Standing on ceremony

As the sound of music, majesty and military precision marks The King’s Birthday Parade, Simon Doughty considers the evolution of the ceremonial uniform

- Simon Doughty

EVERYONE loves colourful ceremonial uniforms. Together with the music and grandeur of a great State occasion, the sight of mounted and marching soldiers in formation is the essence of pomp and circumstance. By contrast, the camouflage uniforms that soldiers wear on operations are designed with the opposite in mind. They blend with their surroundings: a windswept desert, a dense jungle or an inner-city battleground. Yet uniforms were not always like that, in design or purpose.

As Allan Mallinson explains in The Making of The British Army, it was in the New Model Army, Britain’s first standing army formed in 1645, that British soldiers began to ‘wear a true uniform—red’. Oliver Cromwell knew the type of officers he wanted: ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than what you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.’ There was no place in this new army for those who were officers merely because they were Members of Parliament.

Why did British soldiers wear red coats in the field rather than clothing more appropriate to their surroundings and why did this practice continue until the late 19th century? To hide the wounds of soldiers on the battlefield, to intimidate the enemy or as a simple form of recognition? In an era when armies fought at close quarters and often hand-to-hand, it was important to be recognised as friend or foe.

None of these theories, however plausible, explain fully why British soldiers wore red uni- forms in the field for more than 300 years and why these now form the origin of ceremonial dress. The reason, certainly in the early days, was that the most readily available dyes for uniforms were red. The dyeing process for these pigments was simple and, following the old maxim about military equipment always being purchased from the least-expensive supplier, so it was for uniforms: red was cheap.