Ian Stuart Kelly, Echoes of Success: Identity and the Highland Regiments (Ditcham)

Ian Stuart Kelly

Echoes of Success: Identity and the Highland Regiments

(Leiden: Brill, 2015) 259pp.  $142.00

Highlanders Ian Stuart Kelly, Echoes of Success: Identity and the Highland Regiments, History of Warfare 104 (Brill 2015). xii + 259 pp. $142.00. Note- In the interests of disclosure, I should say that my father and grandfather served as regular soldiers in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one of the regiments which Kelly focuses on- the opening years of the latter’s service fell in the period covered by the book.

The Highland soldier, resplendent in feather bonnet and kilt, played a major role in how Victorian Britons imagined their empire. In addition to fighting on imperial frontiers, he featured regularly in popular culture, from music hall acts through adventure stories for adolescent males to advertising (he can still be found on the label of a brand of coffee essence sold in British supermarkets). Ian Stuart Kelly, who works in the Gordon Highlanders’ Museum, examines the units in which this often idealised figure served in order to examine how regimental identity was constructed and maintained over time and how the public image of a fighting elite was created and upheld.

To do this, he traces the process by which six infantry regiments founded at different times in the eighteenth century (the 42nd, 73rd, 75th, 91st, 92nd and 93rd Regiments of Foot) emerged from the army reforms of the early 1880’s as the First and Second Battalions of the Black Watch, Gordon Highlanders and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. This was not a straightforward affair. While the 42nd, 92nd and 93rd were and remained kilted, explicitly Highland, regiments from their embodiment onwards, the other three were “de-Highlandised” (and largely if inconsistently de-Scotticised) at a stroke of a War Office pen in 1809. This was done on the grounds that it would make it easier to find non-Scottish recruits, particularly in Indian service where transfers of men between units to keep up regimental strengths was normal practice. Kelly intertwines the operational history of the units in question with an examination of their shifting identities through the nineteenth century until the army reforms of 1881. Not for the last time, the issue of how one dealt with Scottish (particularly Highland) regiments in army reorganisation caused debate and emotion out of proportion to the number of units involved and vastly exceeding that aroused by the similar upheavals affecting English, Welsh or Irish regiments. Queen Victoria herself was deeply involved. In the end, the more or less tenuous Highland pasts of the 73rd, 75th and 91st were invoked to justify pairing them up with existing regiments to fit the new, two battalion, model.

Kelly then reviews a series of factors bearing on the creation and maintenance of regimental identity. These include recruitment, military discipline, religion, educational provision and the audible/visible identity markers of language (even if relatively few men spoke Gaelic as a first language), uniform, colours and music (both the “conventional” military band and the distinctive pipe band). The role of battle honours and decorations for gallantry (in particular Victoria Cross awards) in creating the regiment as imagined community is also considered- though not all battlefield heroes were entirely satisfactory role models, as Piper Findlater of the Gordons demonstrated by signing a contract to re-enact the action which had brought him the VC on the music hall stage. Some of these are more convincing identity markers than others. While approaches to the enforcement of discipline do seem to vary from regiment to regiment, it is not obvious that there was a specific “Highland” way of dealing with offences. By contrast, more could have been said about religion given the complexities of Scottish church history in the nineteenth century, with its array of schisms and mergers in the Presbyterian churches (particularly in the Highlands) while many officers of impeccably Scottish origin would have been Episcopalian in faith. In particular the chapter on recruitment is the weakest in the book. Admittedly Kelly has to wrestle with confusing, inconsistent and at times downright tendentious data (gibes about “Whitechapel Highlanders” might encourage inaccurate recording of nationality data- or be useful for explaining away poor battlefield performance by blaming non-Scots in the ranks). Nevertheless his presentation is equally confusing and hard to follow (for instance the table on page 72 appears to contradict his confident statement that Scots were over-represented in the Victorian army). There is little sense of how recruitment patterns may have shifted over time (particularly for the post-1881 “re-Highlandised” battalions) or the long term impact of the regimental recruitment districts established under the reforms. From a personal viewpoint, it does nothing to explain why my grandfather went from Great Yarmouth in East Anglia to join the 2nd Argylls!

By contrast the strongest chapter again interweaves operational history with other factors to examine how a common Gordon Highlander identity was established between the 75th and 92nd after 1881. This was hardly a foregone conclusion. The 75th was only nominally Scottish but, by virtue of its lower regimental number, was deemed the senior battalion in the new structure. It took a lot of work, including large amounts of cross-posting between battalions, to create a sense of common regimental citizenship round a core of traditions mostly carried over from the 92nd. It is a pity that Kelly did not tell the parallel stories of the other two post- 1881 regiments, particularly as matters evidently played out differently there. His suggestion that it took much longer to overcome inherited identities in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, for instance, certainly squares with my inherited understanding.

This is not always an easy read. Kelly is inclined to labour his points and his text is long on organisation theory jargon. He can be rather defensively acerbic about earlier scholarship with which he disagrees and is a little inclined to take sources emanating from regimental sources at face value. The human factor in transmitting regimental identity gets less coverage than it deserves; for every officer codifying regimental traditions one suspects there were many long service NCOs inculcating “the way we do things here” to intakes of recruits. Nevertheless he largely proves his point that the Highland regiments of the Victorian army did manage to create a strong self-identity as elite units and succeeded in gaining wider societal agreement to this point (at least in Scotland) in ways which to this day cast long shadows over the management of the British army.

Reading Kelly against the grain raises two issues which merit further study. Not every regiment can be an elite unit. How did the processes of regimental identity formation work in the “ordinary” English line infantry regiments which in the ultimate analysis formed the backbone of Victoria’s army but lacked the obvious (and expensive) markers of distinctive uniform and bagpipes? Secondly, it is clear that not everybody worshipped at the altar of the Highland soldier. Sir Garnet Wolseley, that archetypal Victorian paladin, clearly had a considerable animus against kilted units, and wider resentment about perceived favouritism towards Highland regiments can be detected as a counterpoint to Kelly’s success story. How were these tensions managed, both within the military and in wider civil society- particularly given Queen Victoria’s own notorious partiality towards the Highlands? One suspects there are further stories to be told here. Brian G H Ditcham Independent Scholar [email protected]

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