Church service for 1st Battalion The King’s Regiment (Liverpool) during the Boer War in 1900. In the latter stages of the conflict the battalion operated mainly in the Eastern Transvaal.
One of only four British infantry regiments to have been associated with a city rather than a county, The King’s Regiment was formed in 1685 by Lord Ferrers of Chartley as Princess Anne of Denmark’s Regiment in honour of James II’s daughter, the future Queen Anne. In 1716 it became The King’s Regiment and was granted the privilege of wearing the White Horse of Hanover as its cap badge. It was numbered 8th (The King’s Regiment) in 1751 and its first territorial attachment to Liverpool came in 1873. At the culmination of the Cardwell/Childers reforms it was given the title The King’s (Liverpool Regiment) with two Regular battalions, two Militia battalions and seven Volunteer battalions, including the 7th Isle of Man Volunteers, the only military formation ever to represent that island. The regiment’s first depot was at Peninsula Barracks in Warrington, still used today by the Territorial Army, and in 1911 it opened a sub-depot at Seaforth Barracks at Litherland in Liverpool. These closed in 1958 and were demolished to make way for residential housing but there is an amusing description of the depot in Robert Graves’s wartime novel Goodbye to All That in which he and his brother officers try to imagine what would happen if the neighbouring explosives factory were to be blown up: ‘Most of us held that the shock would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp besides destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle.’
In no other episode in the regiment’s history was the link with Liverpool more important than in the early days of the First World War. On 28 August 1914, in response to Lord Kitchener’s urgent appeal for recruits, the Earl of Derby proposed the formation of special battalions which would recruit men from the same area or workplace in Liverpool: ‘This should be a battalion of Pals, a battalion in which friends from the same office will fight shoulder to shoulder for the honour of Britain and the credit of Liverpool.’ Within a week, thousands of Liverpudlians had volunteered to create the regiment’s 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th Battalions which received the title ‘City of Liverpool’ but were better known as the ‘Liverpool Pals’. Makeshift barracks for the 3,000 volunteers were created at an old watch factory in Prescot, in tents on Hooton Racecourse, in private houses near Sefton Park and ultimately in hastily constructed wooden huts in the grounds of Lord Derby’s Knowsley Hall estate. In the following year it was announced that the four Liverpool Pals battalions would be deploying to the Western Front and excitement was high within the city. Among those leaving was Private W. B. Owens, who wrote to his parents summing up the feelings of many of the Liverpool Pals: ‘Well we’re away at last and ’tho no one feels that it’s a solemn occasion to be in England for perhaps the last time, I think that the predominant feeling in every chap’s heart – in mine at any rate – is one of pride and great content at being chosen to fight and endure for our dear ones and the old country.’ Private Owens was killed in action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916.
The other great manifestation of Liverpool’s support for the war was the regiment’s 10th (Liverpool Scottish) Battalion which was formed of Scots living on Merseyside. With its headquarters in Fraser Street, which were built by public subscription, it had already seen service in the Boer War and its men wore Glengarry bonnets and kilts of Forbes tartan. It was also one of the first battalions of the Territorial Force to cross over to France and it went into action immediately on the Ypres Salient at the beginning of November 1914. One of the battalion’s most famous soldiers was Captain Noel Chevasse RAMC, the doctor son of the Bishop of Liverpool, who was the only man to be awarded a double Victoria Cross during the First World War. Both he and his twin brother, Christopher, had taken part in the 1908 Olympic Games, competing in the 400 metres, and Chevasse Park in Liverpool’s city centre is named in the family’s honour. Another notable Liverpool man in the Liverpool Scottish was the actor Basil Rathbone, scion of the well-known Rathbone family (his uncle was Lord Mayor) and later famous for playing Sherlock Holmes in numerous films. At the end of the war the Liverpool Scottish became a Territorial battalion of Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders but the link with the city was not lost. The headquarters in Fraser Street were retained and were not demolished until 1967, when they made way for a car park, and in 1938 King George VI presented new Colours to the Battalion at a parade held in Liverpool at Goodison Park, the home of Everton Football Club.
Church service for 1st Battalion The King’s Regiment (Liverpool) during the Boer War in 1900. In the latter stages of the conflict the battalion operated mainly in the Eastern Transvaal.
All told, the regiment raised forty-nine battalions for war service and twenty-nine of these served on all the main battlefronts; as a result casualties were disproportionally high – some 13,795 members of the regiment were killed in action during the war. Their sacrifice is commemorated by the imposing Liverpool cenotaph outside St George’s Hall in the city centre, which was unveiled in November 1930. The long bronze reliefs on the memorial were sculpted by Herbert Tyson Smith; the panel facing St George’s Hall depicts men marching off to war, while the one on the opposite, Lime Street, side commemorates those mourning the dead.
