What A Mess We're In...'

 

One of the most interesting debates this week on the defence Twitter space has been on what sounds like an utterly dull subject – ‘should denim be allowed in the mess’? A binary question that has generated a huge number of twitter engagement – one tweet alone by the author has had nearly 80,000 views in less than 48rhrs.

There are some issues in the Defence blogging world which should come wrapped in a large sticker, with warnings in every language known to humanity saying “Do not, under any circumstances go here unless you really want to upset people”. Mess dress is without doubt one of those issues.

At its heart is a debate which is less about what we wear, but the social structure and roles through which we view the role and position of the military as career, a profession and as a lifestyle.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Humphrey should confirm before entering the fray that he has been a full time ‘liver in’ (e.g. periods of over a year as his main residence) in both an Army mess, and a ‘purple’ mess, spent long periods of time temporarily accommodated in service messes from all three Services in the UK and abroad, and done one or two night stays on countless times. This provides the context for what is about to be said.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Firstly, some helpful context – what is, in the British perspective, an Officers Mess? It is both a physical structure and a social organisation. Physically it is the home to Officers in a unit, providing accommodation, food, alcohol, and the various life support services needed for an Officer at their place of work. Traditionally many Officers lived in (e.g. the mess was essentially their full time home), and it was a combination of weekday work accommodation and country house weekend retreat.

Socially the Mess is the structure around which the Officers of a unit bond together – it provides a social means of forming a team outside of formal working environments and helps share the heritage of a unit’s history. It is how balls are arranged, social events co-ordinated and people come together to carry out the many pleasant activities that define residential life in the facility.

Today the Mess is a more challenging concept to define. To some units, the Officers Mess remains the centre of the life of the unit – for example a singleton Infantry Battalion may see its mess as the home of a group of people who by and large live together and work together full time, and where it becomes an extension of their professional life.

In other units, particularly larger training establishments or busy multiple occupancy sites, the Mess is less a site of long history, more a location of convenience to cater for, and accommodate people. There will be a high throughput of casual visitors stopping in for a night or two, and a much smaller cadre of permanent residents – many of whom do not live in full time.  

There are perhaps two types of mess – those with livers in from a formed unit where the mess is the centre of gravity for Regimental history and also its wider ethos, and those messes where people will come and go in a far more transitory manner, with few livers in, and usually playing host to a somewhat random collection of historical artefacts and paintings.

Historically the Mess was a location where peoples conduct was driven by a complex web of mess rules and regulations which governed all aspects of a Mess life. The most contentious or challenging was the dress code.

Dress in these locations has traditionally been formal, jacket and tie the norm in many places until recently, or even black tie for supper. Many people have been caught out by a system where they turn up in good faith expecting that their ensemble is appropriate and correct, only to discover they are ‘out of rig’ and expected to change or depart post haste.

To some this is the mark of an organisation that has lost its way – what does it matter how people dress in their residential abode? To others it is about the maintenance of standards and ensuring that people understand the military life is more than a job, it is both a career and a lifestyle.

There are equally compelling arguments for both lines of thought. Dress codes are without doubt archaic in many messes. Where else in society are people expected to formally dress in a suit to eat their lunch or supper? Why in an age of relatively casual dress codes (e.g. the abandonment of suits and ties by many) should people be bound by rules that make little sense to them and make them actively uncomfortable?

If a Mess is unwelcoming in its dress code, why frequent it when other sites nearby couldn’t care less what you wear? The author recalls doing a short course at one military site where the combination of an unwelcoming transit mess, with barely average food and stuffy rules about dress in the bar meant that the course en masse decamped each night to the off site pub and supermarket to get food and socialise in an informal atmosphere – while the mess bar remained empty.

If you make the mess a place of standards and formality, then you have to be ready to accept that fewer people than in previous years want to partake of this type of ritual and lifestyle every night.

