Gentleman ranker

A Gentleman ranker is an enlisted soldier who may have been a former officer or a gentleman qualified through education and background to be a commissioned officer but elects to remain a common soldier. [cite web
url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E01E4DA113EE733A05752C3A9679C946496D6CF
title=KITCHENER'S NEW ARMY.; Its Personnel, Spirit, and Training Described b... - Article Preview - The New York Times
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Explanation

Reasons have been as varied as a previous disgrace, a gentleman adventurer unwilling to accept responsibility, or in the case of the US Army a shorter period of initial enlistment. Some Gentleman rankers may have been officers in one army but who are unable or unwilling to accept a commission in a different nations' army where they serve.

The British army contained many gentleman volunteers who served as private soldiers but messed with the officers. Many of these men hoped to be noticed through gallantry to receive commissions through valour without purchasing them. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/wars_conflict/soldiers/soldier_trade_in_world_05.shtml]

Examples of Gentlemen rankers have been former officers from various nations serving as enlisted soldiers in the French Foreign Legion. Two examples in fiction are David Niven in "The Guns of Navarone" and Private Percival Pinkerton of the American comic book "Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos".

Kipling's poem, "Gentlemen-Rankers," and its musical settings

The term appears in several of Rudyard Kipling's stories.

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."

Kipling's poem, in translation, was set to music by Edvarg 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. [cite book|title=Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends|author=Finn Benestad|publisher=Peer Gynt Press|id=ISBN 978-0964523821, p. 660-1 Based on a recent recording by Monica Groop, it sounds though the "Baa! Baa! Baa! choruses were omitted.]

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. [cite web|title=An Authentic Account of the Founding of the Whiffenpoofs|url=http://www.yale.edu/whiffenpoofs/history/|author=James M. Howard|accessdate=2008-07-30]

References

Notes

Bibliography

*"Gentleman Ranker", John Jennings, Reynal & Hitchcock (1942), ASIN B0006APPN6
*"The Gentleman Ranker and Other Plays", Leon Gordon, Kessinger Publishing 2007, ISBN 0548400911

External links

* [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gentlemen-Rankers "Gentleman Rankers", Rudyard Kipling]