Pierrette and Margot sing the guinguette
Let us rejoice, good times will come
To the decidedly bloodthirsty:
Aristocrats to the lamp-post …
If we don’t hang them,
We’ll break them,
If we don’t break them,
We’ll burn them.
Ah! It’ll be fine, It’ll be fine, It’ll be fine.
On 23 May 1793 an Allied army attacked the French at Famars, near Valenciennes. The 14th Foot, in one of the main assaulting columns, was checked by French infantry whose drummers were thumping out ‘Ça Ira’. ‘Let’s beat them at their own damned tune’, said the 14th’s commanding officer. His own drummers at once took up the rhythm and the battalion pressed on to victory. The 14th bequeathed the march to the West Yorkshires, and today it lives on as the regimental quick march of The Yorkshire Regiment.
The Foot Guards tended towards the stately, with ‘The British Grenadiers’ as quick march and Handel’s ‘Scipio’ as slow for the Grenadier Guards, and Johann Valentin Hamm’s elegant ‘Milanollo’ for the Coldstream’s quick march and the matchless aria ‘Non pui andrai’, from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro as its slow march. It was as well not to stray too far from familiar musical paths where royalty was concerned. Just before the First World War Mr Williams, bandmaster of the Grenadiers, made an arrangement of Richard Strauss’s Electra for use during a long interval in the Changing of the Guard. The band was suitably elated ‘at their own audacity and the success that had crowned it’, when a red-coated page emerged from the palace with a personal message for Bandmaster Williams from King George V. ‘His Majesty does not know what the band has just played,’ it ran, ‘but it is never to be played again.’7 Rifle regiments needed marches that could accommodate their quickstep, and the 60th Rifles’ ‘Lutzow’s Wild Hunt’ nodded towards the influence of those German jäger on British light troops.
New regiments and corps often found something wholly appropriate. The Royal Army Medical Corps, founded in 1898 when the army’s medical services were brought together, their officers at last holding formal military rank, had the old royalist air ‘Here’s a Health Unto His Majesty’ as its march. The Royal Army Veterinary Corps traces its origins to the commissioning of the first vet in 1796, although an Army Veterinary Department was not formed till 1889, and has ‘Drink Puppy Drink’ and ‘A Hunting We Will Go’ as its marches. ‘The Village Blacksmith’ commended itself to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. The Royal Tank Regiment, emerging from the Heavy Branch, Machine Gun Corps, which had manned the first British tanks in 1916, chose the old Worcestershire folk song ‘My Boy Willie’ because the first prototype tank to be completed was called ‘Little Willie’. This was spliced with ‘Cadet Rousselle’, a folk song from the area of Cambrai, where the first major tank battle took place in 1917. I am not sure what Richard Wagner would make of the march version of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, but it serves The Parachute Regiment well and has the merit of being wholly unmistakable. Then there were some oddities. The Cheshire Regiment’s quick march was the Jacobite ‘Wha Wadna Fecht for Charlie’, and 2/Queens, despite its Surrey connection, had ‘We’ll Gang Nae Mair to Yon Toun’.
The drummers of Guards and line regiments, and the buglers that had existed in rifle regiments from their origin, had always been serving soldiers, although the early practice of giving drummers a short sword with the point broken off suggested that they were not expected to engage in hand-to-hand fighting. The cruciform-hilted pattern introduced in 1856, which remained broadly the same as that now in use, cannot be regarded as a serious weapon. Though that did not prevent an instruction of 1901 requiring all swords, including drummers’, to be sharpened when a regiment went on active service. An English or Welsh battalion’s drummers, under their drum major, constituted its Corps of Drums, while Highland regiments had Pipes and Drums under a pipe major. Although they might find themselves marching on parade at the head of the band, they were wholly distinct from it.
These were certainly not the beardless lads of popular fiction and sentimental imagery, not least because a drummer needed to carry a regulation side-drum and look after himself in the field. Lady Butler’s ‘Steady the Drums and Fifes’ shows the Corps of Drums of the 57th Foot drawn up under fire at Albuhera. It is full of youngsters: one little chap, boldly standing bareheaded to await whatever fate has in store, cannot be more than 10. In fact, the average age of drummers of the 57th in 1811 was a respectable 26.
