Lady Marines and Lumpish Parsons

James Woodforde’s Diary of a Country Parson retains a curious appeal, the more curious given its focus on the mundane details of an obscure English minister’s life. In his long diary, discovered in the 1920s and published in multiple volumes a decade latter, Parson Woodforde rarely experiences and never himself does anything exciting. He preaches and prays, quarrels with his niece and her friends, collects his tithes, has seven poor men to Christmas dinner every year, and otherwise cycles through his routines like a lumpy Anglican prayer wheel.

I suspect many people read the Diary for its food imagery. A popular one-volume edition appeared in 1949, when Britain remained frozen in postwar austerity. Woodforde’s table-busting meals of trout, and perch, and fried gudgeon, and salmon, and neck of mutton, and ham, and roast turkey, and fricasseed rabbit, and duck, and partridges, and veal knuckles, and peas, and capers, and coffee, and port wine, and apple puffs, and strawberries, and syllabub, and gooseberry tarts, and blancmange, and lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and (skip a bit, Brother) must have appealed to Britons tired of their drab and meager rations.

From the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth

Extraordinary events and persons intruded but rarely into this sedate life. Hannah Snell, whom Woodforde met in May 1778, numbered among the latter. Snell belonged to the mostly-unknown group of women who, in male disguise, served in the early modern British Army. More precisely, she became a Royal Marine, under the name “John Gray.” Snell maintained her masquerade for 22 years and fought in the War of the Austrian Succession, receiving a minor wound in the 1748 siege of Pondicherry (India). After her eventual discharge, Private Gray/Snell persuaded the Crown to pay her a veteran’s pension, of eighteen and a quarter pounds per annum. She supplemented this by traveling the country, recounting her adventures to various audiences, and selling “buttons, garters, laces &c.” Parson W. gave Hannah Snell a gratuity in the form of an overpayment: two and a half shillings for 16 pence worth of buttons. Doubtless he thought himself giving the lady veteran the same kind of charity he afforded the poor, the lame, and the freakish. Probably Snell felt she was performing her own kind of charity, bringing the quality of her conversation (Woodforde wrote she “talks very sensible and well,” the drama of her war stories, and the singularity of her person into the duller backwaters of Britain. (James Woodforde, Diary of a Country Parson, ed. John Beresford (London: Oxford UP, 1949), p. 143)   

Private Snell’s story appealed to her contemporaries, and it interests us just as much today, meshing as it does with concerns about gender equity and debates about the role of women in modern armed forces. It did not suit the Victorians, nor their war-weary and hungry mid-twentieth-century descendants. The latter seem to have preferred Parson Woodforde’s adventures in rustication and genteel gluttony to the derring-do of a gender-swapping marine. I guess there weren’t any heroic banquets in Snell’s memoirs.