Episode 6 In the Highest Tradition

It is a bleak March day

as the 5th Royal Inniskilling Royal Dragoon Guards

commemorate an officer who died in peace time after uttering

words familiar to millions, "I'm just going outside and may be some time."

For Captain Lawrence Oates, "some time" was intentional eternity.

Badly injured on Scott's South Pole expedition

he sacrificed himself in the hope his colleagues would survive.

It was March 17th 1912, his birthday and St Patrick's Day.

He had served with the Inniskillings in the Boer War.

They are the only regiment in the British Army to commemorate a person

and not a battle honour on their regimental day.

Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, turn!

Quick march.

When you consider we have such famous officers as Baden Powell

and Field Marshall Allenby and Colonel Sir Mike Hansell

who have served in the regiment it may seem rather strange that it's

Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates who is the man who we commemorate,

but in the eyes of the regiment

and perhaps school boys everywhere it is the fact that this man showed

the most amazing self sacrifice and endurance on Scott's expedition,

especially in 1912.

And this is a quote from a Etonian in 1974.

"At school there is a bronze bass relief head of Oates

"outside the library.

"His nose is bright and shiny,

"it looks as if he's got a streaming cold.

"That's because we always touch his nose as we go past

"in the hope that some of his courage might rub off on us."

At the head of the parade is the Salamanca staff.

Exactly a century before Oates's death the 5th Iniskillings

annihilated the 66th French regiment at Salamanca in the Peninsular war,

relieving them in the process of their drum major's mace.

The two nations have been arguing

about its rightful ownership ever since.

I understand from time to time

that the successor to the 66th Infantry of the Line

in the French army has asked for the staff back

and as far as we are concerned it was a fair and squarely won

piece of booty of war and it is part of our battle honours.

It is as if someone asked for our standard back.

It's ours and they can ask until they're blue in the face, basically,

we're keeping it.

At least one French cavalry officer appears to understand

it's rather like the rules of cricket.

I think it's a very good thing

to have some souvenirs of the past.

It's a very good thing.

But what of Napoleon's golden eagle, taken at Waterloo?

I think now we must be in the future and we must build Europe

and be strong to defend our values against, over bad values.

Not all ex-enemies are so conciliatory.

Another officer visiting the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards

who captured the eagle became so incensed at pictures

of his ancestors being bayoneted around the mess walls

that he stomped out.

He, too, was French.

Oh, the damn frogs, yes, yes.

God bless them. God bless them.

I feel rather like Uncle Arthur in the Mitford book.

Was it Uncle Henry in the Mitford book?

You know, would only refer to the Germans as the damned Huns.

Well, yes.

Colonel David Wrought, possibly not quite Edward Heath's conception

of a committed European, was a King's Own Scottish Borderer,

a regiment celebrating its 300th anniversary this year.

What have they been up to in that time?

Oh, wandering round the world

as amphibious soldiers. You know, bashing the French

which was of course exactly what the French were there for,

and sorted that out.

Company! Company!

Stand...guard!

In their bonnets the King's Own Scottish Borderers wear what appear

to be antennae capable of receiving satellite TV.

In fact they were decreed by Queen Victoria

at the height of her Balmoralist enthusiasm for all things Scottish.

"Blackcock feather," she said, "would look nice."

But Queen Victoria lived in an era

when words like ecology were exclusive to Charles Darwin.

blackcock feathers became so scarce that troops had to be

kitted out with hen feathers that curled up in the rain.

But thanks to forestation programmes and controlled culling

by game keepers the genuine article is slowly returning.

But at one time the shortage, now relieved by a cottage industry,

was so acute that the regiment's attempts

to get their hands on some sound like something out of John le Carre.

Well, we were very fortunate at that point,

or so we thought, to have one of our

members working, a KOSB, working as a defence attache in Warsaw,

not that far away from here in Berlin in fact, and he discovered that

there was a source of blackcock feathers easily available in Poland

and very cheap.

And so we corresponded here from Berlin to him and it was agreed

eventually that we were going to get something in the region of a thousand

of these blackcock feathers which

looked tremendous. That was going to solve the future

for the next 20 years or so.

Well, the deal got very close,

in fact the feathers were on their way over the wall.

As I understand it,

finally we weren't allowed to have them because the Soviets intervened.

The reason given

later through the diplomatic channels that they felt

this was reinforcing NATO's morale by bringing these across

so we didn't get them. So there we are, our potential adversaries

have recognition, have some idea of the value of traditions.

