Commissariat - British Army

British Army

In the British Army, the Commissariat was a uniformed civilian service until 1869, when its officers transferred to the new Control Department as commissioned Army officers. The supply organization of the British Army went through a number of incarnations, including the Commissariat and Transport Department, Staff and Corps, before becoming the Army Service Corps in 1888.

In the "Major General's Song" in The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan, the Major-General boasts that, among many other arcane bits and pieces he "know(s) precisely what is meant by commissariat" (satirizing the 19th century British officers' lack of concrete military knowledge).

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