Several regiments had unofficial colours, both the Seaforth Highlanders and the Highland Light Infantry owing their single extra colour to distinguished performance at Major General Arthur Wellesley’s victory over the Marathas at Assaye in 1803. The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers had a third colour in memory of the 5th Foot’s conduct at Wilhelmstahl in 1762, and it was carried on St George’s Day by a drummer. 2/Duke of Wellington’s Regiment had an extra stand of colours, presented to the regiment by the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company as a reward for the 76th Foot’s conduct in India.
The 2nd Foot (The Queen’s) retained a third, or colonel’s, colour – allegedly presented by Catherine of Braganza – until 1750, when the regiment carried it into Dublin, and its colonel, well aware that the rules were being broken, ordered it to be laid up in the chapel of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham. In 1824 the Queen’s was granted royal permission to carry a third colour and, even though this authority was soon revoked, managed to retain one, provided it did not appear on parade. The original colour had grown very shabby by the time it was replaced, and over the years some replacements have owed much to lively imaginations: one bore the words ‘From the Queen 1661’, a year before Catherine married Charles II. The design eventually reverted to the ‘traditional’ sea-green sheet bearing Catherine’s crowned cipher. The final version was presented to 1/Queen’s at its Jubilee parade in 1977, although production in Pakistan had led to compromises: the colour was in two joined sections, and ‘it could not be described as sea green’. However, as one of the battalion’s subalterns put it ‘The main thing … was that the tradition of the Colonel’s Colour, which dates back to the pre-Restoration regiments of Harley, Fitzgerald and Farrell, had been maintained for another generation.’7 It had been carried, quite illegally, on the King’s Birthday parade in Hong Kong in 1927, appeared again at 1/Queen’s disbandment parade in 1992, and is now in the hands of 1/Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.
Once men saw their colours regularly. Victorian soldiers knew them so well as to be able to stitch them, in long hours in a numbingly cold barrack room, onto the fabric panels that still emerge from junk shops and attics. It is no coincidence that the charity, Fine Cell Work, currently teaches embroidery to prisoners. Soldiers saw them stiffly trooped in their first crisp splendour, trudged behind them in the dust of India’s Grand Trunk Road, glimpsed them wreathed in powder-smoke on the field, and might eventually peer up at them, skeletal and dusty, when they themselves were old men gathered in the hush of a cathedral. The Victorian general, Edward Hamley, was a gunner, but when he saw the laid-up colours of the 43rd Foot he wrote:
A moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole
It does not look likely to stir a man’s soul,
’Tis the deeds that were done ’neath the moth-eaten rag,
When the pole was a staff, and the rag was a flag.
The battle honours and regimental devices on colours, standards and guidons rippled out to colour the wider tapestry of regimental tradition.
Every regiment celebrated special days, some of them with echoes of Sobraon. The Royal Berkshires commemorated the 62nd Foot’s participation in the Anglo-Sikh War at the Battle of Ferozeshah, by entrusting the colours to the sergeants on 21 December, Ferozeshah Day; the custom was carried on into the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment. The South Staffordshires celebrated the 80th’s performance in the same battle by handing the colours over to the sergeants. Colour Sergeant Kirkland of the 80th captured a Sikh standard in the battle, and it is still in the Staffordshire Regiment Memorial Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral. The 10th and 29th Regiments had fought alongside one another at Sobraon. The officers of their lineal descendants, 1/Royal Anglian and 2/Mercian, are honorary members of one another’s messes, and the adjutants of the two battalions refer to one another in correspondence as ‘My Dear Cousin’. 2/Mercian celebrates Alma Day on 20 September by having its Regimental Colour trooped through the ranks by a private soldier. When the 95th Foot ascended the slope above the River Alma in 1854 both ensigns were felled by Russian fire, and Private Keenan picked up the colour and planted it in the Great Redoubt.