In Kipling’s short story ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’, Jakin and Lew, young drummers who were always being birched by the drum major for fighting or smoking, were too young to accompany their battalion to the North West Frontier as company drummers but, on their earnest entreaties, followed the band as supernumeraries. When the untried unit was attacked by Afghan Ghazis the men bolted, leaving Jakin and Lew sheltering behind a rock. On Lew’s suggestion they marched out of cover with fife and drum, picked up from instruments discarded by the band, mangling ‘The British Grenadiers’ but beginning to rally the battalion before ‘Jakin halted and beat the long roll of the Assembly, while Lew’s fife squealed despairingly.’ A mullah amongst the Afghans shouted for the boys to be spared and raised as Muslims, it was too late, for
the first volley had been fired and Lew dropped on his face. Jakin stood for a minute, spun round and collapsed as the Fore and Fit came forward, the curses of their officers in their ears and in their hearts the shame of open shame. Half the men had seen the drummers die, and they made no sign. They did not even shout. They doubled out straight across the plain in open order, and they did not fire.
The battle was won and the brigade commander saw his knighthood glittering:
But some say, and amongst these be Goorkhas who watched on the hillside, that the battle was won by Jakin and Lew, whose little bodies were borne up just in time to fill two gaps at the head of the big ditch-grave for the dead under the heights of Jagai.8
My eyes are damp as I write these words, but there is no evidence that these drummer boys are anything but the products of Kipling’s gloriously fertile imagination.
Youngsters, frequently the sons of serving soldiers, were indeed recruited as drummers, often between the ages of 10 and 12, but generally this was little more than a device for getting them pay and rations, though Samuel Potter, in his 1810 The Art of Beating the Drum, maintained that it was ‘of the utmost importance’ that drummers were taught during boyhood ‘whilst the muscles of the wrist are supple.’ John Shipp, who joined the 22nd Foot as a drummer in 1797, was anxious to exchange his drum for a musket as soon as he could, precisely because he feared that he would be known as a drummer boy whatever his age. As soon as he turned 18:
I then begged the captain that I might be removed from the drummers to the ranks. I did not like the appellation drum-boy. As I have seen many a man riding post, who was at least sixty years old, so if a drummer attained the age of Methuselah, he would never acquire any other title than drum-boy.
He was quickly given ‘three steps in one day! From drum-boy to private, from a battalion company to the Light Bobs; and from private to corporal!’9 One survey of the 304 British drummers in units engaged at Quatre Bras and Waterloo, suggests that only 10 per cent of them were between 16 and 17, with the average age of around 25, the same for soldiers in the ranks. The oldest drummer was John Leeds of the 23rd Foot, who had enlisted in 1802 aged 49, and was 62 at Waterloo.10 There were persistent stories that two boy drummers of the 24th Foot had been ‘hung up and gutted like sheep’ at Isandlwana in 1879, but Ian Knight has recently shown that ‘of the twelve 1/24th drummers killed … the two youngest were eighteen and the oldest was in his late thirties.’11
The fate of the drummers of the 24th demonstrates that, whatever their age, drummers and buglers did not enjoy a risk-free existence. Bugler Robert Hawthorne, of the 52nd Light Infantry, was a native of Maghera, County Londonderry and 35 years old when he accompanied the British attack on t
he Kashmir Gate at Delhi on 14 September 1857. He was with the party of British and Indian engineers under lieutenants Duncan Home and Philip Salkeld that crossed a damaged bridge under heavy fire to lay powder bags against the gate: six of the thirteen were killed or mortally wounded. Not only did Hawthorne sound the charge so that the assaulting column would know that the gate had been successfully blown in, but he then helped the mortally wounded Lieutenant Salkeld. Both Home (killed the following month) and Salkeld were ‘provisionally’ awarded the VC by the force commander, Major General Sir Archdale Wilson, ‘for their conspicuous bravery in the performance of the desperate duty of blowing in the Cashmere Gate of the Fortress of Delhi under a heavy fire of musketry … [and] would have been recommended to Her Majesty for confirmation in that distinction had they survived.’12 Hawthorne, too, was awarded the VC, and died in his bed in Manchester in 1879. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, Drummer Walter Ritchie of 2/Seaforth Highlanders, carrying a bugle, as most infantry drummers in battle had done since the 1850s, took part in the assault on Redan Ridge. His VC citation tells how he
