Renowned as the ‘Fighting Fifth’, The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers had a proud history of active service, with a list of sixty-seven battle honours running from Wilhelmsthal in 1762 during the Seven Years War (a battle honour unique to the regiment) to Imjin during the Korean War of 1950-53. With its distinctive red over white hackle and grenade cap badge, the regiment was always instantly recognisable but, as successive generations of soldiers have argued, deeds rather than details of uniform matter. The regiment was raised in 1674 for service with the army of the Dutch Republic and was known as the Irish Regiment, or Clare’s Regiment, after its founder, Daniel O’Brian, 3rd Viscount Clare, who was attainted in 1691 after supporting the claims of James II against William of Orange. He was succeeded as Colonel by Sir John Fenwick, of Wallington in Northumberland, but he did not last long either, being attainted and then executed for his support of the Jacobite cause. In 1685 the regiment joined the English military establishment, adopting St George and the dragon as its emblem and using it on its Regimental Colour and drums instead of the more usual Royal Cypher employed by other line infantry regiments.
It was not until 1782, by which time it had become the 5th Regiment of Foot, that the regiment cemented its association with the county of Northumberland as a compliment to its Colonel, Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland, a prominent Northumbrian landowner. A further change came on 4 May 1836 when William IV ordered that the regiment should be designated as Fusiliers, a singular honour that had its origins in the development of the infantry regiments of the British Army – originally Fusiliers were armed with the flintlock fusil instead of the more common matchlock musket and were specialist infantrymen who guarded the artillery train.
By then the regiment’s links with Northumberland were well established. Not only did it use part of Alnwick Castle as its depot but during the American War of Independence its Colonel was Hugh, Earl Percy, soon to become 2nd Duke of Northumberland. Although unprepossessing in appearance – he suffered from gout and had poor eyesight – young Percy was a professional soldier to his fingertips and entertained radical ideas about the military profession. In particular his views on discipline were ahead of their time, prompting one observer to note: ‘He detested corporal punishments. At a time when other commanders were resorting to floggings and firing squads on Boston Common, he led his regiment by precept and example.’
Perhaps the most unusual soldier during the regiment’s deployment in North America was Phoebe Hessel, from Stepney in London, who disguised herself as a man in order to be with her lover, Samuel Golding, a soldier in the 5th Foot. She fought at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, where she was wounded in the arm, but her prior identity was discovered when she was stripped to the waist prior to being flogged as part of a punishment. Although she said ‘strike and be damned’ she was instead admonished and duly discharged. In her retirement she married Golding and they had nine children. She then moved to Brighton where she became a local celebrity and received a pension from the Prince Regent. Phoebe Hessel died in 1821 at the grand old age of 108.
On returning from America, the regiment played a prominent role in the Peninsular War, during which it gained a new nickname, ‘Lord Wellington’s Bodyguard’, bestowed upon it because of great courage displayed while beating off a determined French attack at El Bodón in 1811. In his despatches Wellington described the regiment’s action as a ‘memorable example of what can be done by steadiness, discipline, and confidence’. Later in the century, in 1857, the regiment served during the Indian Mutiny, receiving the battle honour ‘Lucknow’, and it also fought in the Second Afghan War of 1878-80. In the former campaign in India the regiment received the first of nine Victoria Crosses won by men of The Northumberland Fusiliers. These were awarded to Patrick McHale and Peter McManus during the relief of the garrison at Lucknow. As with so many soldiers in English and Scottish regiments at that time, both men were Irish: McHale was from Killala in County Mayo, McManus from Tynan in County Armagh. Both medals were awarded for courage under fire but each occurred in different circumstances: on 26 September McManus provided covering fire for a party of wounded men after the building in which they were sheltering was set on fire; during the capture of the Cawnpore Battery, McHale seized a rebel gun at Alum Bagh and turned it on the retreating mutineers. However, service in India came at a price: during the twenty years that the regiment served on the subcontinent 232 of their number succumbed to disease, many of them without hearing a shot fired in anger.
Men of 1st Battalion The Northumberland Fusiliers after the Battle of St Eloi on 27 March 1916. Following the detonation of several mines under the German lines, the attacking troops rushed to take the craters. Although the initial advance went well, the attack eventually became bogged down in the waterlogged landscape.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, the Fighting Fifth expanded enormously, raising fifty-two battalions, twenty-nine of which served overseas. Making full use of the numbers of Scots and Irish who worked in the north-east, the regiment raised four battalions (20th to 23rd Northumberland Fusiliers), which served as the Tyneside Scottish Brigade, and a further four (24th to 27th Northumberland Fusiliers), which served as the Tyneside Irish Brigade. A member of the organising committee noted that when the Tyneside Scottish battalions were recruited ‘there could be no more moving spectacle than that afforded by bodies of men marching into Newcastle from outlying villages for enlistment in the Brigade; one group of about ninety miners so marching nine or ten miles into the city headed by some of their men playing mouth organs’.
