Queen Victoria’s Highlanders

Introduction

On 28 March 2006, the last of the British Army's Highland regiments officially passed out of existence, absorbed with their Lowland counterparts into a new, all-encompassing Royal Regiment of Scotland five battalions strong. From the first parade of the Black Watch at Aberfeldy in 1740, to that ceremony at Edinburgh Castle 266 years later, those Highland regiments had served the Crown with more than conspicuous gallantry in every corner of the globe, from Culloden Moor to Basra. Yet their true heyday unquestionably lay during the reign of Queen Victoria, in the bare century that separated the battles of Waterloo and Mons.

Waterloo helped, of course; but the real catalyst in turning them into crack regiments was, first, a visit to Dublin by King George IV in 1821, which featured a grand review of all but one of the kilted battalions; and a Royal visit to Scotland itself the following year, which just happened to coincide with the publication of a laudatory history of the Highland regiments by Colonel David Stewart of Garth. The king himself was persuaded to wear a kilt, and Highland regiments suddenly became fashionable.

Consequently, in March 1828 the well-known society diarist Thomas Creevy gleefully recorded that: 'We have an event in our family. Fergy has got a regiment - a tip top crack one - one of those beautiful Highland Regiments that were at Brussels, Quatre Bras and Waterloo.' The appointment of 'Fergy' - or to give him his full due, LtGen Sir Ronald Craufurd Ferguson - to be Colonel in Chief of the 79th (Cameron) Highlanders was indeed a matter for celebration, for the kilted regiments were already beginning to eclipse all but the Guards in popularity.

Their distinctive dress undoubtedly contributed to this air of exclusiveness, just as the outlandishly dashing uniforms of the Hussars had earlier made them the darlings of the cavalry. The French in particular also found the Scottish Highlanders fascinating and, having hurried to provide themselves with an equivalent in the exotically dressed Zouave regiments, they then took every opportunity to portray the two side by side. Both combined a striking appearancewith an élan supposedly not found in ordinary regiments of the Line. Those ordinary regiments were consequently wont to grumble that the Highland regiments (and the Zouaves) were the only ones written up in the newspapers, irrespective of who had actually done the work.