stood on the parapet of an enemy trench and, under heavy machine-gun fire and bomb attacks, repeatedly sounded the ‘Charge’ thereby rallying many men of various units who, having lost their leaders, were wavering and beginning to retire. He also, during the day, carried messages over fire-swept ground.13
Pipers, too, were very much in harm’s way. At Sir Arthur Wellesley’s first Peninsular victory, Vimiero, Piper George Clarke of the 71st piped his comrades into battle despite being wounded. At the time, there were no gallantry awards for private soldiers, but the Highland Society of London presented him with a fine set of silver-mounted pipes. Piper George Findlater was more fortunate. When the Gordons attacked the Dargai Heights on the North-West Frontier in 1897 he was shot though both feet and crawled to a rock, whence he piped his battalion forward. Officially he played its march, ‘Cock o’ the North’, but he later admitted that he found the pace of the strathspey ‘Haughs of Cromdale’ more appropriate to a charge. On 25 September 1915, with the British assaulting in dismal weather into their own gas-cloud at Loos, the 40-year-old Daniel Laidlaw of 7/King’s Own Scottish Borderers stood up on the parapet and piped his company out of its trench. He chose the regimental march ‘Blue Bonnets Over the Border’, continuing to play even after he was wounded. Both Findlater and Laidlaw were awarded the VC.
By the Second World War, although pipers might still play men into battle – on D-Day Lord Lovat’s piper, Bill Millin, famously piped his commando brigade forward from Sword Beach to Pegasus Bridge – drummers and buglers were combat soldiers first and musicians second. Many battalions kept their Corps of Drums together by using them as the defence platoon for battalion headquarters, but they were often broken up. However, in the Italian campaign the battalions of 38th Irish Brigade (Royal Irish Fusiliers, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and London Irish Rifles) retained their pipes and drums, and on 12 June 1944 they swaggered, caubeened and saffron-kilted, into St Peter’s Square, Rome playing the 1798 street ballad ‘The Wearing of the Green’, serenading Pope Pius XII with ‘The Minstrel Boy’, and then beating the ‘Retreat’, an event ‘enjoyed immensely by the many Irish priests present who were mad with excitement shouting out their favourite tunes. The tune ‘The Boys of Wexford’ seemed to be their favourite.14
The postwar army, under the dual pressures of financial retrenchment and successive operational tours, found it increasingly hard to sustain its Corps of Drums. An enthusiastic commanding officer could make a real difference, but while piping always attracted the interest of officers (many of whom played the pipes themselves) there was infinitely less concern with drumming. A forceful drum major might both attract and train drummers and protect his Corps of Drums from the adjutant’s desire to post drummers off to the rifle companies. Bernard Lively joined The Buffs as a boy drummer in 1958, became drum major of 2/Queens in 1967, and finished his service as RSM of 6/7 Queens. He did much to uphold the old standards of Corps of Drums.
But it was an unequal struggle. In 1977 a group of enthusiasts formed the Corps of Drums Society in order ‘to preserve the Corps of Drums style of music as a living thing before it is too late’. The first issue of its newsletter The Drummer’s Call lamented
To-day it is not even necessary for the routine barrack calls to be sounded (though this is still done in many battalions) and the Corps of Drums is an entirely ceremonial body whose primary task must be their allotted military function within the battalion. On a ceremonial parade however many Corps of Drums have become merely an extension of the regimental band and very rarely parade on their own … The Royal Military School of Music have stated that they have no jurisdiction or authority over the training or establishment of drummers, fifers, buglers, trumpeters, etc.15
Thanks to the initiative of Warrant Officer Class 2 Mike Hall and Major Jack Barrow of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment, The Drummer’s Handbook was published as an infantry training manual in 1985. Major General Colin Shortis, Director of Infantry, affirmed in its foreword that
It was felt that with the more rapid turnover in personnel in Corps of Drums, particularly in the Infantry of the Line battalions, the customs, traditions and the music too, which had been passed on among the long serving drummers, would have become lost and distorted because so little had been put to print over the years.