This is an instinctively binary argument – to some stepping away from a dress code into a ‘wear what you feel is appropriate’ line of attack seems logical. The mess is their home, people do not wear a suit at home, and as long as you dress inoffensively and in line with the spirit of the occasion, what is the harm done in wearing smart jeans and tshirt to eat supper?

To others, the Mess is the location where the heritage of the unit is proudly on display, and the mess and its standards are seen as the custodians of that units history and story. To walk into an Infantry or Cavalry mess is to see the story of British history on display – priceless silverware, paintings aplenty and artifacts that in other locations would belong in a museum behind multiple security layers are all on display.

There is a real sense that the Mess and its members carry the name and heritage of their unit, and they must be seen to uphold the highest standards and conduct to ensure that the name is not damaged on their watch.  The idea of wearing denim in a location like or dressing in a manner which disrespects their predecessors and their actions is unthinkable. The loss of standards would be unbearable in the extreme.

The phrase ‘standards’ crops up a lot in this debate, and it perhaps comes to the heart of the issue. To those who see no harm in getting rid of dress codes, the question is ‘what is the standard that is being impacted by my choice of clothing’, while to those defending it, the issue is that maintenance of high personal standards indicates they are upholding military standards of conduct more widely.

To the author, the phrase standards feels a bit awkward – we are unable to define what standards means in this context, nor how it is that we measure them and show how they are being impacted as a result of change. Without wishing to sound flippant, if we want to use ‘standards’ as a key cornerstone in our defence of an argument, we need to be able to define them, and measure them objectively – otherwise it becomes a rhetorical comment.

The reasonable challenge has to be ‘what objectively measured standard of my performance as an officer in the armed forces is demonstrated by my choice of clothing to eat supper’

Arguably to not have a dress code gives the opportunity for an officer to exercise significantly greater values of insight and judgement in choosing their ensemble with care, rather than mindlessly throwing on a suit – you need to think about how you dress in order to fit in with your audience rather than assume you know what is needed.

There is an argument that professional standards can be judged through your choice of dress, but this does seem a bit self-defeating. The British Army itself, an organisation known for venerating standards of dress regards the Special Forces as the highest level of soldiers and elites within its organisation.

Yet the irony is that were you to encounter Special Forces out and about in the field, they dress in a most unsoldierly like manner. Renowned for their love of non issue kit, to see an group of SF amble past is like watching a group of armed scarecrows form a militia. Yet they are revered as the most ‘ally of the ally’ in the eyes of the Army.

We don’t judge them on how they dress, but their soldiering skills – so why given this are we so fixated that dress standards more widely define our ability and skill as a professional? No other organisation judges or rates people on their dress – its an entirely military thing.

Perhaps it is linked to the concept of definable control? People can easily point to and define dress codes, and identify in a binary way when someone is in or out of rig – its much easier to stay in the comfort zone and refer to the miscreant being in breach of the mess rulebook, p63 subsection 2.5, clause C, in the manner of a hard left Trades Union Official at a TUC Congress, than it is to spend your time working on unquantifiable and challenging issues– ) the correct response of course in the event of a challenge is merely to note that your own ship/sqn/unit is today marking the anniversary of the massacre of the Battle of Bongozwania, and you are required to dress in this way out of respect for the Sultan, felled by the sharpened mangos – given the complex history of the British Armed Forces, no one will dare correct you for fear of insulting your units history and traditions).

There is too a wider argument that dress codes, and ensuring people adhere to them are a way of hiding from confronting a multitude of difficult issues that need fixing. Having eaten barely inedible scampi, while dressed in a suit and tie, before retiring to a freezing cold room with mouldy communal bathroom without hot water, it is hard to wonder how we can say the phrase ‘highest standards’ with a straight face. 