What may appear to be English soccer fans looking for an off-licence

is actually an exercise known as FIBUA, fighting in built-up areas.

British regiments stationed in Berlin have built a mock town, Ruhleben,

for this purpose, among them are the Black Watch.

But the Black Watch have another side to them.

They may not sing Crimond with quite fervour of the Welsh

but religious observance is encouraged

and as part of the Church of Scotland they have their own Kirk sessions.

It raises a question we put to the Dean of Windsor,

very much a former military man.

Is the soldier, a man whose job is facing death,

a naturally religious man?

No. No, he's like the rest of us,

but I think he's more perhaps like

a farmer...

or a sailor.

A farmer is near to the land, he's near to the things of nature.

A sailor is near to the sea, he sees the elements at their worst,

and I don't think a soldier will scoff at God in quite the same way

that people outside will.

I remember an old commanding officer of mine, great, great character,

who heard two young officers

in the mess one day sort of laughing at the local chaplain

and he turned on them and he said,

"You are either fools or you've never been shot at.

"If you'd been shot at you'd have learned how to pray."

And I think that's very true.

When you've got a couple of machine gun bullets coming across

the top of your head you soon learn how to pray.

SINGING IN GAELIC

Another Scottish regiment, the Queen's Own Highlanders,

has audible traditions.

For a rare moment the pipes are silent.

The Gaelic singing is accompanied by a Clarsach, a harp.

The harp is the Scottish predecessor of the bagpipes

by at least 600 years.

But the pipes are not redundant for the Queen's Own Highlanders.

The dancing that once celebrated Scottish victories

in battle is now a serious cultural item on the regimental curriculum.

This isn't rehearsal for some knees up in the officers mess,

you come here to get it right.

Well, I judged they're really not quite ready to pass off the floor

and dance at a regimental guest night.

I think the problem really, unusually,

lies at the beginning of the dance in the strathspey.

The dancing is for the entertainment of the guests.

Without exception British army regiments are excellent hosts

yet hosts only now coming to terms with the existence

of a previously neglected species known as women.

It's not always been thus. General Duncan Cameron, Black Watch,

did not approve of the alternative gender.

Because he was a great misogynist

it was clear that he wouldn't approve of ladies in the mess

so at some time just before the last war somebody took a decision rashly

that women should be allowed into the mess for the first time.

So other mess members said,

"Well Duncan Cameron would turn in his grave."

Fine, well we understand that.

So then somebody else said "Well we can't possibly hang him on the wall,

"let's saw him in half."

And the story has it from the olden bowls that

when ladies came into the mess only General Cameron's legs were shown.

When the rest of us were in the mess his head and shoulders.

Alas, during the war his legs were lost

and we only have his head and shoulders left,

so he is presumably is still spinning in his grave.

Not surprisingly,

this lady officer is brazenly drinking

from Joseph Bonaparte's looted chamber pot.

Ladies can come into the mess for tea, for instance, in a specific room

but the overriding consideration

remains that it is the home of the bachelor officers.

But what of today's subalterns? Would they like women in the mess?

I'm not a bachelor officer

but I think that the answer to your question is yes.

It's a rather stultified existence to live in a mess without

any contact with girls at all. That, of course, doesn't happen any more.

There are lots of parties and lots of occasions when the girls come in,

and I think if you asked the bachelor officers they would agree with you

that perhaps they would prefer

what could loosely be called a more normal existence in this respect.

Can you describe what it was like in the old days, say 20 years ago?

In the old days women were expressly excluded from the mess,

as I understand it.

What happened about wives I don't know but of course one must remember

that the regiment, this regiment in particular, spent a very long time

away in India and those occasions were without wives.

The officers who were married came home to England,

came home to see and be with their wives,

but largely the regiment was unmarried when it was serving abroad.

Yet Clinton Dawks of the 4th 7th Dragoon Guards contributed

to the changing times actually during the making of these films.

He invited our lady researcher

to witness a mess function traditionally exclusive to men.

She became the first woman to do so in 300 years.

Enlightenment of a more strategic nature

came in the 1930s when the British Army conceded that the combat horse

was obsolete and turned to the tank.

Yet in the 1930s the army was still on old boys network.

Colonel Charles Napier, descendent of a distinguished line of generals,

recalls the day he joined the club.

Well, no, 1937 was when I took my entrance exam to the army.

