Behind Trooping the Colour and the Changing of the Guard is a working army division with a difficult double life
The Soldiers Under the Bearskins Are Real Soldiers, and It Is Hot in There
On most mornings of the year, a crowd several rows deep presses against the railings of Buckingham Palace to watch men and women in scarlet tunics exchange places with other men and women in scarlet tunics. Phones are held aloft. Children are lifted onto shoulders. A visitor beside me on a recent Monday asked her companion, in all sincerity, whether the guards were actors. It is an understandable question and the answer is no. They are infantry soldiers, and a fair number of them have served on operations abroad.
That double life, ceremonial and operational, is the thing I set out to understand. I spent time at the barracks, at rehearsals and on Horse Guards Parade, and I came away with a sharper sense of what the display costs the people who perform it.
Who They Are
The soldiers who guard the sovereign belong to the Household Division. It is made up of five regiments of Foot Guards, the Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Irish and Welsh Guards, and the two regiments of the Household Cavalry, the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals. To the untrained eye the Foot Guards look identical. They are not. Each regiment is told apart by the spacing of the buttons on the tunic, the badge on the collar and the colour and position of the plume in the cap. Guardsmen can spot the difference at a hundred yards and are faintly pained that the rest of us cannot.
These are not ornamental units. The Guards regiments are fighting soldiers who take their turn at public duties in London and Windsor between other tasks. A young guardsman may spend one season standing motionless outside a palace and the next on exercise or deployment overseas. Recruits are trained first as infantry. The drill comes on top.
The Standard Demanded
The drill is ferocious in its precision. A turn must be made by dozens of soldiers as one. A rifle movement that is a fraction late is seen by everyone. Uniforms are inspected to a standard that most of us would consider unreasonable in any other walk of life, and boots are polished for hours to a finish like black glass. Before a major parade there are weeks of rehearsal, some of them in the small hours when the roads can be closed.
The reward for this effort is to be stared at. Sentries are trained to ignore provocation, of which there is plenty. Tourists pull faces and pose for pictures inches away. The sentry may shout a warning if someone comes too close or obstructs the beat, and visitors who assumed the guard was a statue are regularly given a fright that they then post online.
The Cap
The bearskin cap, eighteen inches tall, was adopted after the defeat of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard at Waterloo in 1815. It is heavy, and under a summer sun it is an oven. Soldiers do faint on parade, as anyone who has watched a June rehearsal can confirm, and the instruction is to fall to attention, face down, without breaking the line.
The cap is also the subject of a long-running dispute. The fur comes from black bears culled in Canada, and animal welfare campaigners have argued for years that a synthetic alternative should be used. The Ministry of Defence has said that no man-made material tested so far has met its requirements for appearance and performance in wet weather. Campaigners disagree, and the matter has been debated in Parliament. The record is on the UK Parliament website. It is a fair argument, and I do not think tradition alone is a sufficient answer to it.
Trooping the Colour
The great annual set piece is Trooping the Colour, held on Horse Guards Parade each June to mark the sovereign’s official birthday. More than a thousand soldiers, some hundreds of musicians and around two hundred horses take part. The origin is practical. A regiment’s colour, its flag, was the rallying point in the smoke and confusion of battle, and it was carried slowly along the ranks, or trooped, so that every soldier would know it on sight.
Today one regiment’s colour is trooped each year in rotation. The King takes the salute and inspects the troops, the Household Cavalry rides past, and the day ends with the family on the palace balcony and a flypast overhead. The programme is published in advance on the Royal Family’s website.
Why Have a Second Birthday
The official birthday puzzles visitors. The explanation is weather. Edward VII was born in November, a poor month for a parade, and moved the public celebration to the summer. His successors kept the arrangement. It may be the most British reason for a state occasion ever recorded.
The Strain on the Army
There is a serious question underneath the spectacle. The Army is smaller than it has been in generations, and ceremonial duties consume a great deal of time. Soldiers who join for adventure can find months of guard duty hard going, and commanders must balance public duties against training for the Army’s main purpose. Senior officers have spoken openly about the pressure, and the Ministry of Defence sets out its position on force size and commitments on GOV.UK.
The counter-argument, put to me by a warrant officer with a voice that could be heard in Whitehall, is that drill builds exactly what an army needs: discipline, endurance and pride in the regiment. He added that it is the best recruiting poster the service has. Looking at the faces along the railings, I could not say he was wrong.
What the Crowd Is Watching
I went back to the palace on my last morning and stood among the visitors. The band struck up. The new guard marched in. It was faultless, and knowing what I now knew, I watched the faces under the caps instead of the uniforms. They were very young, and they were concentrating hard.
The Royal Collection Trust, which looks after the palaces’ public opening, gives a good account of the ceremony’s history for those who want more, at rct.uk. The guards have also been a stock joke for a very long time, as the London satirical news desk and NewsThump will happily show you, and the essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not explains why a joke about a soldier is not a slight on one. My other reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
