Bugler and privates of 2nd Battalion The Royal Scots in marching and drill order, Aldershot 1890. The Royals was the oldest line infantry regiment in the British Army.
First of Foot, Right of the Line, The Royal Scots was the oldest line infantry regiment in the British Army, having been founded on 28 March 1633, and it enjoyed that distinction until 28 March 2006 when The Royal Regiment of Scotland came into being with five Regular battalions and two Territorial battalions. The new regiment’s 1st Battalion was named The Royal Scots Borderers to perpetuate the titles of both The Royal Scots and The King’s Own Scottish Borderers (25th), founded in 1689 as The Edinburgh Regiment, which drew its recruits from Scotland’s Border counties. Given the great longevity of The Royal Scots it is not surprising that the regiment’s best known nickname was ‘Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard’. The origins are lost in the mists of time but the most credible version stems from a dispute involving the French Regiment of Picardy over the right of precedence - by longstanding military tradition the senior regiment always stands on the right of the line. While the two regiments were serving together in French service an officer in the Picardy Regiment employed the nickname ‘Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard’ as an insult and added for good measure that the Scots must have been asleep at their posts while guarding Christ’s body after the crucifixion. ‘You must be mistaken, sir,’ retorted a Royal Scots officer, ‘for had we really been the Guards of Pontius Pilate and done duty at the sepulchre, the Holy Body had never left it.’
As well as being the oldest infantry regiment in the British Army with a history of service to seventeen British monarchs - from King Charles I to Queen Elizabeth II - and a list of battle honours stretching back to the seventeenth century, the Royal Scots, or ‘Royals’, also have the distinction of serving two French kings, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Following its formation in 1633 by Sir John Hepburn, an East Lothian landowner and mercenary soldier, the regiment was sent into French service as the Regiment de Hebron to fight in the Thirty Years War and did not return to Scotland until 1678 following the earlier restoration of Charles II. Throughout the eighteenth century the regiment saw almost continuous service fighting in Europe, North America and the West Indies. Its 2nd Battalion was part of the government army that defeated the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746 and one of its private soldiers, Alexander Taylor, produced a graphic account of the fighting in a letter to his wife in which he described the ‘most dreadful Havock’ inflicted on the rebels.
During the campaigns against France in Europe the Royals played a prominent role and some engaging characters emerged from the ranks. Shortly before the Battle of Malplaquet, fought on 11 September 1709, one soldier named Donald McBain discovered that his wife had given birth to a son and then declared that she was leaving him. Nothing daunted, McBain put the three-week-old baby in his knapsack and both came through the fighting unscathed. (Not only did the Royals have the youngest participant in the battle, they also had the oldest in William Hiseland, a veteran of eighty-nine.) Master McBain (as Donald McBain was styled) also supplemented his income by running a fencing school and was frequently in trouble. In an incident in Edinburgh involving ‘women and gaming’, he outfought four assailants by giving one of them ‘a Thrust in the Buttocks’ and then escaping into the Fleshmarket. McBain later wrote an entertaining memoir of his life as a soldier.
Until the reforms of the British infantry between 1873 and 1881 the Royals had no specific base, but under the Cardwell/Childers reforms it became The Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment) with its main recruiting area designated as Edinburgh and the Lothian counties. A more enduring change was the establishment of a permanent depot at Glencorse in Penicuik to the south of Edinburgh, still an important military facility and now home to the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland. Over the years much has changed at Glencorse but still standing are the memorial gates to the 11,213 Royal Scots who fell during the First World War. These were consecrated in 1927; five years earlier the Royal Scots Memorial Club had been opened in Abercromby Place in Edinburgh as a permanent and practical reminder of the regiment’s sacrifices during the conflict. It is now a private establishment but still bears the regimental name.
During the First World War more than 100,000 men served in the regiment which fought on all the battlefronts except for Salonika and East and West Africa. A total of seventy-one battle honours were granted and six Royal Scots were awarded the Victoria Cross. Among them was Robert Dunsire, a miner from Fife, who showed exceptional courage and initiative during the Battle of Loos in September 1915 by twice going out into no-man’s-land while under heavy enemy fire to bring in wounded comrades. He was later killed in a trench mortar attack and is buried in the Mazingarbe Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery near Lens in France.
Bugler and privates of 2nd Battalion The Royal Scots in marching and drill order, Aldershot 1890. The Royals was the oldest line infantry regiment in the British Army.