I had to pass the examination and although there wasn't the rigid

and very searching and very fair selection procedure that there is now

with their practical tests and so on, there was an interview

and the interview as far as I was concerned was the saving grace

because out of a total of about 1,000 marks

450 of them were for the interview.

And my interview was absolutely splendid.

Going into the long marble corridor through huge doors

before the board,

which was sitting behind a large, long green baize table,

terrifying array of generals and civil servants,

and the voice in the centre said,

"Is your name Napier?" And I said "Yes, Sir."

And I thought at least that's one question right.

And he said, "Sit down, Napier," so I sat down

and there was a bit of a pause and the chap further along said,

"Oh, no," said the bloke, the Chairman,

"He can't be." He said, "Well, come on, ask the boy."

So he said, "Freddy here says you're Jock Napier's boy."

So I said, "Well, my father was a soldier,

"certainly I think he was known as Jock."

"There you are, I told you so."

"Good God," he said, "is the old bugger still alive?"

He said, "Well he must be older than God."

I said, "He's still very fit, sir."

And so that was a couple of questions right.

Then there was another pause and a chap right out on the flanks said,

"If he's Jock Napier's boy he must be Dodo's half brother."

So everybody hoisted that in for a bit

and then another out on the other flank said,

"Hell of a girl, Dodo."

HE LAUGHS

And then there was a short pause and he said,

"Damn good horsewoman, I mean."

So the chairman said,

"Well, after all that we better get on with the interview."

He said, "Read any books?"

So again, Freddy spoke up.

"Course he doesn't read any books, Jock never read a book in his life."

So he said, "Well, never mind."

I said, "Well I have read one, Sir,

"I've read one specially for the board."

"Don't be impertinent."

Then there was another sort of a pause and he said,

"Why do you want to come in the army?"

And then again another chap said,

"Poor little devil couldn't help it with Jock as a father."

So that's how I got in the army.

I think they gave me 425 out of 450.

They asked me one other question like what was going on in Waziristan.

Fortunately I knew the answer to that.

REPORTER: It sounds a bit like nepotism.

Wouldn't do. Wouldn't do the present system much good.

Progress in the British Army has never been revolutionary,

always evolutionary.

This is the Marquis of Londonderry

dressed as Colonel of the 18th Hussars.

The interesting thing really about this picture is the fact that

most of the uniform he's got on,

as well as being extremely gaudy also did have some utilitarian purpose.

If you were a cavalryman

you would either be going for the thrust like that with your sword

or the cut, bringing the sword down or across your opponent.

And so here they had a form of

very primitive armour in all the gold frogging going across his coat here.

And that can really be compared to

the present day flak jacket, of which this is an example here.

Also the busby is tall and has quite a strong rim to it

so if you are coming down it again will deflect some of the force.

So perhaps that could be considered the equivalent to

this little number here, the modern...

polycarbonate helmet, issued now to all members of the army.

The jacket here is known as the pleat and you can see that it is fur-lined,

and that is really your cold weather gear and here, again,

we have the equivalent of it

and this is my one and extremely scruffy it is, too,

but it's lined in this padded material

in order to keep you warm in exercise

and in battle.

And last but not least, going round and over his shoulder

to a little box at the back he's got somewhere to keep his

few private but very useful knick-knacks.

This has been replaced, unfortunately,

by this stuff which is the conventional webbing.

And you can see that it gets

extremely dirty and that's after just a couple of days out on exercise.

One wonders really how these people looked

after they'd been on campaign for six weeks or so.

When you go on exercise

or you go to war I think you are extremely unfashionably dressed.

The sweat of going around

carrying all this lot, I mean this is hardly Gucci accessories is it?

Alnwick Castle in Northumberland is the regimental museum

of the Northumberland Fusiliers, now amalgamated into

the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers,

and it's a suitable resting place for one of its volunteer heroes,

Drummer the dog.

In 1898 the battalion was ordered to Gibraltar again and then it stopped

at Gibraltar and then it went down from there to Egypt

and to Sudan where the regiment took part in the Battle of Omdurman.

Now, Drummer was present at the Battle of Omdurman

and he wears the Queen's Sudan medal and the Sudan medal

with the bar Khartoum.

He took part during the Battle of Khartoum.

According to the reports he was running about in the battlefield

sort of jumping and trying to catch the bullets as they were winging by.

He thought they were flies.

During the Battle of Omdurman and the Sudan which was

a very well-publicised campaign,

Queen Victoria got to hear about this little dog running about in the field

and she said she thought he should have a gallantry award.