Most regimental days mark victories. The Cheshires celebrated the 22nd Foot’s part in the defeat of the amirs of Scinde at Meanee on 17 February 1843; the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire held Quebec Day, 13 September, sacred because the 15th Foot helped Wolfe win his battle on the Heights of Abraham; and the Durham Light Infantry marked the 68th’s role in the foggy slaughter of Inkerman on 5 November 1854. When the British stormed Badajoz on 6 April 1812, Lieutenant MacPherson of the 45th Foot, having no Union flag to hand, ran his short scarlet coatee up the castle’s flag-pole to show that the place was taken. The Sherwood Foresters duly celebrated Badajoz Day each year, sending a red coat up the flagstaff of Nottingham castle, a practice continued today by 2/Mercian. There were relatively few British cavalry regiments in India, but the 16th Lancers charged Sikh squares at Aliwal on 28 January 1848, giving the 16th/5th Lancers its regimental day, and initiating the regimental practice of pleating lance-pennons to mimic their creasing with blood.
Although the charge of the light brigade at Balaclava on 25 October 1854 was at best a pyrrhic victory, it gave regimental days to both the 13th/18th Hussars and the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars. Maiwand was anything but a triumph, but the Royal Berkshires were to recall the last stand of the 66th with justifiable pride. The Cheshires celebrated Mons, although their battle, fought on 24 August 1914, was the day after the main action. 1/Cheshire held the long, gentle slope above the village of Audregnies on the left flank of the retreating British army. It was effectively wiped out, losing 771 officers and men, but managed to keep the flank covered. The officers’ wives had embroidered a quarter-scale regimental colour that was awarded to the best shooting company, and Captain Shore of B Company decided to take it to France in August 1914. It was carried by Drummer Charles Baker, who, with the collapse of the position imminent, managed to hide it. Private Harold Riley told the nun nursing him what had happened, and eventually, thanks to priest, schoolmaster, and village secretary, the colour was rolled into a length of pipe and hidden in a bricked-up attic. The Cheshires sent a colour party back to the village to collect it on 17 November 1918.
The Royal Scots emphasised their antiquity by having 28 March as their regimental day. It was on 28 March 1633 that the Privy Council of Scotland, under the authority of Charles I, issued a warrant for the raising of the regiment. The Black Watch allegedly won the right to its wholly distinctive red hackle for bravery at the battle of Geldermalsen in 1795, although there is some evidence that the regiment had already worn the hackle in North America. Officers and men were presented with their red vulture feathers on the king’s official birthday that year, though it was not until 1822 that formal permission for the wearing of the hackle was given. In 1919 the central committee of the Black Watch Association resolved that Red Hackle Day would be celebrated on 5 January, and this continues.
The days of national patron saints were celebrated with appropriate enthusiasm. Irish regiments made much of St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, and in North America Captain John Peebles saw that his fellow Scots also did their best for the old gentleman. In 1777 Peebles was adjutant to a battalion of grenadiers, made up by combining the grenadier companies of individual battalions. He and his men lived on transports and went ashore when the chance offered.
Monday 17th March. Ushered in with St Patrick’s Day in the morning. At ‘Reveille’ beating, parade ashore at the usual hour, the Shamrock mounted by the Hibernians who dedicate the day to the saint and the bottle or rather to the saint for the sake of the bottle, we drank to his memory at dinner in the cabin, but was more amply sacrificed to between decks.
Peebles was in Philadelphia in the following year, when
the Hibernians mounted the Shamrock and an Irish grenadier personated St Patrick in a procession through the streets with a prodigious mob after him – the friendly bro
thers [of the Order of St Patrick, an admirable anti-duelling society whose regimental branches were called ‘Marching Knots’] and several other Irish Clubs dined together and dedicated the day to the saint and the bottle.
