The Mayor of Walsall presenting new drums to 5th Battalion The South Staffordshire Regiment in July 1925.
Staffordshire’s senior county regiment was formed in 1881 as a result of the amalgamation of the 38th (1st Staffordshire) Foot and the 80th (Staffordshire Volunteers) Foot. From the outset the new regiment enjoyed strong links with the county and wore a cap badge that incorporated the traditional Staffordshire three-looped knot, which is also the symbol of the Earls of Stafford. It also began the tradition of having a Staffordshire bull terrier as a mascot. The first was called Boxer. He accompanied the regiment to Egypt and survived a solitary 200-mile trek across the Sudanese desert after leaping from a train and being left for dead while the regiment was being taken south as part of the force to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885. This extraordinary feat encouraged the South Staffords and its successor regiment to have a Staffordshire bull terrier mascot with its own rank of sergeant. After 1949 the dog’s official name was Watchman.
The South Staffords’ story began in 1705 when General Luke Lillingstone raised a regiment of foot using as his headquarters the King’s Head, in Bird Street, Lichfield, thereby beginning a lifelong association with the county of Staffordshire. The pub is still there under the same name but no longer has any official connection with the regiment. In the early years the regiment was known as Lillingstone’s Regiment of Foot; it received the number 38th in 1751 and the Staffordshire territorial connection was added in 1782. Shortly after its foundation, Lillingstone took his regiment to the West Indies, an unpopular posting because of the unhealthy climate and the distance from home. For most of the time it was based on the island of Antigua and it remained there until 1764, making this the longest overseas posting of any regiment in the British Army. It was not an easy time. In addition to the high death toll, clothing wore out very quickly and the only alternative material to make tropical uniforms came from the sacking to store sugar. This unusual improvisation was commemorated in the ‘Holland Patch’ of coarse sacking worn behind the cap badge and on the collar badges of the South Staffordshire Regiment.
On amalgamation the 38th became the new regiment’s 1st Battalion while the younger 80th became its 2nd Battalion. Immediately thereafter the 1st Battalion was sent to Egypt in 1882 as part of the British invasion of the country to restore order following a coup d’état which unseated the Khedive Tewfik Pasha, a key British ally. On landing in Alexandria, 1st South Staffords marched its Regimental Colours through the city, the last time a British regiment would take such action on active service. Three years later, in 1885, the battalion travelled up the River Nile to Sudan in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve Khartoum and rescue General Gordon. It was subsequently involved in the defeat of Arab forces at Kirbekan and that battle was to be the last time that the South Staffords wore red uniforms in combat, a distinction it shares with 1st Black Watch, which also took part in the engagement. There was only one casualty in the Staffords – that of the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Eyre, whose death is commemorated by a brass plaque in the north wall of Lichfield Cathedral.
The Mayor of Walsall presenting new drums to 5th Battalion The South Staffordshire Regiment in July 1925.
The other constituent battalion was the 80th (Staffordshire Volunteers) Foot which was raised on 9 December 1793 by Lord Henry Paget, later 1st Marquess of Anglesey. Most of the men came from the local Staffordshire Volunteers or were recruited from the estates of Paget’s father at Beaudesert on the edge of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. The estate was broken up and sold in 1935 and the elegant Elizabethan brick mansion house demolished. During the course of the nineteenth century the 80th Foot served in India and Africa and was part of Lord Chelmsford’s army which suffered defeat at Isandlwana in the Zulu War of 1879. Out of this disaster came the second of the regiment’s two Victoria Crosses, awarded to Private Samuel Wassall, a native of Dudley, Staffordshire, who saved a fellow soldier from drowning in the Buffalo River while both men were being threatened by the presence of the enemy. On reaching the bank the two men mounted Wassall’s horse and made good their escape. Before his death at Barrow-in-Furness in 1927, married and the father of seven children, Wassall recorded his memory of that dramatic moment: ‘At this time I was very lightly cold, I had thrown my helmet aside and my red tunic off, the British soldiers fought in the good old red in those days and not in khaki, so that I was clothed in just my shirt and trousers with my bandolier over my shirt and so I rode on as hard as I could, with a few of the fugitives from Isandlwana.’
Given the South Staffords’ long fighting history it is not surprising that it has produced several outstanding battlefield commanders. In addition to Lord Paget of the 80th, who ended his career as a field marshal, there was General Lord Rowland Hill who was commissioned in the 38th Regiment in 1791 and also served in the 90th Perthshire Light Infantry. (See The Cameronians.) Hill fought with Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo and although he eventually became the army’s commander-in-chief he never lost the common touch. Renowned throughout the army for his gentleness and consideration to soldiers, ‘Daddy’ Hill once provided a sergeant with a meal and a bed for the night after he had delivered an important despatch, unusual behaviour from a senior officer at the time.