At the outbreak of the Second World War the regiment expanded once more, raising ten battalions, two of which served in the artillery and armoured roles. Both the 1st and the 13th Battalions served in Burma as Chindits, the remarkable long-range penetration force devised by Major General Orde Wingate for service behind Japanese lines. Before leaving for India, 13th King’s had been employed on coastal defence duties and many of its men were either middle-aged or had low medical categories. Even so they responded to the challenge of operating in harsh jungle conditions against a vicious enemy and frequently proved their worth, as Private Leonard Grist from the Wirral explained in an interview for the Imperial War Museum. He and the rest of this platoon were making their way back towards India at the end of the operation when they encountered a large Japanese sentry:
He or it, I was never sure, literally screamed at us in broken English ‘pigs you die’, in the high staccato vocal chords singular to the Japanese. Reaching for a grenade, he had just managed to pull out the pin, when with great presence of mind Joe shot him through the forehead. With our minds now on the grenade, we both dived into the bushes either side of the track, sure enough the grenade exploded with a deafening crack, as we peered out we could see our Nip writhing and frothing from his big mouth, he was in his death throes. It was the first time I had ever witnessed a human being slowly leaving our world, he gave a convulsive shudder and rolled over face down into a heap, forever still. I could see a jagged hole the size of the boxers fist in the back of his head, what a mess a .303 bullet could make.
The memorial to the King’s men who served as Chindits stands on the site of the former Harington Barracks in Formby, which served as the regimental depot and infantry training centre during the Second World War. It was demolished in the 1960s to make way for residential housing.
The regiment gained its last battle honour, ‘Korea’, for its service in 1952 and 1953 during which it fought at the Third Battle of the Hook, where Chinese and North Korean casualties were estimated at 1,050 killed and 800 wounded. Five years later The King’s Regiment (Liverpool) amalgamated with The Manchester Regiment to form The King’s Regiment; in 2006 this became the 2nd Battalion of The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment which adopted the King’s old motto Nec Aspera Terrant, which may be translated freely as ‘Difficulties be damned’. On amalgamation, the Colours of The King’s Regiment (Liverpool) were laid up in Liverpool Cathedral.
Men of 7th Battalion The King’s (Liverpool) Regiment in a front line post near La Bassée, 15 March 1918.
Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, Dettingen, Martinique 1809, Niagara, Delhi 1857, Lucknow, Peiwar Kotal, Afghanistan 1878–80, Burma 1885–87, Defence of Ladysmith, South Africa 1899–1902
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Mons, Retreat from Mons, Marne 1914, Aisne 1914, Ypres 1914, 15, 17, Langemarck 1914, 17, Gheluvelt, Nonne Boschen, Neuve Chapelle, Gravenstafel, St Julien, Frezenberg, Bellewaarde, Aubers, Festubert 1915, Loos, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, 18, Bazentin, Deville Wood, Guillemont, Ginchy, Flers-Courcelette, Morval, Le Transloy, Ancre 1916, Bapaume 1917, 18, Arras 1917, 18, Scarpe 1917, 18, Arleux, Pilckem, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele, Cambrai 1917, 18, St. Quentin, Rosières, Avre, Lys, Estaires, Messines 1918, Bailleul, Kemmel, Bethune, Scherpenberg, Drocourt-Queant, Hindenburg Line, Epehy, Canal du Nord, St Quentin Canal, Selle, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Doiran 1917, Macedonia 1915–18, N.W. Frontier, India 1915, Archangel 1918–19
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Afghanistan 1919
Normandy Landing. North-West Europe 1944, Cassino II, Trasimene Line, Tuori, Capture of Forli, Rimini Line, Italy 1944–45, Athens, Greece 1944–45, Chindits 1943, Chindits 1944, Burma 1943–44
Carried on the Regimental Colour
The Hook 1953, Korea 1952–53
Sergeant Harry Hampton, 2nd Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Corporal (later Captain) Henry James Knight, 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Private (later Sergeant) William Edward Heaton 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Lance Corporal Joseph Harcourt Tombs, 1st Battalion, First World War, 1915
2nd Lieutenant Edward Felix Baxter, 1/8th Battalion, First World War, 1916
Private Arthur Herbert Procter, 1/5th Battalion, First World War, 1916
Sergeant David Jones, 12th Battalion, First World War, 1916
Captain Oswald Austin Reid, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1917
Private (later Corporal) Jack Thomas Counter, 1st Battalion, First World War, 1918