He was back in his own battalion in 1781, when he saw that celebrations started before the usual time: ‘several men drunk on parade this morning, no keeping them sober when they get money.’8 Things were more decorously observed on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November. On the evening of 29 November 1799 Peebles ‘gave out a dollar a man and two to the sergeants to keep St Andrew’s’. On the great day itself, he
Went to Town to celebrate the day with his Excellency [General Sir Henry Clinton] where the field officers and captains of the 42nd were invited, the admiral [Arbuthnot] there the officers of the Royal Highland Emigrants and some others, about 24 in all. Major Small personated the saint, who gave good toasts and apropos for the occasion. The admiral very chatty and entertaining. Major [Adam] Hay sang some good songs and spouted a prologue very well, a good dinner and drink till 10 o’clock. A numerous party of the Sons of St Andrew dined at Hicks’ above 60, among whom were the subs of the 42nd. Exchanged a compliment, and some of our company joined them after we broke up, and made a night of it.9
St David’s Day – Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant – falls on 1 March, and was the subject of particular attention from the Royal Welch Fusiliers. On 1 March 1808 Captain Thomas Henry Browne found himself aboard ship on the Atlantic, but that did not stop the festivities.
This being St David’s Day and mine a Welsh regiment, we did honour to our tutelary Saint, in the best manner that our station would permit. The custom of the corps is, that on that day, immediately after dinner, when we are in barracks, one of the little drum-boys rides a large goat, with which the regiment is always provided, round the mess-room, carrying in his hand a dish of leeks. Each officer is called upon to eat one, for which he pays the drummer a shilling. The older officers of the regiment, and those who have seen service with it in the field, are favoured with only a small one, and salt. Those who have before celebrated St David’s Day with the regiment, but have only seen garrison duty with it, are required to eat a larger one without salt, and those unfortunates, who for the first time, have sat at the mess, on this their saint’s day, have presented to them the largest leek that can be procured, and unless sickness prevent it, no respite is given, until the last tip of the green leaf is enclosed in the unwilling mouth; and day after day passes before the smell; and taste is fairly got rid of. This may be a nasty way of making a Welsh Fusilier – and so it is, but not much worse than making a man pass though a dirty horse pond, in order to become a freeholder of Berwick. We could not, of course, on board our little ship, render all the honours due to the day, but we had every thing dressed in onions, and drank an extra glass of grog on the occasion.10
Captain James Dunn proudly records how 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers kept up the tradition, regardless of circumstances, on the Western Front. On 1 March 1918, with the great German offensive palpably on its way, the battalion in the line and the officers’ mess corporal arrested by Military Police (it was just one glass, his chums maintained, but he had no head for drink), the mess staff achieved a miracle.
The only possible hut … was occupied until after dark by Englishmen who knew not David and didn’t want to hear about him … only the largest of the holes, through which a raw cold wind swept, could be closed. At half-past eight it was not known where plates, glasses and cutlery could be got; however, one of the remaining estaminets in Erquinghem was persuaded to lend what had been packed for removal, to eke out the contents of the company boxes, and clean bed linen to serve as table cloths. Midnight was near when the CO invited our old-maidish Brigadier to be seated. [Cook Sergeant] Parry, as ever, sent in first-class fare in the most adverse conditions. The menu, in the French of Kitchen cum Orderly Room: ‘Consumme of Gallos; merlan Duglers; Escallops de Veau Vilanairese; Gigot de Mouton Roti, pommes Rissoles, Choux Bruxelles; Pudding au Chocolat; Scotch Woodcock; Dessert; Café; Veuve Cliquot, Benedictine, Kümmel. At Gris Pot.’ Only port was wanting, even the Portuguese canteen had none – or said so. Of 31 at table 23 ate the Leek in the odour of the Goat and to the roll of the drum. The toasts were proposed by the CO – ‘St David,’ ‘The King,’ ‘Other Battalions’: [Major] Cuthbert ‘Toby Purcell and his spurs’; [Captain] Moody – ‘Shenkin ap Morgan’; [Lieutenant] French ‘The Ladies’; [Captain] Radford – ‘The Guests.’ As usual I had to reply for The Guests, though I’m responsible for the dinner and pay my whack. After the Brigadier and the CO had gone the younger members of the Mess resumed, and made merry … until near daylight. A biting wind, some snow in it; thaw later. Digging is to be got on with, everyone at it.11
The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, with St George and his steed curvetting on their cap-badge, naturally celebrated his day, 23 April. In 1951, 1/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers found themselves holding the line of the Imjin River in Korea as part of the British 29th Brigade. Despite the unpropitious conditions, beer (albeit at the dismal rate of two bottles per man) had been stockpiled and the cooks stood ready to produce a turkey lunch. Because red and white roses were traditionally worn behind the cap-badge but were not readily available on the Imjin, hundreds of Japanese-made imitations had been issued. However, on the night of 22–23 April the Chinese mounted the largest offensive of the war, and by its end the brigade had been driven back after a formidable defence, with 1/Glosters, one of its battalions, effectively destroyed. Amongst the thirty Northumberland Fusilier dead was the CO, Lieutenant Colonel Kingsley Foster, who had declined promotion to take his battalion to war. More fusiliers would have died had it not been for the support provided by the 25-pounder guns of 45 Field Regiment Royal Artillery. Lieutenant George Truell, his battery under attack by Chinese infantry in the pre-dawn darkness of St George’s Day, ordered a single gun to take them on with direct fire at a range of 150 yards. The Chinese scattered and the battery was saved. Truell, awarded an MC for his bravery that day, had a rose tucked into his service dress cap. But while the fusiliers were sporting fabric flowers, the gunners had managed to obtain real ones.
