer class")