Regiments and Corps of the
BRITISH ARMY:

An Introductory Overview

The modern British Army was born by Royal Warrant on 26 Jan. 1661, eight months after the Stuart restoration to the throne. A handful of regiments were held over from the Cromwellian army and the Stuart army in exile, but most were new.  [See FAQ: What is the Oldest/Senior Regiment in the British Army?] In the subsequent three and a half centuries the army evolved from a very small insular establishment to a far-flung imperial force, and back again to something similar to its original role. 

Snapshots of the British Army, in the form of rolls of regiments at various periods in the Army's history, serve to illustrate the evolving continuity and heritage of the regimental system that has been described as both the envy and puzzlement of the rest of the world. 

Prior to the Act of Union in 1707 there was no "British Army", but rather three separate small armies on the English, Scottish and Irish establishments, all owing allegiance to the same monarch, and co-mingling with the forces of the Dutch and other establishments (including two French Huguenot regiments in 1689-98). The army of 1660-62 consisted of a mix of regiments that the King brought to England from his exile, Cromwellian units which switched allegiance, and newly raised units.

By 1702 a sense of seniority and precedence across the three establishments was beginning to evolve as Parliament, ever suspicious of the Army, forced major cuts after every war or crisis, and the regiments sought a claim to survival based on seniority. The forces retained by the time of Charles II's death in 1685 amounted to little more than a royal bodyguard. A major exception in the trend of disbandments were nine infantry regiments raised later that year by James II to suppress the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion. He not only managed to hold on to them, but they survived intact into the 20th century. Most the regiments raised for King William's war were disbanded by 1698, and when he died in 1702 he was beginning to rebuild the army to meet the French challenge in the War of the Spanish Succession. Seven new cavalry and fifty new infantry regiments were raised for that war.

Both cavalry and foot regiments were known by the names of their colonels, which led to confusion when new colonels took over and when the same person successively commanded different regiments. Efforts to sort out this confusion also led to regimental nicknames, which in turn sometimes evolved into official titles. Two regiments commanded by colonels Howard were distinguished as the Buff Howards and the Green Howards from the colour of their facings, and the units eventually came to be officially known as The Buffs and The Green Howards.

The Expanding Empire

Until 1751 regiments were known by their successive colonels' names, but in that year they were numbered approximately in the order of their seniority. (Those that were out of order had originally been on a non-English establishment.) Since names fluctuated considerably, the army had to make numbers work as the designation of continuity. At the high end of enumeration, extra regiments were raised for wars and subsequently disbanded. Such regiments which may have shared the same number at different periods of history did not claim continuity with each other. A very rare exception were the 5th Dragoons, who re-formed in 1858 after being disbanded for almost sixty years yet claimed the heritage of its antecedent. At the same time the regiment lost its position of seniority, which resulted upon amalgamation with another regiment in 1922 in the "backwards" title of 16th/5th The Queen's Royal Lancers.

Cavalry were originally styled "horse" and "dragoons", the latter fighting as dismounted as infantry. The Horse regiments were eventually re-styled "dragoon guards" (three regiments in 1746, and the remaining four in 1788), even though they never had a royal guards role.

Prior to 1782, when almost all infantry regiments were assigned county titles, very few had any honorary distinction besides the number. These numbers remained in use for a hundred and thirty years, and to them adhered the accumulated lore of the regiments such that the numbers kept reasserting themselves long after they were officially abandoned. The 1760 list well illustrates the practice of disbanding and renumbering regiments. Numerous regiments were disbanded before and raised after 1760, notably during the Seven Years' War, the American Revolution, and the French invasion scare of the 1790s. Twenty-one infantry regiments raised in the 1750s survived into the 20th century, but another twenty-three were disbanded by 1768.

Cardwell and the Management of Empire

The 1871-72 reforms of Secretary of War Edward Cardwell were far-reaching in the development of the modern British Army. This was the beginning of the regimental system as it has been known since, and the product of that restructuring was the army that fought two world wars. Beginning in 1881, the reserves (Militia and Territorial Army), were tied to the regular army regiments. While the term "regiment" had heretofore been almost synonymous with a battalion (or its equivalent), it now came to represent a family of any number of battalions.

The principal feature of the reforms was the pairing of regular infantry battalions, and strengthening of county affiliations which had begun a century earlier. This was an army for the maintenance of empire. The plan called for each infantry regiment to have one battalion overseas and one at home recruiting and providing drafts. The first twenty-five regiments, the 60th and The Rifle Brigade already had two battalions, and of the remainder, the 79th remained un-paired, but raised its own 2nd Battalion in 1897. The second phase of the restructuring in 1881 officially eliminated regimental numbers, but the old numbers remained the basis for precedence, and kept re-asserting themselves in regimental titles over a hundred years later. General Army Order 41 in May 1881 established one form of title for the regiments, but G.O. 70 in July 1881 changed many, essentially flipping titles and subtitles. The titles presented here are the July 1881 form. In 1920 many regiments changed to the May 1881 form (see Roll of Regiments 1945).

