Recruitment poster for The Royal Sussex Regiment, 1929. In time of peace it was difficult to recruit men on ideological grounds alone: this recruitment poster appeals to prospective soldiers’ love of sport.
The Royal Sussex Regiment possessed all the trappings of a quintessential English county regiment. Its headquarters and depot at Roussillon Barracks were situated in Chichester and through that connection the regiment had an enduring connection with the county of Sussex and its people. However, beneath such orderly traditions the regiment had a rather less settled past. It began life in 1881 as the result of the amalgamation of two very different infantry regiments – the 35th (Royal Sussex) Regiment of Foot and the 107th Bengal Light Infantry Regiment. While it was not uncommon for English regiments to amalgamate with former regiments of the Honourable East India Company, the senior regiment in the partnership had a peripatetic history. It was formed in Ulster in 1701 as the Earl of Donegal’s Regiment of Foot, wore orange facings in its uniform and was sometimes referred to as the Belfast Regiment. In 1782, for reasons which have never been explained, it became the 35th (Dorsetshire) Foot and it was not until 1805 that it received Sussex as its territorial designation. The change came about as a result of the influence of Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond, who had joined the regiment in 1787. Not only did he recruit Sussex men from his family estate at nearby Goodwood but he also obtained George III’s permission for the title ‘Sussex’ to be transferred from the 25th Regiment of Foot to the 35th. (In time the 25th became The King’s Own Scottish Borderers.)
Recruitment poster for The Royal Sussex Regiment, 1929. In time of peace it was difficult to recruit men on ideological grounds alone: this recruitment poster appeals to prospective soldiers’ love of sport.
Roussillon Barracks remained the regimental home until 1960 when The Royal Sussex moved to Canterbury in Kent and their Chichester home was modernised and extended to become the headquarters of the Royal Military Police. Now part of a housing development following the army’s departure in 2005, the barracks occupy a unique place in British military history. In June 1982, following the Falklands War, they provided secure accommodation for Commander Alfredo Astiz, an officer in the Argentine Navy responsible for the invasion of South Georgia, who, before he was repatriated to Argentina in 2011, was the first prisoner of war to be held in Britain since 1945.
Although the 35th was raised for service in Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession it first came to prominence in North America in the 1750s when Britain was fighting the French for possession of the colonies. It was a story that began with disaster and ended in triumph. In the summer of 1757 the 35th was part of a force occupying Fort William Henry, a strategic garrison in the province of New York which was attacked by larger French forces under the command of General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm. Forced to surrender on 9 August, the British commander, Colonel George Forbes, agreed to a surrender which would have allowed the defenders to leave Fort William Henry with all the honours of war and their reputations intact. It was not to be. The Native Americans cared little about European standards of behaviour and promptly set about killing many of the survivors. Despite Montcalm’s attempts to restore order and save lives, around two hundred soldiers and camp followers were slaughtered before they could leave Fort William Henry and the 35th was almost wiped out. The incident was vividly portrayed in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
Two years later the 35th gained their revenge when they were on the right of the army commanded by General James Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham fought on 13 September 1759 to capture Quebec. The steady fire of the 35th helped to break the French lines which included the Royal Roussillon Regiment, one of the regiments at Fort William Henry. As the French soldiers fled from the field the 35th advanced and, according to regimental tradition, picked up their white plumes and placed them in their own headdresses. When The Royal Sussex regiment came into being the distinctive Roussillon Plume was incorporated into its badge. The regiment was again in North America during the War of Independence and had the distinction of remaining undefeated throughout three years of fighting. It was honoured with a royal title in 1832, becoming the 35th (Royal Sussex) Foot.
The other regiment in the partnership started life in 1765 as the 3rd Bengal European Regiment which was one of the first to be armed, clothed and drilled in the European fashion. A light infantry title was granted after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and in 1862 it transferred to the British Army as 107th Regiment (Bengal Light Infantry). Its only Victoria Cross was won by Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General Sir) John Carstairs McNeill, during the invasion of Waikato, a campaign in the Maori war of 1863-66. A native of the island of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides, McNeill rescued his orderly from certain death while under heavy enemy fire. After amalgamation with the Royal Sussex, the 107th became the new regiment’s 2nd Battalion.
Trumpeters of a battalion of The Royal Sussex Regiment wearing battle dress ‘somewhere in England’ during the ‘Phoney War’ in March 1940.
