Renowned as ‘The Gay and Gallant Gordons’, The Gordon Highlanders recruited from the city of Aberdeen and from the surrounding counties in the north-east of Scotland. Dotted throughout the regimental area are scores of granite-clad war memorials, many of them featuring the figure of a kilted Highland soldier, which testify not only to the north-east’s sacrifices in two world wars but also to the community’s close connections with the local regiment. The civic memorial in Keith is a good example, showing a defiant Gordon Highlander with a German Pickelhaube helmet trampled in the mud at his feet. The Gordons’ motto said it all: ‘Bydand’, meaning ‘enduring’.
The regiment’s personality was formed from the fishing and farming communities that give the area its character - tough, unyielding, reticent of speech and blessed with an idiosyncratic sense of humour. More Victoria Crosses were won by Gordon Highlanders than by any other Scottish regiment; its battle honours were a roll call of campaigns fought by the British Army over two centuries and the distinctive yellow stripe in its government tartan kilt was widely known and respected. It also gave the army some of its finest soldiers, among whom may be mentioned Field Marshal George White, the winner of a Victoria Cross, and General Sir Ian Hamilton, the commander of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in 1915, who was twice turned down for the same award, on the first occasion because he was considered too young and the second because he was too senior. Another fine and upstanding Gordon Highlander was Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, who, unusually, rose from the ranks to become one of the best known soldiers of the late Victorian period. In more recent times the regiment was memorialised in the fictional Private McAuslan stories written by George MacDonald Fraser, who served in the 2nd Battalion immediately after the Second World War.
The regiment also gave rise to a popular music hall ditty in which ‘Geordie Mackay of the HLI’ is rejected while courting because he serves in the wrong regiment. The girl’s catchy response in the chorus is the final put-down:
A Gordon for me, a Gordon for me,
If you’re no’ a Gordon, you’re no use to me.
The Black Watch are braw, the Seaforth an’ a’,
But the cocky wee Gordons the pride of them a’.
Also inspired by the regiment was the catchphrase ‘The Gordons will take it’, which enjoyed a wide currency at the end of the nineteenth century. Before the storming of a well-defended enemy position at the Heights of Dargai in India’s troublesome North-West Frontier Province in 1897, the commanding officer of 1st Gordons, Lieutenant Colonel H. H. Mathias, told his men: ‘The General [Sir William Lockhart] says this hill must be taken at all costs - the Gordon Highlanders will take it.’ Before long, wags in London’s gentlemen’s clubs were saying that the same thing would happen if anyone left an umbrella unattended - ‘the Gordons will take it’. As the Gordons stormed into the attack at Dargai, Piper George Findlater won a gallant Victoria Cross, continuing to play his bagpipes even though he had been wounded in both legs. His regiment succeeded in taking the position and the action was widely reported, turning the piper into a national hero. After leaving the army, Findlater settled down to farm at Forglen in Banffshire, where he died in 1942, aged seventy. He is buried in Forglen churchyard, near Turiff.
The history of the Gordons also embraces another fine regiment, the 75th (Stirlingshire) Foot, with which it amalgamated in 1881. Although the 75th had a distinguished record of service it more or less disappeared from history and very little is known about its foundation or its antecedents. At the time of the amalgamation the 75th had already lost its Highland status and, while it became the 1st Battalion of the new regiment, it is fair to say that when The Gordon Highlanders came into being in 1881 it was not so much an amalgamation of equals as a hostile takeover by a younger but better known regiment.
Given its subsequent history and achievements it is not really surprising that the story of the raising of the 92nd (Highland) Regiment is steeped in romance. Its founder was Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon, a north-east landowner, who raised a regiment in 1794 for service in the war against France. Originally designated the 100th Foot, it was quickly associated with the Gordon family but from the outset recruiting proved troublesome, so much so that the Duke had to introduce a cash bounty to encourage his tenants to join up. Regimental records provide a graphic account of the way in which every recruit had his price. Two young men from the Badenoch district received £21 and one recruit in Peterhead was given £24. Almost £2,500 was paid out in bounties from the Duke’s exchequer at Gordon Castle in Banffshire – an enormous sum worth around £225,000 today.
The payment of the additional bounty created a romantic myth around the raising of the regiment and the part by played by the Duke’s wife, Jean, Duchess of Gordon, a lady of undoubted charm and beauty who introduced a novel way of recruiting. Throughout the summer of 1794 she rode around the surrounding countryside visiting local fairs where she offered a kiss and a golden guinea to any man who agreed to join up. Many accepted the offer, including a young blacksmith in Huntly remarkable for his strength and good looks. Recruiters from other regiments including the Foot Guards had attempted without success to enlist him, but he could not resist the Duchess. He took the kiss and the guinea; but to show that it was not the gold that had tempted him he tossed the coin into the crowd. While the story’s authenticity has been disputed, it still forms a key part of the regiment’s history simply because it is such a good tale.
