ABSTRACT
A second version of Margaret Evans’s story is contained in Col. L. I. Cowper’s history of the regiment. Cowper, who commanded a battalion of the regiment in the 1930s, wrote a number of histories of the King’s Own. Although it cannot be known with certainty, it is possible that as a young officer he may have known Evans.
A man who married without the consent of his commanding officer could be forced to live in barracks only until a child was born, after which he had to be allowed to live out if he so desired. In many of the new barracks the rooms were larger than they had been hitherto, and at Ashton-under-Lyne each held twenty-four men. Sometimes as many as four women lived in one of these rooms, each in a corner curtained off. Mrs. Evans, who in her old age told many tales of the Regiment as she had known it, had married in 1852 and started her married life at Ashton. She received ½ d. a day from each man whose washing she did, and she describes how the women worked and ate, gave birth to their children, slept and died, in the barrack-room.
