Back to Photos including press cuttings of 9th Lancers 1956-1958 including AFV and armoured cars
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* UPa on the downs above Tidworth , road , an old and private world is dying . To a shine of lances and a beat of drums the officers and men of the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers , one of the finest of British cavalry regiments , are preparing themselves for amalgamation . Grand and aloof among the workshops , a late survivor of the old order drills unflinchingly for its last parade : the colonel on a tall grey charger , the adjutant in breeches of impeccable cut , the sergeants a trifle sentimental , and the whole glittering community breathing a long , last , sad sigh of resignation . are This is more than just the end of a regiment . for there is to the 9th Lancers a profound and nostalgic For 24 quality of symbolism . years they have been armed with tanks , and they remain a highly skilled and experienced armoured regiment but in flavour , spirit , taste , outlook , tone of voice , the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers unmistakably cavalry . Through all the social convulsions of our time , the technical revolutions and the military reforms , they have ridden patrician down the years as a regiment of the old kind . Today they form one of the few institutions in modern English life that are still based , with perverse and astonishing success , upon frankly antique con ceptions of class and duty . At Tidworth , Hampshire , during preparations and parade of the Ninth Queen's Royal Lancers for the presentation of a Guidon by the Queen Mother . A trooper arriving with lance and family ; old comrades awaiting inspection ; the march - past ; the sergeant in charge of the banner party and a trooper oiling the hooves of the colonel's horse Pictures by Robert Smithies THE GUARDIAN MONDAY JULY 25 1960 TAKE THAT SMILE OFF FACE .... a This they have achieved by being , for nearly two and a half centuries , a kind of family club . They set their own standards and obey their own rules , and they do not give trooper's cuss for the winds of change , the progress of history , or the brasshats in Whitehall . Theirs being an aristocratic society , the tone of the regiment is set firmly by the corps of officers and the officers themselves are governed by old fashioned stan dards of fitness , loyalty , and com patibility . To say that class is the basis of these disciplines is to vulgarise an immensely complex and subtle formula ; that three but it is a fact quarters of the serving officers are Etonians , and that nearly half are the sons of old 9th Lancers - one , indeed , is a direct descendant of that " Trusty and Well belov'd Owen Wynn , Esq . , " who was commissioned in 1715 to raise the six Troops of One Serjeant , Two Corporals , One Drummer , One Hautbois , and Thirty private Dragoons , including the Widdows men in Each Troop , " that formed the first embryo of the regiment . This rare hierarchy is scrupulously but liberally maintained . Within the YOUR officers ' mess , when the demands of military efficiency have been satis fied , all men are equals . Nobody calls anybody else " sir , " and entry to the regiment is nearly always by family association or personal recom mendation . People put their sons down at birth , as for a good school ; the same names recur over and over again in the regimental annals ; and the 9th Lancers remain in a very real sense a family , a way of life , a band of some times rather catty brothers . It is partly pride of caste that has pre served this con tinuity , but it is partly love of horseman ship triumph antly surviving the impact of mechanised warfare . To this day the life of the officers ' mess is shot through with horsy affairs . The regiment has its own grooms , its own spanking stables , its own polo ponies ( with names like June , Some Doubt , and Hindu Lady ) . " The Horse Sport , " says the Colonel decisively , in staccato and faintly satirical Good for the syllables , " is Character . " Cavalrymen believe fer vently that in the training of a good tank officer , with an eye for country and the view - halloo of initiative , nothing is more effective than riding . by James Morris who served with the 9th Lancers and who wrote this article before he left for Cuba Certainly the officers of this regiment , bound as they are by cords of common background and enthu siasm , retain the fire of individuality . They love to cut a dash , cock a snook , drive a fast car , take an . impossible fence . Pride of regiment makes them efficient , and a tradition of quixotic high jinks keeps their militarism more comical than menacing . " Thwaites wagers Green wood the sum of £ 5 " ( says an entry in the mess betting book ) " that field calls in a cavalry regiment are sounded on a bugle and not a trumpet . " If we ever have a Nasser , a Massu , or a Kassem in England , I bet Greenwood a hundred guineas that he won't be a 9th Lancer . Their environment is littered with queer relics of a warlike past captured bugles and looted urns , huge pictures of unpronounceable by Lord battles , trumpets present Curzon , souvenirs from Tsarist hussars , the hog spear carried by Lieutenant John ( Bashi ) Evans instead of a lance , with which in one day he accounted for eleven Indian rebels , " inscribed portraits of horses ( " Royalty , my charger , " Lord . Charles Cavendish - Bentinck has " He written on the back of one . was a high showy stepper . " ) The mess is rich in convoluted silver , and the of portraits several dozen predecessors stare down glassily , in ponderous moustaches and agonising walls of the collars , from the colonel's office . Three 9th Lancers have ridden Grand National winners . Fifteen have won the Victoria Cross . The last lance - to - lance charge in Europe was mounted by the 9th Lancers on the Marne in 1914. Seven serving officers have done the Cresta run . One skis for the Army . A 9th Lancer team played the first game of polo ever seen in England , in 1871 , and last year a 9th Lancer was the first foreigner to be champion amateur jockey