The Army School of Ceremonial, part of the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick, now trains drummers and buglers and the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming provides the Royal Regiment of Scotland, and the handful of other units that maintain pipes and drums, with qualified musicians. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, which as a cavalry regiment would traditionally have had trumpeters rather than pipers, took on pipers in 1946. Its pipes and drums went to the top of the British pop chart in April 1972 with ‘Amazing Grace’. The album Spirit of the Glen: Journey, was recorded when the Scots DG were serving in Basra in 2008. The regiment’s pipers and drummers are trained as crewmen on the Challenger 2 main battle tank, and are expected to maintain their skills as armoured soldiers whilst maintaining high musical standards. Elsewhere the picture is more patchy. The Foot Guards, with their emphasis on ceremonial parades, maintain strong Corps of Drums, and both The Royal Green Jackets and their successors The Rifles, have seen the advantages that accrue from having buglers available (even on operations) to sound appropriate calls. After the painful formality of seeing off a dead comrade on his way home, it is wholly appropriate for a bugler to sound the advance; there can be tears and beers later, but for now there is a job to be done. Sadly, the line infantry struggles, and in most battalions the Drummer’s Handbook recommendation that a Corps of Drums should consist of a drum major and sixteen drummers is an ideal that is seldom achieved.
In contrast to members of the Corps of Drums, who were fighting soldiers, for years bandsmen were in a more anomalous position. In the eighteenth century they were civilians, paid for by the regiment’s officers, and might accompany it on campaign. The band of the 52nd Light Infantry played the regiment into the assault on the Mysore town of Savandroog in 1791 with the evergreen ‘Britons Strike Home’, and when the French were repulsed from Tarifa in 1812 the band of the 87th Foot saw them off with the lively ‘Garryowen’. This had started life as an Irish drinking song: ‘Let Bacchus’ sons be not dismayed/We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors/But join with me each jovial blade/The watch knock down by threes and fours’. It was to cross the Atlantic with Irish immigrants to become the regimental march of George Custer’s 7th Cavalry. Major George Simmons of the 95th recalled that when the regiment crossed the Ebro in June 1813 ‘Our band struck up “The Downfall of Paris”, we were amused at their wit on this occasion, and we had it followed by a national tune or two to remind us of Old England and absent friends.’16
By this time the army was making determined efforts to ensure that bandsmen were enlisted soldiers. In 1803 a general order declare
d:
It is His Majesty’s pleasure that in regiments having bands of music not more than one private soldier of each troops or company shall be permitted to act as musicians; and that one Non Commissioned Officer shall be allowed to act as master of the band. These men shall be drilled and instructed in their exercise, and in the case of actual service are to fall in with their respective troops or companies completely armed and accoutred – soldiers first, bandsmen second.17
This order was not generally obeyed, in part because commanding officers saw the advantage of taking their bands on campaign with them, and in part because the allocation of enlisted bandsmen was so stingy that officers hired extra musicians. The last civilian band-masters did not disappear until the twentieth century, and they were common in the nineteenth. William ‘Billy the Bugler’ Miller was born in 1815, son of a soldier in the Rifle Brigade. He enlisted in 1/95th in 1828 and became a bugler in the band, then numbering fifteen musicians led by a sergeant. Miller became bandmaster in 1842 and gained a Greek licentiate of music when the battalion was stationed in Corfu. He bought his discharge from the army in 1854 and was immediately employed by the officers of 1/95th as civilian bandmaster. Miller went to the Crimea with his battalion, and his bandsmen were used as stretcher-bearers, work so arduous that the band was reduced in strength from forty-five to sixteen men in a year. He handed over the remnants to Bugle-Major Peachey, who took responsibility for bandsmen and buglers alike, and set off home to raise a new band. When 1/95th returned to England with just twelve bandsmen and a handful of buglers Miller had trained forty new bandsmen. He later boasted ‘My turn with the 1st Battalion was from ’28 to ’80, that was 52 years service; never away from the green jackets, at home or abroad.’18