'With Courage and Energy': Military masculinities and Civilian Transitions in the British Corps of Commissionaires, 1859-1914

The subject of this study is the Corps of Commissionaires, an organisation founded in 1859, and which was devoted to securing civil employment for British ex-servicemen - both able-bodied and disabled- on their leaving the military; the temporal focus of the study is 1859-1914. The Corps operated on quasi-military lines which critically influenced its organisational identity. Through adopting an approach informed by R.W.Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, along with organisational analysis, this study will examine the genesis of the Corps' masculinised identity, how this was maintained within the body of its employees, the commissionaires, and how it was promoted to the men's potential employers. In addition, it will analyse how these factors might have influenced the professional and personal trajectories of the commissionaires.
Through sitting at the intersection between military, business and social history, this study will open up new areas of enquiry in the scholarship surrounding the experiences of British ex-servicemen, as well as scholarship that deals with British masculinity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This will be achieved in three ways. First, the time period of this study will allow for an understanding of whether changing conceptions of ex-servicemen, brought about through war, determined the fortunes of the Corps and its commissionaires. Second, in analysing the experiences of able-bodied and disabled ex-servicemen, it will examine the role played by employment within the mainstream - i.e.: non-rehabilitative- workplace, in configuring their masculine identities. Third, it will investigate the connections between masculinised organisational identity and business practices.