THE JUNIOR OFFICER'S PAY
By GORDON GOWER
OMMISSIONED service in the Forces of the Crown has always been by tradition the professional preserve of the richer classes, for the simple reason that it has been next to impossible for a junior officer to live on his pay. This has necessarily meant that many potentially excellent officers have been lost to the Services, but in time of peace the policy could always be justified economically on the grounds that a country which thought that it required only a small Army and Air Force, and a relatively small Navy, had no need to add financial inducements to the attractiveness of Service life when such vacancies as existed could always be filled by people to whom the rates of pay were a strictly secondary consideration. In time of war, when service in the fighting forces is the profession of everyone, and therefore necessarily of more poor men than of rich, this economic justification lapses. No officer worthy of his commission would wish to ask from his country at war any more than is necessary for his reasonable require- ments. But there is a growing feeling among junior officers that their pay is in fact not adequate, judged by any reasonable standard; and when they compare their own scanty emoluments ith, for example, the much larger and steadily increasing urns received by relatively unskilled civilian workers employed industrial work which can scarcely be considered of greater clonal importance than their own, their customary attitude f philosophy is liable to be temporarily inflamed. It is im- rtant that the inflammation should not be allowed to become rmanent.
It would require too much space to examine in detail the axial position. of an average young officer in each of the ervices, but since there are no very substantial differences tween the three Services one can legitimately be taken as resentative of all. It is fair to take as representative of a nor officer a Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force. The pay a Pilot Officer employed on flying duties is 14s. 6d. a day, £264 izs. 6d. a year. To this must be added, assuming to be unmarried and living in the mess, allowances which ount to a matter of pence per day and approximately iro year. If he is married, but less than thirty years of age, he cemes in allowances, as a war-time concession, a further 3s. day. The number of young officers who marry under the e of thirty is naturally small, though equally naturally there far more now than in peace-time, since so many officers e Volunteer Reservists who have entered the Service since e outbreak of war. Their financial situation, unless they private means, is necessarily even more difficult than that the unmarried officer who is the central subject of this de.
There is an illusion poplar in civilian circles that all Service rs°11n el living in a camp are housed and boarded free. This n fact true of the " other ranks," and relatively true of CO.s, but it is absolutely untrue of officers. Let us examine tYPIcal mess-bill, which is an officer's first financial obliga- m- A mess-bill can be divided into obligatory and non- .
gatory items. Messing itself is the first of the former, and tints for about half of the total charges in this category. daily messing charge varies from station to station ; the erage is probably about 3s. 3d. a day, or approximately £5 month. for which sum no one will deny that the members a mess are as a general rule fed very adequately. To this must be added, among obligatory charges, such miscellaneous items as sports-fund, library-subscription, silver-fund, benevo- lent fund, breakages fund, charges for mess-guests, batman and maintenance subscription—amounting together to not less than LI. In addition, there is the non-obligatory, but in fact inevitable, item of laundry, amounting perhaps to iss. a month, and the non-obligatory accounts for drinks and tobacco. Quite a fair number of young officers are both non-drinkers and non- smokers, but the majority, like the majority of civilians, are not. Fifteen to twenty cigarettes a day is probably the average consumption, which with cigarettes at their present price amounts to approximately £2 5s. a month. Wine-bills naturally vary greatly from officer to officer ; is a month is the amount traditionally allowed for a junior officer's wine-bill, but the majority of them are remarkably abstemious and in practice few allow their bills to reach this figure. Two shillings a day, or £3 a month, is probably the average amount expended on drink in a mess. Thus so far the items accounted for are £5 for messing, Li for miscellaneous mess charges, 15s. for laundry, £2 5s. for tobacco, and £3 for wine bill. Add another los. for such things as stamps, telephone-calls, cleaning and an occasional game of billiards, and you get a round figure of LI2 IOS. a month, or £15o a year.
There is thus approximately £125 left of a Pilot Officer's pay and allowances, on which he has to pay his Income Tax, clothe himself, and allow for all personal expenses—including any civilian liabilities which have survived his joining the Service. Income Tax accounts for approximately £25 ; another £25 at least—at the very least, with clothes at their new prices— must go on clothes, for Service life is hard on cloth and leather, and an officer is expected to set an example of smartness and cleanliness in his appearance. Many young officers try to main- tain some modest insurance policy ; this absorbs perhaps £20, which sum will not provide for the flying man nearly so good a policy as it will for the civilian. Insurance is perhaps a luxury in war-time ; it is a relic from the peace-time days when young officers on short-service commissions tried to put something by against the day when they left the Service and were looking for another job. But the flying man has even in war-time as good a right to an insurance policy as the miner or the munition worker.
There is now £55 left, to allow for all personal expenses, including those incurred on periods of leave—and cases have been known of officers, who deserved and badly needed leave, being unable to afford to take it. There are very few young men in positions of comparable importance whose personal expenses amount to less than Li a week, and there are certainly none who could be more unfairly forced to keep their expendi- ture beneath this figure than the young officers of the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy or the Army. But they nevertheless have only the alternatives of either doing so or of living up to the absolute limits of their incomes. Of the two, in practice the majority of them choose the latter. All of them work desperately hard, and those of them that are engaged on operational work live as dangerously as any men have lived in history; for them a certain amount of relaxation outside their camps is an essential. That remaining ix a week is easily absorbed by a weekly visit to the nearest town, leaving nothing for such aids to fitness as regular riding or shooting, for the ownership of a car (which most civilians living as far from towns as the majority of them do would consider an essential), for books, for belonging to a club, or, as has already been mentioned, for leave. It is unfair that those who are doing so magnificently should have financial stringency added to the diffi- culties they have to face. The responsibilities of officers have been immeasurably increased by war, but officers remain probably the only men connected with the practical conduct of the war whose incomes have not been increased Since it began. That so few of them complain does not mean that they are all content. To bring their pay up to the figures which the best of them deserve would perhaps be a strain which the Exchequer could not bear ; but it is illogical and unfair that a country spending so much on the instruments of war should give so little to the men who use them.
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