Originally Posted by
The Times March 27, 2006
Goodbye to the Black Watch
By Philip Howard
“SAY something, laddie, even if it’s only ‘Goodbye’!” screamed the purple sergeant-major in a Black Watch kilt. The officer cadet was dithering to time his command of “Abooowt TURN” as the left feet of the squad hit the tarmac. His squad was marching rapidly towards noyade in the Tweed. On Tuesday we say goodbye to 281 years of history, as the Black Watch is subsumed with the other Highland and Lowland regiments into the new Royal Regiment of Scotland, which will comprise just five Scottish infantry battalions. Major- General Euan Loudon, GOC 2 Division, whose area of command will then stretch down into the middle of England, will present his new battalions with their cap badges and glengarries. And the Black Watch, Royal Highland Regiment (“the Ladies from Hell”) will hold its final clan gathering in Perth before it loses its red hackle and becomes plain 3 Scots.
It is impossible to exaggerate the pain and rage that this is causing to the old and bold of the Watch. A regiment is an extended family. Its warrior spirit and discipline have sustained the family in victory and defeat, in peace and war, in barracks or in camp, in billets or in bivouac, from Ticonderoga to Basra, since it was formed to police the Highlands after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. Black for the tartan, Am Freiceadan Dubh, to distinguish them from the redcoats.
And not just the Black Watch, which raised a million and a half signatures in a month in its recruiting area for a petition to preserve its identity. The King’s Own Scottish Borderers started a court case to argue that, since they were formed in 1689 under a Scottish Parliament, they could not be ordered to amalgamate with the Royal Scots by the United Parliament at Westminster.
The Royal Scots, the First of Foot, are known as Pontius Pilate’s bodyguard. Legend has it that Pilate was the son of a Roman legionary from the Wall and a Highland lass from Fortingall in Tayside. When in French service as Le Régiment de Douglas, a dispute arose with the Régiment de Picardie as to which was the senior. An officer of the Picardies claimed that his regiment was on duty on the night of the Crucifixion. The Colonel of the Scots replied: “Aye, and if it had been our turn for duty, we’d no have slept at our post.”
This is not the first occasion that the Black Watch have felt betrayed. Their original companies were recruited on the understanding that they would serve only in the Highlands. But in 1743 they were marched to London, and learnt that they were to be posted to the deathtrap of Jamaica. More than a hundred mutinied and set off to march back to their Highlands. They got as far as Oundle before the Dragoons caught up with them. The four “ringleaders” were hanged. The rest were drafted to regiments in the hotter postings in the War of the Austrian Succession. Not many took the high road to the Highlands again.
The Watch don’t do mutiny any more. Of course they will march wherever they are ordered. They always have. The regimental bagpipe bayonet tune is The Black Bear, which has pauses for the Jocks to scream their battlecry as they charge towards the flames at Quatre Bras or El Alamein.
Major Colin Innes, whose family have soldiered in the Watch for generations, says: “We will support the Black Watch battalion of the new large regiment. But ‘we hae mony doots’ about its future. We are duty-bound to wish it well. But soldiering will be very different from that experienced by the family, who have been trying to retain that which they loved about their regimental soldiering.”
The stramash will not do Gordon Brown much good in his constituency, which lies in Black Watch recruiting territory. The Army would never have dared to sack the Black Watch while the Queen Elizabeth Queen Mother, whose brothers and uncles fought and died with the Watch, was alive. Field Marshal Lord Wavell, who, like the Queen Mother, was Colonel of the Regiment, said: “It will be a sad day and an evil day for the British Infantry if the reformers ever succeed in weakening or destroying the regimental tradition.” So goodbye, Black Watch. And thank you, in blood and tears.
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