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.
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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.
Kipling's poem
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.
In Kipling's poem "Gentlemen-Rankers", the speaker "sings"*:
Oh, it's sweet to sweat through stables, sweet to empty kitchen slops, And it's sweet to hear the tales the troopers tell, To dance with blowzy housemaids at the regimental hops And thrash the cad who says you waltz too well. Yes, it makes you cock-a-hoop to be "Rider" to your troop, And branded with a blasted worsted spur, When you envy, O how keenly, one poor Tommy being cleanly Who blacks your boots and sometimes calls you "Sir". If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep, And all we know most distant and most dear, Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep, Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer? When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters And the horror of our fall is written plain, Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling, Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain? We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth. God help us, for we knew the worst too young! Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence, Our pride it is to know no spur of pride, And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an alien turf enfolds us And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.Commentary on the poem
"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.
And the Curse of Reuben holds us, this refers to the Biblical story of Reuben, who, for sexual misconduct, was told by his dying father, "Reuben, thou art my first-born .... Unstable as water, thou shall never excel...." (Genesis 49:3-4).