The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was formed from the four English fusilier regiments on St George’s Day 1968. The new regiment celebrated St George’s Day, and in 2009 the fact that its second battalion was on its third operational tour of Afghanistan did not stand in the way of tradition. Men were awakened that morning by the rattle of a side-drum beaten by the drum major, and then served ‘gunfire’ – tea laced with rum – by the officers. In happier times there would have been a battalion parade in the morning, with sports in the afternoon, and parties in the evening.12 The Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars had celebrated both St Patrick’s and Balaklava Day in much the same way, with ‘gunfire’ first thing, sporting activities all day, and celebrations in the evening. When the QRIH amalgamated with The Queen’s Own Hussars in 1993 to form The Queen’s Royal Hussars, the new regiment added the anniversaries of Dettingen (27 June) and El Alamein (2 November) to its regimental days, and continued to pay homage to St Patrick.
The pattern of activities on regimental days across the army is very similar: a formal parade, perhaps with caps and colours suitably embellished, sports, and then parties in canteens and messes. The process is part historical commemoration, part tribal ritual leavened with family bonding and, given that attempts are usually made to mark the occasion even in the midst of operations, an affirmation that the exigencies of the moment must not weaken ties to the past. In 1944 Captain A. G. Oakley of the Hampshires recorded in his diary
1st August … Hell of a sports programme today for Minden Day … What a day, I am half gone as I write this.
2nd August … Well, we have recovered from Minden Day apart from a slight headache.13
CHAPTER 21
FULL OF STRANGE OATHS, AND BEARDED LIKE THE PARD
LANGUAGE, LIKE MUSIC, costume, shared history, and even hairstyles, helps groups – national, social,
and professional – define themselves. Military English remains a distinctive mixture of professional jargon laced with rank-and-file bluntness, dotted with slang, and foreign words or expressions acquired on overseas campaigns or garrison duty. It has long separated those who could penetrate its thorny thickets from those who could not, and by doing so has helped to mark out the military tribe.
Not all British soldiers, even those born in the United Kingdom, actually spoke English. Scots and Irish soldiers of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth were often more comfortable in Gaelic. During the Peninsular War a general inspecting the Connaught Rangers asked a private
to whose squad he belonged. Darby Rooney understood about as much English as enabled him to get over a parade tolerably, but a conversation such as the General was about to hold with him was beyond his capacity, and he began to feel a little confused at the prospect of a tête-à-tête with his General: ‘Squidha – sqoodha – cad dershe vourneen?’ said he, turning to the orderly-sergeant, Pat Gafney, who did not himself speak the English language as correctly as Lindley Murray. ‘Whist, ye Bostoon,’ said Gafney, ‘and don’t make a baste of yourself before the General.’ ‘Why,’ said General Mackinnon, ‘I believe he don’t understand me.’ ‘No sir,’ replied Gafney, ‘he don’t know what your honour manes.’1