ECCENTRIC ENGLISHWOMEN : V. HANNAH SNELL
By LAWRENCE ATHILL
WOMEN commonly enough profess to wish that they had been born boys, and from the days of the Amazons onward this wish has resulted in females borrowing from time to time the plumage of the envied sex to play the soldier. Hannah Snell, who served for five years as a private in the forces of George II, is therefore not unique. But Hannah was an Amazon with a difference. Most he-women have had a touch of hoyden or virago : she won her comrades' love by cookery and mending shirts. Even the authentic Amazons periodically visited their neighbours with conjugal intent, and most of their imitators have had amorous exploits to their credit or discredit : Hannah, though forced by circumstances frequently to share a manly couch, remained as jealous of her chastity as of her secret and once saved the virtue of a female friend at the cost to herself of five hundred lashes. It is to this blend of domesticity and decorum with a passion for male adventure which constantly subjected both to the severest shocks that she owes such title as she has to eccentricity. Evidence of her mental outlook is meagre, for, although she came of a family of which it is recorded that none miscarried for want of learning, she herself never learnt to write. The student of her history must depend on an anonymous account published in 175o by R. Walker of the Little Old Bailey which is more concerned to chronicle her doings than to expose her character.
The daughter of a hosier in the City of Worcester, Hannah first showed her military bent by raising a troop of youthful Amazons with which she paraded her native streets. At the age of twenty, most unhappily for herself, she jilted Mars for Venus and espoused a Dutchman who sold her things and left her, seven months gone with child. The child died quickly and was buried, leaving her free to put on trousers and set out to chase the Dutchman. On learning, years later, that he had been hanged for murder she was moved to reflect that, had she found him first, she might have spared the hangman his pains, and from this one gathers that her quest was undertaken less in sorrow than in anger. Nor did she take it very much to heart, for she found solace for its failure in the sight of a fleet riding at anchor, and at its very outset, having inadvertently accepted the King's Shilling, made no effort to dodge the consequences of her action but very blithely went for a soldier.
Hannah was an apt recruit. She quickly mastered the military exercise and was getting on swimmingly when virtue tripped her up. Her Sergeant, as was not uncommon in those rude days, cast dishonourable eyes on a young female and employed Hannah to further his intrigue. She, disgusted at this duplicity, blew the gaff and thereby won the close friendship of the intended victim. The jealous Sergeant, smelling a rat, supposed his go-between to have turned principal. He trumped up a charge of neglect of duty on which poor Hannah was sentenced to six hundred lashes and actually received five hundred.
While she was still smarting under this injustice the arrival of a recruit who had been well known to her in her native town put her in fear for her disguise, and she deserted. Return to the dress of her sex would have guaranteed her immunity from re-capture, but she preferred to make her way from Carlisle to Portsmouth and to enlist as a Marine. Within a few weeks she had sailed in the ' Swallow' sloop with Admiral Boscawen's fleet, bound for the East Indies.
Now her domestic accomplishments came to the fore. She mended, washed and cooked to such a tune that she became a universal favourite. The men, it is true, would damn her in their familiar way and called her Miss Molly for her beardlessness. But she returned the compliment with a smile or an oath and disarmed any suspicion which her distaste for amorous adventure might have roused by the efficiency with which she did her duty. A lieutenant of marines befriended her and made her his mess-boy. Her fighting station was the quarterdeck, and her business in action to do what mischief she could with her small-arms. Though spared the test of a naval engagement she proved herself " a little tar of note."
Unhappily, however, Hannah was one of those who, though obliging, will not be put upon. The first lieutenant, an arrogant fellow, saw fit one day to order her to sing a merry song for him. Hannah, rightly believing that the singing of songs, merry or otherwise, was not part of a marine's duty, refused point-black. Again a charge was trumped up against her, this time one of stealing a comrade's shirt. After lying in irons for five days she received 12 lashes at the gangway. Although this modest dozen must have seemed the merest bagatelle after the jealous sergeant's 500, they were in one respect more embarrassing. She had received the 50o roped to the gates of Carlisle, which hid the secret of her shape. At the gangway only the skilful draping of her neckerchief saved her from detection. It is nice to know that a devoted messmate soon afterwards contrived to let a heavy block fall from a great height on the head of the tyrannical lieutenant.
But Hannah's most terrible ordeal befell her ashore. Arrived at Fort St. David, the marines were disembarked and laid siege to Areacopong and Pondicherry. Hannah fought with gallantry and distinction in both actions, and in the latter received 12 bullet wounds ; six in the right leg, five in the left, and one, most seriously embarrassing, in the groin. This last she concealed from the surgeon in spite of the most excruciating agony, and having bribed an Indian woman with one rupee to bring her a salve and some lint, plunged her finger and thumb deeply into the wound and herself extracted the ball. Within three weeks sfie had made complete recovery.
In due course she returned to England for discharge. After having been careful to wait for the L15 and two suits of clothes to which she was entitled, she decided to disclose her secret to her messmates, and among them to a certain Moody whose bed she recently had been obliged to share. The manner in which she broached the news proves that hardship and rough company had failed to quell her sprightly humour or dull the polish of her diction. After some preli- minary badinage, she thus addressed her friends : " Had you have known, Mr. Moody, who you had between a pair of sheets with you, you would have come to closer quarters. In a word, gentlemen, I am as much a woman as my mother ever was ! " Whereupon the surprised and surprising Mr. Moody at once tendered his hand in marriage, but Hannah, mindful of the Dutchman, and knowing, perhaps, more about marines than any marine's wife should know, declined the honour with many courteous acknowledgments.
The financial future now engaged her mind. Seizing a propitious opportunity she accosted the Duke of Cumberland in his landau and extracted from him an allowance of one shilling a day for life. To supplement this income she went upon the boards at the New Wells in Goodman's Fields, where to the music of the drum and tabor she nightly carried out her military exercises with a precision to wring praise even from veteran soldiers. Doing of her own free will what no coercion had been able to compel, she now regaled her audience with ditties in which her experiences were recounted at enormous length, and with others less personal in their nature, of which her favourite dealt with herring-fishery and had first been sung by the anti-Gallicians. But she was conscious, her biographer tells us, that these attractions could not long command the attention of the town, and we last hear of her in search of a tavern within the City or the Bills of Mortality, where she proposes to offer her patrons the very best of liquors at the lowest price.
Was poor simple Hannah really an eccentric ? Whether she was or no, one may be fairly sure that the more exclusive inmates of the spectators' gallery of female eccentrics will cut her for a low impostor. But we, with the admirable Moody before our eyes, should not find it hard to overlook a little posthumous gate-crashing in Valhalla by one who in life sailed under borrowed colours so gaily and so gallantly.
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