The new regiment was soon in action in continental Europe and played a notable role at Waterloo in 1815. The moment came during an attack by the heavy cavalry of the Union Brigade when the Royal Scots Greys piled into the advancing French with the pipes of the Gordons playing and shouts of ‘Scotland For Ever’ ringing in their ears. For the Greys the attack meant that they had to advance through the lines of their fellow countrymen and it is possible that Gordon Highlanders joined in the charge by clinging to the stirrups of the cavalry as they swept past them. Later an officer confided that his ‘Highlanders seemed half mad, and it was with the greatest difficulty the officers could preserve anything like order in the ranks’.
Men of the Gordon Highlanders suffer the indignity of being taken prisoner by the Germans during the First World War. They probably served in the 1st Battalion which had the misfortune to surrender after being outnumbered in confused fighting during the retreat from Mons in August 1914.
That willingness to engage in battle whatever the odds was typical of the Gordon Highlanders throughout its 200-year existence. During the Boer War the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it ‘the finest regiment in the world’ after watching 1st Gordons going into the attack at Doornkop, and during the First World War it raised twenty battalions for service on all the main battlefronts. Above all, the regiment remained very much a product of the indomitable spirit evinced by the men of the north-east of Scotland who served in its ranks. During the fighting in Sicily in 1943 a platoon from 5th/7th Gordons was surrounded by the Germans and ordered to surrender. It was to no avail; a rich Aberdonian voice responded: ‘Come and get us ye feart [scared] fucker!’
By the 1970s oil had been discovered in the North Sea, sparking a jobs bonanza in the north-east of Scotland. As a result fewer young men saw opportunities in a military career and recruitment into the Gordons slumped. Largely as a result of that downturn, in 1994, its bicentenary, the Gordons amalgamated with Queen’s Own Highlanders to form The Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordon and Cameron) and in 2006 it became the 4th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland.
Mysore, Seringapatam, Egmont-op-Zee, Mandora, Corunna Fuentes d’Onor, Almarez, Vittoria, Nive, Orthes, Pyrenees, Peninsula, Waterloo, South Africa 1835, Chitral, Delhi 1857, Lucknow, Charasiah, Kabul 1879, Kandahar 1880, Afghanistan 1878–80, Tel-el-Kebir, Egypt 1882, 84, Nile 1884–85, Tirah, Defence of Ladysmith, Paardeberg, South Africa 1899–1902
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Mons, Le Cateau, Retreat from Mons, Marne 1914, 18, Aisne, 1914, La Bassee 1914, Messines 1914, Armentieres 1914, Ypres 1914, 15, 17, Langemarck 1914, Gheluvelt, Nonne Boschen, Neuve Chapelle, Frezenberg, Bellewaarde, Aubers, Festubert 1915, Hooge 1915, Loos, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, 18, Bazentin, Delville Wood, Pozieres, Guillemont, Flers-Courcelette, Le Transloy, Ancre 1916, Arras 1917, 18, Vimy 1917, Scarpe 1917, 18, Arleux, Bullecourt, Pilckem, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Cambrai 1917, 18, St Quentin, Bapaume 1918, Rosieres, Lys, Estaires, Hazebrouck, Bethune, Soissonais-Ourcq, Tardenois, Hindenburg Line, Canal du Nord, Selle, Sambres, France and Flanders 1914–18, Piave, Vittorio Veneto, Italy 1917–18
Those in bold carried on the Queen’s Colour
Withdrawal to Escaut, Ypres-Comines Canal, Dunkirk 1940, Somme 1940, St Valery-en-Caux, Odon, La Vie Crossing, Lower Maas, Venlo Pocket, Rhineland, Reichswald, Cleve, Goch, Rhine, North-West Europe 1940, 44–45, El Alamein, Advance on Tripoli, Mareth, Medjez Plain, North Africa 1942–43, Landing in Sicily, Sferro, Sicily 1943, Anzio, Rome, Italy 1944–45
Private Thomas Beach, 92nd Highlanders, Crimean War, 1854
Ensign (later Colonel) Richard Wadeson, 75th Foot, Indian Mutiny, 1857
Private (later Colour Sergeant) Patrick Green, 75th Foot, Indian Mutiny, 1857
Colour Sergeant Cornelius Coghlan (also Coughlan), 75th Foot, Indian Mutiny, 1857
Major (later Field Marshal) George White, 92nd Highlanders, Afghanistan, 1879
Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Colonel) William Henry Dick-Cunyngham, 92nd Highlanders, Afghanistan, 1879
Private Edward Lawson, 1st Battalion, India, 1897
Piper George Findlater, 1st Battalion, India, 1897
Captain (later Major) Matthew Meiklejohn, 2nd Battalion, Boer War, 1899
Sergeant Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) William Robertson, 2nd Battalion, Boer War, 1899
Captain Ernest Towse, 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Lance Corporal (later Lieutenant Colonel) John Frederick Mackay, 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Captain (later Colonel) William Eagleston Gordon, 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Captain David Reginald Younger, 1st Battalion, Boer War, 1900
Drummer (later Drum Major) William Kenny, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1914
Lieutenant James Anson Ortho Brooke, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1914
Private George Imlach McIntosh, 1/6th Battalion, First World War, 1917
Lieutenant (later Major) Allan Ebenezer Kerr, 3rd Battalion, First World War, 1918