During both the world wars of the twentieth century The Royal Sussex raised additional battalions for operational service on all the main battlefronts – twenty-three in the First World War and fourteen in the Second World War. Perhaps the most poignant action was the Battle of the Boar’s Head, a diversionary attack on an obscure salient in the German lines around the tiny village of Richebourg-l’Avoué in northern France, which is barely mentioned in any of the war histories. It was fought on 30 June 1916, the day before the Battle of the Somme began, and it involved three Royal Sussex battalions, the 11th, 12th and 13th, all ‘South Downs Pals’ from the same county who were going into the attack for the first time.
Following the usual bombardment of the German trenches, the 12th and 13th Battalions went into the attack and immediately faced heavy German machine-gun fire. Supported by the 11th Battalion they succeeded in taking the German front line trench, holding it for some five hours. During this phase of the fighting Company Sergeant Major Nelson Victor Carter from Hailsham rallied his men and would later be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Before the war he worked as a commissionaire at the Old Town Cinema in Eastbourne, the first in the town, and there is a blue plaque in his memory at his home at 33 Greys Road.
Only steadily mounting casualties and a shortage of ammunition forced the men of the three South Downs battalions to retire but their cussedness came at a terrible price: they lost 17 officers and 349 men killed with almost a thousand more wounded or taken prisoner. Among the casualties were twelve sets of brothers; one family lost three sons. With good reason this unnecessary battle was memorialised as ‘The Day Sussex Died’.
One of the officers present was Edmund Blunden who served in the 11th Battalion and later became a leading war poet. In his memoir Undertones of War he quoted a sentry who responded to a general’s query about the battle by saying, ‘It was like a butcher’s shop.’ The other notable writer associated with the regiment was Richard Aldington whose autobiographical novel, Death of Hero, is one of the great novels of the First World War.
On 31 December 1966 the regiment was amalgamated with other Home Counties regiments to form The Queen’s Regiment. Further changes came in 1992 when The Queen’s amalgamated with The Royal Hampshire Regiment to form The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment. On amalgamation the Regimental Colours were laid up in Chichester Cathedral. For a flavour of what a traditional English county regiment represented it is worth visiting The Royal Sussex Regimental Museum at the Eastbourne Redoubt in Eastbourne, built on the site of Napoleonic Wars coastal defences.
Gibraltar 1704–05, Louisburg, Quebec 1759, Martinique 1762, Havannah, St. Lucia 1778, Maida, Egypt 1882, Abu Klea, Nile 1884–85, South Africa 1900–02
Mons, Retreat from Mons, Marne 1914, 18, Aisne 1914, Ypres 1914, 17, 18, Gheluvelt, Nonne Bosschen, Givenchy 1914, Aubers, Loos, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, 18, Bazentin, Delville Wood, Pozières, Flers-Courcelette, Morval, Thiepval, Le Transloy, Ancre Heights, Ancre 1916, 18, Arras 1917, 18, Vimy 1917, Scarpe 1917, Arleux, Messines 1917, Pilckem, Langemarck 1917, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele, Cambrai 1917, 18, St. Quentin, Bapaume 1918, Rosières, Avre, Lys, Kemmel, Scherpenberg, Soissonais-Ourcq, Amiens, Drocourt-Quéant, Hindenburg Line, Èpéhy, St. Quentin Canal, Beaurevoir, Courtrai, Selle, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Piave, Vittorio Veneto, Italy 1917–18, Suvla, Landing at Suvla, Scimitar Hill, Gallipoli 1915, Rumani, Egypt 1915–17, Gaza, El Mughar, Jerusalem, Jericho, Tell ‘Asur, Palestine 1917–18, N.W. Frontier India 1915, 1916–17, Murman 1918–19
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Afghanistan 1919
Defence of Escaut, Amiens 1940, St. Omer-La Bassée, Forêt de Nieppe, North-West Europe 1940, Karora-Marsa Taclai, Cub Cub, Mescelit Pass, Keren, Mt. Engiahat, Massawa, Abyssinia 1941, Omars, Benghazi, Alam el Halfa, El Alamein, Akarit, Djebel el Meida, Tunis, North Africa 1940–43, Cassino I, Monastery Hill, Gothic Line, Pian di Castello, Monte Reggiano, Italy 1944–45, North Arakan, Pinwe, Shweli, Burma 1943–45
Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General) John Carstairs McNeill, 107th Regiment, Maori War, 1864
Sergeant Harry Wells, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1915
Lieutenant Eric McNair, 9th Battalion, First World War, 1916
Company Sergeant Major Nelson Carter, 12th Battalion, First World War, 1916
Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General) Dudley Johnson, The South Wales Borderers, Commanding 2nd Royal Sussex, First World War, 1918
Captain Lionel Ernest Queripel, The Royal Sussex Regiment, attached 10th Parachute Regiment, Second World War, 1944