During the Second World War both the regular battalions of the South Staffords found themselves undertaking unfamiliar roles. The 1st Battalion fought in Burma as part of Orde Wingate’s Chindits and had to be trained in the rigours of jungle warfare and fighting behind enemy lines. At the same time the 2nd Battalion was trained as an air-landing force going into battle by glider and served in the campaigns in Sicily in 1943, and at Arnhem in 1944 where losses were high. The battalion set out with an operational strength of 867, but only 139 survived to return to British lines. During the fighting two South Staffords were awarded the Victoria Cross – both Major Robert Henry Cain and Lance Sergeant John Daniel Baskeyfield displayed incredible bravery while engaging German armoured vehicles in separate incidents. Baskeyfield was killed in action and his body was never found but he is commemorated by a statue at Festival Heights in Stoke-on-Trent, which was unveiled in 1990. The full extent of Major Cain’s courage was only revealed to his daughter Frances after his death. According to her husband, the motoring journalist and broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson, who made a television documentary on prominent VC winners in 2003, ‘he’d never thought to mention it’ (Major Cain was commissioned in The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers).
Soldiers of the South Staffordshire Regiment serving with the 2nd Division guard a road with a Bren gun during a military training operation in England in 1936.
In 1959 the South Staffords amalgamated with the neighbouring North Staffordshire Regiment (The Prince of Wales’s) to become The Staffordshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s). For many years the regimental museum was in Davidson House in St John’s Street, Lichfield, but today it is housed in a modern purpose-built structure in Whittington Barracks, three miles from Lichfield and the regimental depot of both constituent regiments since 1880. The Staffords remained in existence until 2007 when it became the 3rd Battalion of The Mercian Regiment, a new large regiment formed by an amalgamation of The Cheshire Regiment (22nd), The Worcester and Sherwood Foresters (29th and 45th) and the Staffords. As a result of the 2010 defence review the regiment’s 3rd Battalion was earmarked for disbandment in 2014 following a final tour of duty in Afghanistan.
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Guadeloupe 1759, Martinique 1762, Rolica, Vimiera, Corunna, Busaco, Badajos, Salamanca, Vittoria, St Sebastian, Nive, Peninsula, Ava, Moodkee, Ferozeshah, Sobraon, Pegu, Alma, Inkerman, Sevastopol, Lucknow, Central India, South Africa 1878–79, Egypt 1882, Kirbekan, Nile 1884–85, South Africa 1900–02
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Mons, Retreat from Mons, Marne, 1914, Aisne, 1914, 18, Ypres, 1914, 17, Langemarck 1914, 17, Gheluvelt, Nonne Boschen, Neuve Chapelle, Aubers, Festubert 1915, Loos, Somme, 1916, 18, Albert 1916, 18, Bazentin, Delville Wood, Pozieres, Flers-Courcelette, Morval, Thiepval, Ancre 1916, Bapaume 1917, 18, Arras 1917, 18, Scarpe 1917, 18, Arleux, Bullecourt, Hill 70, Messine 1917, 18, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Cambrai, 1917, 18, St Quentin, Lys, Bailleul, Kemmel, Scherpenberg, Droucourt-Queant, Hindenburg Line, Havrincourt, Canal du Nord, St Quentin Canal, Beaurevoir, Selle, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Vittorio Veneto, Italy 1917–18, Suvla, Landing at Suvla, Scimitar Hill, Gallipoli 1915, Egypt 1916
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Caen, Noyers, Falaise, Arnhem 1944, North-West Europe 1940, 44, Sidi Barrani, North Africa 1940, Landing in Sicily, Sicily, 1943, Italy 1943, Chindits 1944, Burma 1944
Private Samuel Wassall, 80th Regiment, Zulu War, 1879 Colour Sergeant Anthony Clarke Booth, 80th Regiment, Zulu War, 1879
Captain John Franks Vallentin, 1st Battalion, First World War, 1914
Captain Arthur Forbes Gordon Kilby, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1915
Private Thomas Barratt, 7th Battalion, First World War, 1917
Lance Sergeant John Daniel Baskeyfield, 2nd Battalion, Second World War, 1944
Major Robert Henry Cain, The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, attached 2nd South Staffordshire Regiment, Second World War, 1944