But I suppose...I don't know

and the war office prevailed upon her and said

no, you know, it will be making a mockery, I suppose,

of gallantry awards.

But anyway, so she decreed that he would be awarded

the campaign medals and clasps for the engagements he took part in.

He was present in many engagements in this case denoted by the clasps

on his Queen's Sudan medal.

He was present at Belmont, Modder River, Bloemfontein, Magersfontein,

Kimberley, Diamond Hill,

Johannesburg, and overall he has seven

what is known as battle bars on his medal.

He was wounded once

and photographs exist where he had just a slight wounded shoulder.

After the regiment was ordered home

and the fighting died down he lived quite happily with Colonel Ray

until the 20th July 1902

when unfortunately he picked up a lump of meat

that someone had left around laced with strychnine poisoning.

So that was the end of Drummer.

Drummer's much-decorated dog's own paper adventures

were crammed into eight short years.

Naturally, being British,

his obituary notice appeared in The Times.

Drummer isn't the army's only commemorated animal.

A ram called George posthumously made it to the officers mess.

Do you know George?

- Very well, sir. - Do you ever take snuff?

- No, sir. - No?

- No. - Can I just show you how it's done?

- Yes, Sir.

This was given to us by Colonel Sproat

just after amalgamation along with his cousin.

You would break off the snuff from inside

so you've got a nice smooth till,

and then with the spoon there

you would take it out and you would put it into

the little snuf thing there

and with the pastel made absolutely certain that it was ground down.

You then...

And then finally with the little foot,

brush it off, make certain it was clean.

- Very impressive. - Over to you.

This fiercely bearded general is another of the Napiers,

a conqueror of Sindh.

With so many battle honours on the family tree, let alone

regimental colours,

Charles Napier must surely be an entrenched traditionalist.

Well, no, I'm not.

I can't say frankly that I am.

For instance, although I have the utmost regard and respect

for the qualities of the British

and the Scots in particular,

I believe that we have to move beyond that now

and I feel that the family has done

what it can over the last 200-300 years

to play its part within the fabric of State,

but I believe we have now gone beyond that and that the future lies

in bigger organisations.

What has to be achieved now cannot be achieved on purely national stages.

These stages are too limited and the next stage is surely

the European one and Europe, to me,

makes sense politically, economically and socially.

You can't pursue the crime, you can't pursue the economics,

you can't pursue defence solely on a national stage

and it must now be on a European stage

and therefore those who want to serve the State now, I believe,

should now concentrate on serving Europe.

But whatever the protagonists of Europe decree, the army itself knows

precisely where its loyalties lie.

Mr Vice, the Queen.

Gentlemen, the Queen.

The Queen.

In recent years the British Army,

like so many citadels of British tradition, has had its knockers.

They may just care to consider this.

Well, it's perfectly true.

I mean there's the old bit of doggerel from the Marlborough wars

when God is near and danger nigh, God and soldier is the cry,

when war is over, danger righted, God forgot and soldier slighted.

Yes, the soldier has always been unpopular. I can remember even

as a young man myself before the war when if soldiers got

in uniform into a railway carriage civilians got up and moved out of it.

But I think that has changed, strangely enough, since the war

and I think that their example in countless areas

like Cyprus and Palestine and all over the world,

in the Falklands and particularly in Northern Ireland, and with television

showing their discipline and their restraint,

I would say now that soldiers have a very high regard in the nation.

But I think what is even more important,

which people have got to realise,

is that we only enjoy our way of life and our sense of freedom

because we as a nation

are able to produce young men who in times of peace are prepared

to put their lives on the line and if necessary be killed in order that

we may still hold the freedom which we have to live our lives.

The rest of us selfishly enjoying our own way of life do it on the backs

of the soldiers who stand between us and our freedom.

Highlanders, stand at ease.

The British Army may have quaint ways of doing things.

This man, a Queen's Own Highlander,

is leaving the battalion after 22 years.

By tradition he is chaired out by men of his own rank.

Unlike hundreds of thousands of others

he is not called upon to die for you and me.

Well, Sergeant, it gives me great pleasure

to not only say good bye to you

on behalf of the battalion

but also to give you your final dram

on your final day in the battalion.

Slainte.

Slainte.

Three cheers!

- Hip hip. - Hooray.

- Hip hip. - Hooray.

- Hip-hip. - Hooray.

And one more!

Hooray!