Both brigades saw action at the Battle of the Somme where they sustained heavy casualties. After the war the Colours of the Tyneside Irish were laid up in Newcastle’s Cathedral Church of St Mary. One of its men, Lance Corporal Thomas Bryan, had played rugby league for Castleford before the war and was awarded the Victoria Cross after he knocked out a German machine-gun position during the Battle of Arras in April 1917. The enthusiasm of the men of the north-east to join up came at a heavy price: during the First World War, The Northumberland Fusiliers suffered some 16,000 casualties, one of the highest regimental totals in the British Army. Their sacrifice is commemorated by the City War Memorial in Old Eldon Square in Newcastle and also by ‘The Response’ memorial which shows soldiers marching off to war beneath the figure of a winged angel. It stands in the grounds of the Church of St Thomas the Martyr and was erected from funds provided by the shipping magnate Sir George Renwick whose sons served in The Northumberland Fusiliers. In 1935 the regiment received a royal title, becoming The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers.
The regiment’s proud history came to an end in 1968 when it became the 1st Battalion of The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers but, fittingly, it was in action to the very last. In 1950 it formed part of 29 Infantry Brigade in the Korean War along with 1st Gloucestershire Regiment and 1st Royal Ulster Rifles; and in 1967 it was one of the last regiments to leave the British colony of Aden. Towards the end of its tour in June, 1st Royal Northumberland Fusiliers lost four men when a joint patrol was ambushed by mutinous members of the Aden police force.
Unlike most other infantry regiments The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers possessed a third colour in honour of its conduct at the Battle of Wilhelmsthal which was carried on parade by a drummer every St George’s Day. On amalgamation, the Regimental Colours were laid up in the Cathedral Church of St Nicholas in Newcastle. The regimental museum is located in Abbot’s Tower at Alnwick Castle.
Full dress parade of 1st Battalion The Northumberland Fusiliers in Portsmouth in January 1914. Eight months later the battalion had crossed over to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force and was in action in the opening Battle of Mons.
Wilhelmsthal, St Lucia, 1778, Rolica, Vimiera, Corunna, Busaco, Salamanca, Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, Vittoria, Nivelle, Orthes, Toulouse, Peninsula, Lucknow, Afghanistan 1878–80, Khartoum, Modder River, South Africa 1899–1902
Those in bold carried on Queen’s Colour
Mons, Le Cateau, Retreat from Mons, Marne 1914, Aisne 1914,18, La Bassée 1914, Messines 1914, 17, 18, Armentières 1914, Ypres 1914, 15, 17, 18, Nonne Bosschen, Gravenstafel, St. Julien, Frezenberg, Bellewaarde, Loos, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, 18, Bazentin, Delville Wood, Pozières, Flers-Courcelette, Morval, Thiepval, Le Transloy, Ancre Heights, Ancre 1916, Arras 1917, 18, Scarpe 1917, 18, Arleux, Pilckem, Langemarck 1917, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Passchendaele, Cambrai 1917–18, St. Quentin, Bapaume 1918, Rosières, Lys, Estaires, Hazebrouck, Bailleul, Kemmel, Béthune, Scherpenberg, Drocourt Quéant, Hindenburg Line, Èpéhy, Canal du Nord, St. Quentin Canal, Beaurevoir, Courtrai, Selle, Valenciennes, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Piave, Vittorio Veneto, Italy 1917–18, Struma, Macedonia 1915–18, Suvla, Landing at Suvla, Scimitar Hill, Gallipoli 1915, Egypt 1916–17
Those in bold carried on Queen’s Colour
Defence of Escaut, Arras Counter Attack, St. Omer-La Bassée, Dunkirk 1940, Odon, Caen, Cagny, Falaise, Nederrijn, Rhineland, North-West Europe 1940, 44–45, Sidi Barrani, Defence of Tobruk, Tobruk 1941, Belhamed, Cauldron, Ruweisat Ridge, El Alamein, Advance on Tripoli, Medenine, North Africa 1940–43, Salerno, Volturno Crossing, Monte Camino, Garigliano Crossing, Cassino II, Italy 1943–45, Singapore Island
Carried on Regimental Colour
Seoul, Imjin, Kowang-San, Korea 1950–51
Private Robert Grant, 5th Regiment Indian Mutiny, 1857
Private Patrick McHale, 5th Regiment, Indian Mutiny, 1857
Sergeant Peter McManus, 5th Regiment, Indian Mutiny, 1857
Private Ernest Sykes, 27th Battalion, First World War, 1917
Lance Corporal Thomas Bryan, 25th Battalion, First World War, 1917
2nd Lieutenant James Bulmer Johnson, 36th Battalion, First World War, 1918
Private Wilfred Wood, 10th Battalion, First World War, 1918
2nd Lieutenant John Scott Youll, 1st Battalion, First World War, 1918
Captain James Joseph Bernard Jackman, 1st Battalion, Second World War, 1941
