438 MESS MANAGEMENT, 
chairs and a good sofa in the ante-room, and have nice solid chairs with 
leather seats for Mess. What looks worse than cane-bottomed chairs 
covered with cushions tied on with tapes ? 
Messmen, Most large Messes are run by messmen, this saves a great deal of 
trouble and worry and where you have not the services of a first-rate 
man as Secretary and caterer, a messman is, as a rule, cheaper than 
catering ; the messman contracts to supply so many meals a day up 
to a certain standard at a fixed price; thus you can calculate almost 
to 5s. what your messing will cost you for the month. There are 
many very excellent messmen and of course some very bad ones, 
but messmen are quite sharp enough to know when they are well 
looked after and wher not, and act accordingly. A messman in a 
big Mess as a rule looks chiefly to make his profit on extras, but 
many, if not watched, make their profits by giving second-class meat, 
inferior fish, cheap American bacon and hams and bad stores. It is 
A liberal by far better to make a fairly liberal contract with a really good man, 
forn;_-than to try and run him too fine. At the contract prices I have known 
should be 
made with in some Messes, it was absolutely impossible that the messman could 
“oe provide first-class meat at all. 
In a large Mess 6d. a head a day makes a vast difference to the mess- 
man, but individually it only makes a difference to the members of 15s. 
a month. Surely there is great comfort in being well fed for 4s. 6d. a 
day and great discomfort in being badly fed for 4s.; yet how often is 
this lost sight of. here is an idea somewhere that you can have three 
Cannot mess gOOd meals a day in a Mess for 4s.; I have never done so, except in 
for 4s. Limerick and there we had a cook among the battery women, a very 
good and careful woman who almost looked on the officers as her 
children (Mrs. Tomlins in H/4, 1873). We certainly lived well and 
our messing never cost over 4s. 6d. Messmen supply their own cooks 
and have to pay them out of the messing, though it is a better plan, I 
think, to partly pay the cook out of the subscriptions. 
Extra Extra dinners and suppers, and guests’ meals, should be paid on a 
messing. fairly liberal scale, a messman cannot provide a dinner as officers 
expect on guest nights for 3s. 6d. or yet 4s. a head. 
The messman should be made to get all supplies from first-class 
tradesmen and the Mess Secretary should constantly see the supplies. 
No one in the Mess should be allowed to find fault with the mess- 
man but the C.O., the President of the Mess and the Secretary. 
Seethemess 1b is advisable to see the messman’s receipted bills monthly; if he 
man’s bills. defaults, the case will probably be given against the Mess and the 
members will have to pay; this has been done. Crying down credit 
is not really much use; local juries will probably be composed partially 
of the tradesmen or their relations. 
A messman should be given every assistance and help to do his 
work ; as I have said before, there are among them many most excellent 
men who take a pride in feeding their regiments well. Never take a 
very low tender from a messman, it means having constant worries 
and being starved and poisoned. 
India. In India we find catering Messes and messmen as at home and the 
routine is much the same in most respects; the cooks are fairly good 