of Germany since 1881. To a remarkable degree the regiment maintains an old , almost lost English tradition of dash , élan , and merri ment . It is rich enough , it is fit enough , and it knows how . It would be futile to deny that a deep gulf of taste and breeding separates the glittering young men of the mess from the other ranks of their regiment . Among all the armies of the world today , the social divide is perhaps deepest in these last British old - school regiments . The commissioned live in one world , the non - commissioned in another , and though a few outstanding officers have risen from the ranks of the regiment , to most soldiers of the 9th Lancers . the officers ' mess is as unattainable as Nirvana ( which indeed in some respects it strikingly resembles ) . No anxious sophistry can disguise this anachronism , but the incredible truth is that the system works . " It couldn't happen anywhere else , " as one sergeant observed to me , " but here we seem to get away with it . " The other ranks do not , by and large , resent the moneyed splendour of the officers . On the contrary , they often relish it . " If they didn't carry on the way they do , they wouldn't be cavalry officers . " Centuries of polish and shared glory have made this organism a precision instrument , exquisitely balanced upon a social tight - rope . It works like a clock , even today , in a world of rope - soled soldiering . at Relationships between officers and are certainly not hail fellow - well - met , but they are easy , uncondescending , sure . Discipline is complete , but seldom vicious . Snobs , bullies , and social climbers do not make good cavalry officers , and when from time to time one slips into the regiment , he is generally soon shifted elsewhere . The 9th Lancer trooper ticks regularly , like a cog in any other clock , but he usually feels a reluctant pride in the old mob , a slow and half - amused affection for its quirks and as for the officers , more than anything else they brag about the regiment's success soccer , a game which scarcely a member of the mess , thanks to the queer stockades of class and school ing , has willingly played in his life . You think I am pitching it high , you levellers and modernists , you men in tired pin - stripe ? You think I am dazzled by the diamond glitter of it all ? Perhaps I am . But it is a splendid thing that is dying up there on the downs , a thing of grace and nobility and fun , a gay echo , a fanfare . Anomalous it may be , and doomed but you need not be a rabid die - hard to regret its passing . live in a grey , greasy world , and one day we shall miss that jangle of the harness , that purity of command , Major Moule with his dog and his stick in the evening , Colonel Laurie's clipped effervescence , the plumed troops of the lost cavalry , the flourish of a dead order . We Jupes men Spare them a last salute , as they clatter pomaded by ! And take that smile off your face when the gentle man is addressing you ! 5 MISCELLANY by Michael Frayn earn their money by estimating the cost of public undertakings are splendid examples to the rest of the popula tion . They are nearly always SO catastrophically , astronomically wrong , that the browbeaten layman feels his morale restored . The ignorant fellow who estimated it would cost him £ 40 to redecorate his house , and finds it costs him £ 60 , takes fresh heart when he learns that the Government defence experts estimated the Seaslug missile would cost them £ 1 million and found it worked out at £ 40 millions . Sometimes I think I shouldn't do all that much worse than the experts myself . If anyone had asked me to guess , first figure that came into my head , how much it would cost to electrify the railway line from Euston to Manchester , I should have said about £ 1 million ( which , to tell the truth , seems to my tiny , unpractised mind enough to electrify every railway line in Britain , and perhaps to electrify some of the more moribund staff into the bargain ) . The British Transport Commission's experts , after studying the prices of china insulators and galvanised iron nails , and probably the entrails of a freshly slaughtered beast , came to the conclusion that it would cost £ 75 millions . There is , as you will realise if you count up the noughts carefully , a fairly substantial difference between our two estimates . All the same , it is less than the difference between the Transport Commission's estimate and £ 161 millions , which is what it now looks as though the scheme will which cost - a difference would finance the laying of several lines of golden sovereigns between London and Manchester . All this has not escaped the eagle of the Select Committee eye on Nationalised Industries , which declares itself " astonished " that the Transport Commission should have gone ahead with the electrification scheme without first estimating the cost of dieselisation as an alternative . I , too , am astonished that they didn't have a stab at guessing that as well while the guessing mood was upon them . If it had turned out as well as the electrification estimate . it would have been a handy sort of statistic to have around the house . Perhaps it was just because they didn't understand the word " dieselisation . " Nor did I until a railway expert explained to me that it meant simply desteamification , followed by replacementisation with oilised transportisement . The Select Committee confesses frankly that it is perturbed by the situation . So am I. Experts are probably even now shaking dice to estimate the cost of denationalisification . Mr " E Macmillan heartily the other day , " is fun . " Fun is just the word I should have used to describe exporting , if anyone had asked me . What a time those exporters have . The gay round of the Board of Trade , the shipping offices , the foreign customs ! A wild evening at the Ritz , drinking bubbly out of a buyer's slipper . then off like mad things to Paris , to Vienna , taking along some little bit of nonsense they picked up who knows where - a sample trunnion bearing , perhaps , or a new non - ferrous cotter pin . infant that |