The challenge of ‘declining dress standards in the mess means declining standards in the military’ is thrown about a lot. It certainly popped up a lot on the Twitter debate. But does it really indicate this? Standards in the military have been going to the dogs since the first armies formed thousands of years ago – it is our lot in life to rebel against the system when we join, yet moan many years later that the next generation have no respect for the rules. Those serving today who feel standards are dropping probably had the same said about them when they joined – in the words of John Winton “the navy is always going to the dogs”.

Dress codes have always changed – what people wore day to day 150 years ago bears no resemblance to what we wear now. Our sartorial choices evolve, as do our preferences for style and comfort. The idea that we are upholding standards by dressing a certain way is easily countered by the argument that had our predecessors seen the way we dress now, they would potentially be appalled at how casual things had become (“what do you mean you don’t don black tie and mess kit for supper each night”)?

The more uncomfortable reality is that standards are not upheld by dress code, but by personal acts and conduct, and this will endure no matter how people dress. To suggest that the military have to uphold themselves to the highest possible standards, and that this means the highest possible dress standards seems painfully laughable in the context of the Sunday Times front page today, alleging the murder of a Kenyan woman by a member of the British Army.

When you look at the litany of behaviours and standards that have fallen foul of Courts Martial over the years, for example CEA fraud, burning down accommodation due to drunken hijinks, common assault, sexual assault and other deeply shocking behaviour, you have to ask whether the problem is dress codes, or a wider issue with alcohol and personal conduct – and no matter what you wear, you’ll still need to address this.

Talking about the integrity of the mess, how standards are upheld and the like provides little reassurance when you read of how Officer Cadets repeatedly hid in female colleagues cupboards to watch them naked after they got out the shower. The Atherton Report – a deeply disturbing read, which reveals that 58% of serving females have been subject to bullying and harassment suggests that for all the talk of highest standards, these clearly don’t apply when it comes to how some male personnel treat their female colleagues.

That the MOD has yet to formally respond to, or set out how it will address the appalling findings of this report is even more disturbing – it is as if the Department hopes the whole problem will ‘go away’.

So, when we look at the issues of dress code, we need to look not just at how people dress, but also how it reflects on the military and the people it is trying to attract to join. Forty years ago society was different, dress codes were different and people were much more formal in certain social circumstances. Recruits would think little of being asked to wear a jacket and tie to supper – that was the norm across wide parts of society.

Yet today the Military is an outlier in this regard. It is hard to think of any other large organisation in the UK that cares so much about how you dress in your own time, or seeks to direct the way you can only eat if wearing a certain combination of clothes. Some people may find this lifestyle and way of life immensely appealing – but we need to be wary of falling into the trap that it appeals to all.

For each person who joins up and has no issue with, or is actively all for, a mess dress code, how many others were put off by the image it presented? The various dress codes circulating about for different regiments and Services at different times present an image of a somewhat archaic way of life that bears no resemblance to the reality of the military world in which they work.

Do dress codes present images of a stereotypical society last seen in Downtown Abbey, that is socially stratified and where failure to wear the right clothes means you won’t fit in? Why if you are an early 20 something graduate who has grown up doing what you want, would you want to work for an employer that feels it has to tell you what you should wear in your own time?

The argument of course is that the military is a voluntary organisation and that not everyone needs to join it. But this perhaps misses the point – if the military through its choice of dress codes, and perpetuation of a sense of social hierarchy actively presents an image that is out of step with modern society, is the military really upholding the values of the society it wants to defend?

Is there a danger that the armed forces may find in their desire to ‘maintain standards’ that they become ever more marginalised in trying to recruit people-  the normal men and women who are interested in serving, but are not interested in the hassle and odd behaviours that come with mess membership?

How, by showing an image of an intensely male boarding school organisation in terms of structure, lifestyle and dress, can the military actively hope to recruit women and people from ethnic minorities – both of whom may be actively put off by the image the military presents as not speaking to them? There is a real concern that without looking to ask whether the way the mess is run remains relevant to the society we defend, it may find itself isolated and without relevance.