Within this framework, the end of the nineteenth century saw more Army expansion, chiefly to cope with the Boer War. Between 1897 and 1900 twenty-six new battalions were raised: a 3rd Battalion for the Coldstream Guards and Scots Guards, the newly raised Irish Guards (a single battalion), a 2nd Battalion at long last for the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, and 3rd and 4th Battalions for the Northumberland, Warwickshire, Royal Fusiliers, King's, Lancashire Fusiliers, Worcestershire, Middlesex, and Manchester regiments, and the newly formed Royal Garrison Regiment (five battalions). (The King's Royal Rifle Corps and Rifle Brigade already had four battalions each.) The Army now stood at 171 infantry battalions, not counting the Indian Army and some colonial units under direct War Office control. Sixteen battalions disbanded in the wake of the Boer War (3rd Scots Guards, 3rd and 4th Battalions of the Northumberland, Warwickshire, King's, Lancashire Fusiliers, and Manchester regiments, and the Royal Garrison Regiment), and the Army entered the First World War with 157 regular infantry battalions. Most of the other battalions raised at the beginning of the century disbanded in 1922 (the exceptions being the Coldstream Guards, Irish Guards and Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders), and the King's Royal Rifle Corps and Rifle Brigade also reduced to a standard two-battalion establishment.

The roll of regiments in early 1918 was pretty much the same as that produced by the 1881 Cardwell reforms, with a few new concessions to technological change and a considerable growth in support services.

The Machine Gun Corps was formed in 1915, and its Heavy Branch split off in 1917 to become the Tank Corps. The latter were the only new fighting corps to survive postwar reorganisations. In 1899 the Royal Artillery split into two separate corps, Field and Garrison, but these reunited in 1924. In 1912 the air battalion of the Royal Engineers split off to form the Royal Flying Corps, and this in turn became a separate branch in April 1918, the Royal Air Force.

Just as the Irish Guards had formed in 1900 in recognition of Irish services in the Boer War, the Welsh Guards were formed in 1915 for services rendered in the opening phases of the First World War. Other expansion for the war effort was largely achieved by raising fourteen cavalry reserve regiments, second and third line copies of the yeomanry and new battalions in each infantry regiment, upwards of forty or more. (The normal peacetime establishment was two regular, one or two militia, and three to six Territorial Force battalions.)

Five Irish regular regiments disbanded in 1922 when Eire became independent (Royal Irish Regiment, Connaught Rangers, Leinster Regiment, Royal Munster Fusiliers, and Royal Dublin Fusiliers). For all but the first, their Irish heritage was relatively recent. Five of the ten disbanded battalions had come from the army of the East India Company sixty years earlier and taken Irish names in 1881. Two of these actually predated the modern British Army. Another one had been raised in 1568 as the Scots Brigade, belatedly joining the British Army as the 94th Foot, and united with the Connaught Rangers in 1881. The 1st Battalion of the Leinster Regiment had actually been raised in Canada in 1858 and was subtitled the "Royal Canadians". This history belied the true nature of Irish contributions to the British Army. Fully a third of Wellington's troops in the Napoleonic wars had been Irish, and the Gloucestershire Regiment once held the distinction of being the most "Irish" regiment in the Army. Despite the 1922 disbandments, the British Army continued to recruit freely throughout Ireland.

The roll of regiments in 1945 was recognisably the same as in the previous world war, despite some minor changes in regimental titles, notably the flipping of titles and subtitles in 1921.

The First World War had manifested a reduced need for cavalry, and these regiments were reduced from 31 to 22 by amalgamation in 1922 . This was the first time in the history of the British Army that units had amalgamated in order to preserve the heritage of ancient regiments. The previous practice had been to disband unneeded units, almost always the most junior regiments. After mechanisation, cavalry regiments periodically switched light reconnaissance and heavy armoured roles without regard to their prior "heavy" and "light" classifications as cavalry, and their titles ("dragoon guards", "hussars", "lancers", etc.) continued only for the perpetuation of tradition.

Mechanisation of the cavalry began in 1929 when the 11th Hussars and 12th Royal Lancers converted to armoured cars, and completed in 1941 when the Royal Scots Greys traded their horses for tanks. The Royal Armoured Corps was formed in 1939 to encompass the Royal Tank Regiment and all mechanised cavalry (except the Household Cavalry, which retained a composite mounted regiment for ceremonial purposes). Six new armoured regiments, randomly styled "hussars", etc.(22nd Dragoons, 23rd Hussars, 24th Lancers, 25th Dragoons, 26th Hussars, and 27th Lancers) were formed for the war, but did not survive post-war demobilisation. In addition, the Reconnaissance Corps, formed in 1940 and consisting of 23 armoured regiments, disbanded in 1946; and the Royal Armoured Corps had 44 numbered regiments (e.g. "1st Regt, RAC") converted from infantry battalions, which converted back to Territorial infantry in 1947.

