Regimental Identities

[Steven Broomfield]

Interesting piece in today's Times: Here

[Pete1052]

Should the link above not work try clicking here. The article mentions the London Scottish, which today is a company and not a regiment, and is said to have let all manner of dodgy people in since 1945.

[ianjonesncl]

The Ogliby Trust mentioned on the site provides a good listing of Army Museums

Museum search by Museum, Regiment or Region and a good book search by Arm or Service. For those interested in the Territorial Force, the book search also provides a Listing of units administered by County Association

[Steven Broomfield]

The rotters seem to have removed the link.

And I'll ignore the slur on the composition of London's premier Territorial unit. Some of my best friends were in the London Jocks.

[Steven Broomfield]

Let's see if This one works

[Staffsyeoman]

Nope. None of the links now work.

[Steven Broomfield]

Try Googling "Military Indenties Times".

[AlanCurragh]

The links seem fine now

[Pete1052]

From The Times

January 9, 2010

Regimental identities and fighting spirit

Allan Mallinson

Military dress regulations and what a soldier actually wears are not always the same thing, so life paintings of soldiers in the days before colour photography are of special importance. Just published is a remarkable collection of work by the Scottish artist Archibald Haswell Miller, from the decade before 1914, “a period of military elegance soon to be eclipsed by the horrors of the First World War”, says the foreword.

Vanished Armies: A Record of Military Uniform Observed and Drawn in Various European Countries During the Years 1907 to 1914, is, with its realistic figure drawings, vivid colour and artist’s notes, a fascinating, handsome volume. It was published at the behest of the Army Museum’s Ogilby Trust, to which many of the paintings were bequeathed by the artist’s daughter.

Haswell Miller trained at the Glasgow School of Art from 1906 to 1908 before studying in Paris, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. During his travels he painted the dress and service uniforms of the French, German, Austrian and Italian armies, as well as of the minor European powers, and extensively of the British Army in which no two regiments were ever dressed alike.

After the Great War, in which he served with distinction in that most romantic, if many-sided, of regiments, the Highland Light Infantry, Haswell Miller was commissioned by the recently established Imperial War Museum to paint 65 watercolour groups along the same lines, and these, along with the work of a small number of professional artists such as Harry Payne, laid the foundations for the serious study of uniforms in the creation of the Society for Army Historical Research.

For the last 25 years of his life — he died in 1979 — Haswell Miller was artistic adviser to the Ogilby Trust. The trust had been founded in 1954 by Colonel Robert Ogilby, whose experiences in the two world wars convinced him that the fighting spirit of the British soldier was rooted in the esprit de corps engendered by the Army’s regimental system, and that this spirit was best spread abroad through the nascent regimental and corps museums. With his own money, dynamism and fine fighting record, Ogilby steered the trust through its early days of official, if benign, War Office scepticism, and it came to play a significant part in the establishment and development of 136 such museums in Britain.

Besides being a grant-making body, funded largely by charitable contributions, the trust is the focus for professional advice to military museums and acts as the interface with the Ministry of Defence, which now subsidises the running costs of half the museums in recognition of their role in providing a “military footprint” in parts of the country where the Army would not otherwise be seen.

Last year, for example, about 400,000 children visited military museums, many of them as part of the National Curriculum Key Stages 1 and 2, to answer the questions: What was it like for children and their families on the Home Front in the Second World War? and What is it we are remembering on Poppy Day?

The museums are as varied and individual as the regiments and corps they represent. Some, such as the Tank Museum at its new, purpose-built complex at Bovington in Dorset, with its daily working displays of armoured fighting vehicles, are like vast out-of-town supermarkets. Others, such as that of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars/Light Dragoons, in a wing of Cannon Hall Museum near Barnsley, are more akin to the sub-post office housed in the local convenience store. But all of them tell an essentially human story.

Colonel Ogilby, who died in 1964, served with the London Scottish, a Territorial Army regiment raised in the 19th century from Scots living in the capital. It drew on the traditions of the regular Highland regiments but forged its own independent-minded identity, not least by adopting Hodden grey for its kilt rather than tartan, thereby avoiding inter-clan feeling. Throughout Ogilby’s service there were ten distinct regiments of Scottish infantry; now there is only one — The Royal Regiment of Scotland — albeit with five battalions incorporating the names of their antecedents. One of the challenges facing all the infantry of the line today, for all have recently been amalgamated into larger units, is how to preserve the heritage of their former identities when their regimental recruiting areas are now so much larger and support several museums of former regiments. It is a question likewise exercising the Ogilby Trust, and for the same reason as its founder’s vision: preserving fighting spirit by preserving operational heritage.

For more information on the work of the Ogilby Trust visit its website, armymuseums.org.uk. To order a copy of Vanished Armies, price £20, go to shirebooks.co.uk

[squirrel]

It is much less expensive on Amazon - buy it if you wish through the link on the donations page and support the Forum.

[Staffsyeoman]

I got a review copy of this (don't forget, his work was published in a series of IWM postcards in the 70s) but what is heartbreaking is that a batch was produced with one plate duplicated, and an insert was rushed out. A splendid work - the artist's eye translates what dress regulations never can merely in words. It's quite a branch out for Shire - who normally produce those excellent booklets you see in museums - to go into full books. Encourage them, is my recommendation...

[squirrel]

Book arrived this morning and it is excellent - except that I received a copy with the duplicated plate.

Returned to Amazon.