Gentleman Ranker - Kipling's Poem, "Gentlemen-Rankers", and Its Musical Settings

Kipling's Poem, "Gentlemen-Rankers", and Its Musical Settings

The term appears in several of Rudyard Kipling's stories and as the title of a poem he wrote which appeared in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses, first series, published in 1892.

In Kipling's poem "Gentlemen-Rankers", the speaker "sings":

To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,

To my brethren in their sorrow overseas,

Sings a gentleman of England cleanly bred, machinely crammed,

And a trooper of the Empress, if you please.

Yea, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,

And faith he went the pace and went it blind,

And the world was more than kin while he held the ready tin,

But to-day the Sergeant's something less than kind.

We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,

Baa! Baa! Baa!

We're little black sheep who've gone astray,

Baa—aa—aa!

Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,

Damned from here to Eternity,

God ha' mercy on such as we,

Baa! Yah! Bah!

Oh, it's sweet to sweat through stables, sweet to empty kitchen slops,

And it's sweet to hear the tales the troopers tell,

To dance with blowzy housemaids at the regimental hops

And thrash the cad who says you waltz too well.

Yes, it makes you cock-a-hoop to be "Rider" to your troop,

And branded with a blasted worsted spur,

When you envy, O how keenly, one poor Tommy being cleanly

Who blacks your boots and sometimes calls you "Sir".

If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,

And all we know most distant and most dear,

Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep,

Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?

When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters

And the horror of our fall is written plain,

Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,

Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?

We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,

And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.

God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,

Our pride it is to know no spur of pride,

And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an alien turf enfolds us

And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.

We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,

Baa! Baa! Baa!

We're little black sheep who've gone astray,

Baa—aa—aa!

Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,

Damned from here to Eternity,

God ha' mercy on such as we,

Baa! Yah! Bah!

Kipling's poem, in translation, was set to music by Edvard Grieg in 1900 (EG 156, Gentlemen-Menige.) However, after he had completed it, he received a copy of the English original and was so dismayed by the omission of important passages that he did not publish it; it was published posthumously in 1991.

The poem was also set to music and sung at Harvard and Yale in the early 1900s. According to Whiffenpoof historian James M. Howard, "...this song is known to have been sung at Yale as far back as 1902... Whatever its origins, 'Gentlemen-Rankers' was frequently sung at Yale in 1907–1909, mostly by the Growlers, '08, with whom it was a favorite." The words were famously adapted by Meade Minnigerode and George Pomeroy to become "The Whiffenpoof Song". According to Howard, the musical setting is often attributed to Tod B. Galloway, but is almost certainly the work of a Harvard student named Guy H. Scull, who in turn may have borrowed from a Negro spiritual.

Billy Bragg borrows part of this poem in his song "Island Of No Return": "Me and the corporal out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity".