Gentleman ranker

A gentleman ranker is an enlisted soldier who may have been a former officer or a gentleman qualified through education and background to be a commissioned officer. It suggests that the signer (and/or 'singer' (see note below*)) was born to wealth and privilege but he disgraced himself and has enlisted as a common soldier (perhaps at the lowest rank, as a private or corporal) serving far from the society that now scorns him. Cf remittance man, often the black sheep of a "good" family, paid a regular allowance to stay abroad, far from home, where he cannot embarrass the family.

The term also describes those soldiers who signed on specifically as 'gentleman volunteers' in the British army to serve as private soldiers with the understanding being that they would be given a commission (without purchase) at a later date. These men trained and fought as private soldiers but "messed" (dined, and perhaps socialized) with the officers and were thus afforded a social standing of somewhere in between the two.

The term appears in several of Rudyard Kipling's stories and as the title of a poem he wrote which appeared in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses, first series, published in 1892. T. S. Eliot included it in his 1941 collection A Choice of Kipling's Verse.

In Kipling's poem "Gentlemen-Rankers", the speaker "sings"*:

"machinely crammed" may indicate the use of a Latin 'crammer' and the general method of learning by rote; a somewhat 'mechanical' process.

The Empress is Queen Victoria, specifically in her role as Empress of India.

Ready tin means easy access to money.

Branded with the blasted worsted spur   refers to the emblem of a spur, embroidered with worsted wool, that was sewn onto the uniforms of highly skilled riding masters of the British Army.

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