One of the most compelling manifestations of the volunteer principle was the formation of the 15th and 16th Battalions, which were raised by two prominent Edinburgh businessmen, respectively Sir Robert Cranston and Sir George McCrae. Both battalions came into being in late 1914 and went on to serve on the Western Front but McCrae’s battalion was unique in that it contained a large number of footballers, most of whom played for one of the Edinburgh clubs, Heart of Midlothian, better known as Hearts. Shortly after the battalion was raised, one of the new recruits penned some verse for McCrae to read out when he appeared in uniform at a special performance of the annual Christmas pantomime at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh: ‘Do not ask where Hearts are playing and then look at me askance. If it’s football that you’re wanting, you must come with us to France’. By then McCrae had recruited more than a thousand officers and men and his battalion assembled in Edinburgh’s George Street on 15 December 1914, each volunteer being told to bring ‘one pair good Boots, Topcoat, two pairs Socks, and shaving outfit’. The battalion saw action from the Battle of the Somme to the end of the war and suffered more than 800 casualties. In many respects, McCrae’s was the original ‘footballers’ battalion’: in addition to Heart of Midlothian, it also had players from Hibernian, Dunfermline Athletic and East Fife as well as from several junior clubs. (See also The Middlesex Regiment.) In 2004 a memorial cairn to McCrae’s Battalion was unveiled in the village of Contalmaison on the Somme where it first went into action on 1 July 1916.
In the 1970s and 1980s, at the height of the ‘Troubles’, 1st Battalion The Royal Scots was regularly deployed in Northern Ireland. A patrol of B Company receives orders on a street in Belfast.
No less moving is the story of 7th Royal Scots, a Territorial battalion from Leith which was involved in a railway accident while on its way to serve in Gallipoli. The train carrying half the battalion collided with another train at Quintinshill Junction, near Gretna, in the early morning of 22 May 1915 and, as the survivors struggled to get clear, the wreckage was hit by an overnight express from London to Glasgow. Fires broke out and the death toll rose rapidly: 3 officers and 207 soldiers killed; 5 officers and 219 soldiers injured, and the battalion had to travel to Gallipoli at half strength. When the funerals were held in Leith’s Rosebank Cemetery, Edinburgh’s port area was in mourning with blinds drawn, shops closed and huge crowds lining the route of the funeral procession. At the time it was the biggest disaster in British railway history; it was, too, a terrible blow for a city which would soon be mourning even greater numbers of Royal Scots’ casualties from Gallipoli and the autumn battles in Flanders.
The regiment’s last major operational deployment came in 1991 when it was part of the UN forces sent to liberate Kuwait following the invasion ordered by President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Tangier 1680, Namur 1695, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, Louisburg, Havannah, Egmost-op-Zee, St Lucia 1803, Corunna, Maheidpor, Busaco, Salamanca, Vittoria, St Sebastian, Nive, Peninsula, Niagara, Waterloo, Nagpore, Ava, Alma, Inkerman, Sevastopol, Taku Forts, Pekin 1860, South Africa 1899–1902
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Mons, Le Cateau, Retreat from Mons, Marne 1914, 18, Aisne 1914, Le Bassée 1914, Neuve Chapelle Ypres 1915, 1917, 18, Gravenstafel, St Julien, Frezenburg, Bellewaarde, Aubers, Festubert 1915, Loos, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, 18, Bazentin, Flers-Courcelette, Le Transloy, Ancre Heights, Ancre 1916, 18, Arras 1917–18, Scarpe 1917, 18, Arleux, Pilckem, Langemarck 1917, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele, Cambrai 1917, St Quentin, Rosieres, Lys, Estaires, Messines 1918, Hazebrouck, Bailleul, Kemmel, Bethune, Soissonnais-Ourcq, Tardenois, Amiens, Bapaume 1918, Drocourt-Queant, Hindenburg Line, Canal du Nord, St Quentin Canal, Beaurevoir, Courtrai, Selle, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Struma, Macedonia 1915–18, Helles, Landing at Helles, Krithia, Suvla, Scimitar Hill, Gallipoli 1915–16, Rumani, Egypt 1915–16, Gaza, El Mughar, Nebi Samwil, Jaffa, Palestine 1917–18, Archangel 1918–19
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Dyle, Defence of Escaut, St Omer-La Bassee, Odon, Cheux, Defence of Rauray, Caen, Esquay, Mont Pincon, Aart, Nederrijn, Best, Scheldt, Flushing, Meijil, Venlo Pocket, Roer, Rhineland, Reichswald, Cleve, Goch, Rhine, Uelzen, Bremen, Artlenberg, North-West Europe 1940, 44–45, Gothic Line, Marradi, Monte Gamberaldi, Italy 1944–45, South East Asia 1941, Donbaik, Kohima, Relief of Kohima, Aradura, Schwebo, Mandalay, Burma 1943–45
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Gulf 1991, Wadi Al Batin
Private Henry Howey Robson 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1914
Lance Corporal William Angus, 8th Battalion, First World War, 1915
Private Robert Dunsire, 13th Battalion, First World War, 1915
Captain Henry Reynolds, 12th Battalion, First World War, 1917
Private Hugh McIver, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1918
Corporal (later Major) Roland Edward Elcock, 11th Battalion, First World War, 1918
Lieutenant David Stuart Macgregor, 6th Battalion, First World War, 1918