In the infantry, a few war-formed units were disbanded in 1945-48, but the Parachute Regiment and Special Air Service Regiment were retained (the latter after a brief disbandment). Army Commandos, formed in 1940, were also disbanded in 1945, the commando role being retained by the Royal Marines. (The Marines had originally been Army regiments in the 17th century, but transferred to the Royal Navy in 1758.) Other expansion for the war was accomplished principally through the "duplication" of the Territorial Army.

    The third and only other war-formed land force unit to be retained after after the war was the Royal Air Force Regiment (1942), which took over the RAF Armoured Car Companies, Iraq Levies and Aden Protectorate Levies which had been formed in the 1920s.

Retreat from Empire

With the independence and partition of India in 1947, the British imperial army was no longer needed. India was the main overseas station of the Army and the principal reason for the Cardwell system of each regiment theoretically keeping one battalion at home and one overseas. Consequently the 2nd Battalion of every infantry regiment disbanded in 1948. At the transfer of power in India four of the ten Gurkha regiments in the Indian Army elected to join the British Army, being stationed first in Malaya, later in Hong Kong, and finally in Britain. The outbreak of the Korean War caught Britain by surprise with post-war demobilisation barely completed, and the disbandments of 1948 proved premature. Seven regiments in different brigades in northern Britain were selected to resurrect their 2nd Battalion (Green Howards, Lancashire Fusiliers, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Black Watch, Sherwood Foresters, and Durham Light Infantry). The King's Royal Rifle Corps had already re-formed their 2nd Battalion as a motor battalion for 6th Armoured Division.

After the 1956 Suez fiasco, Britain realized that it was no longer a global superpower and needed to retrench from its world commitments. The Sandys Defence White Paper of 1957 called for the end of national service by 1963 and the creation of an all-professional army. In the process 51 major units were axed, including 30 infantry regiments (and all their 2nd Battalions which had been briefly revived) which amalgamated into new regiments within 14 administrative brigades. Although regiments retained their identity, the brigades took over the regimental roles of recruiting, training and cross-posting. In 1959 brigade cap badges superceded regimental badges, which was regarded as an insidious first step toward a "Corps of Infantry" and the destruction of the regimental system. But after two more rounds of reductions (see 1972 and 1995), the regimental system still survived. The 1958-62 reorganizations were the first major disruption of the army since 1881, and the amalgamations were strongly resisted in some quarters. The colonels of two Scottish regiments resigned rather than oversee the dilution of their traditions. But in the end the new regiments developed their own unique heritage and esprit de corps much as the 1881 regiments had.

The British withdrawal from Aden in 1967 completed its retreat from Empire, which began twenty years earlier with the independence of India. Only a few small overseas defence commitments such as Hong Kong, Brunei and Belize remained, and the British Army found its new role in NATO.

The second round of army reductions since 1958 resulted in several more amalgamations of famous regiments. Two elected for disbandment rather than lose their identity in a merger: The Cameronians, and The York and Lancaster Regiment. Six of the administrative brigades formed in 1946 were converted into "large" regiments in 1964-68 (Queen's, Fusiliers, Anglian, Light Infantry, Irish, and Green Jackets), with the junior battalions of each one scheduled for subsequent disbandment. Most of these survived disbandment by being retained for a year as a representative company. They later reconstituted as a full battalion, but most finally disbanded by 1975. The large regiments perpetuated the traditions of up to six of the 1881 Cardwell regiments. The administrative brigades were superceded in 1968 by six divisions, and in 1969 regiments discarded their brigade cap badges and reverted to regimental ones. A planned amalgamation of The Gloucestershire Regiment and The Royal Hampshire Regiment was rescinded when the Edward Heath government came to power in 1970, and The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were saved from extinction by a popular campaign.

With the reduced threat to Germany (the British Army's overseas "home") at the end of the Cold War, the Defence White Paper "Options for Change" in 1991 called for major Army reductions. Infantry was cut from 55 to 41 battalions, armour from 19 to 11 regiments, artillery from 20 to 15 regiments, engineers from 15 to 10 regiments, and signals from 15 to 10 regiments. In addition, logistic support underwent major reorganization with the merger of several services into the Royal Logistic Corps and the Adjutant General's Corps. The Women's Royal Army Corps was disbanded and personnel integrated into all other units. These reorganizations were completed by 1995 (except for one Gurkha battalion which disbanded in 1996 on the eve of British withdrawal from Hong Kong).

As before, reductions were achieved by the amalgamation of regiments in order to preserve the traditions of their forebears. Planned amalgamations of The Royal Scots with The King's Own Scottish Borderers, and of The Cheshire Regiment with The Staffordshire Regiment were rescinded. By 1995 only eight of the ninety-seven cavalry and infantry regiments (other than guards) in the 1881 Army List had emerged unscathed from four rounds of army reorganizations.