Victorian painting of soldiers with a large drum, Scottish flag and bagpipes, dressed in a Scottish style military uniform

Review: Strike Up, Strike Sure: The Pipes and Drums of the London Scottish Regiment

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Strike Up, Strike Sure: The Pipes and Drums of the London Scottish Regiment
by Duncan da Silva

Scottish military music has a complicated place in the history of Scottish music.  On the one hand, it’s part of a powerful tradition involving bagpipes and drums that has traveled with Scots around the world and continues to feature in the national music of other nations even in this post-colonial age.  Post-1745, the revival of Highland culture in Hanoverian Britain marched hand-in-hand with pipes and drums, marking attacks, retreats, celebrations and laments. On the other hand … well, that’s also the other hand. The Scots have quite a complicated relationship with this kind of music.

If you visit Edinburgh castle, the Scottish National War museum and the regimental museums of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (“raised to help Charles II  fight the Covenanters”, as it says on their website) and the Royal Scots all feature historic pipes and drums, as does the museum at Fort George of musical bands associated with the northern Highland regiments, and the Black Watch museum in Perth to the Black Watch regiment (recently re-branded the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland). For veterans and families of these bodies, pipe and band music is a source of considerable pride and personal identity.

There are general histories about British military music, and chapters on music within histories of Scottish regiments, but, the author of this book argues, not a great deal of sustained book-length accounts, although Gary West has written a decent summary essay on music within a general history of the military in Scotland.  The National Piping Centre in Glasgow is also a source of practical expertise on the traditions, and its shop sells various anthologies of pipe music connected with particular regiments such as the Seaforth Highlanders, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Royal Scots and Scots Guards.

So, there is a gap for a comprehensive book, but it’s rather surprising to find this book-length study focuses not on the obvious Scottish-based full-time regiments, but rather on the London Scottish Regiment, a volunteer reserve group that draws on the identity-in-exile of Scots in London, and which grew out of armed associations created during the Napoleonic Wars.

The London Scottish Regiment was formally instituted in 1859, at the time when the Volunteer Act created volunteer militias throughout Britain, and responded pragmatically to the reality that many Scots didn’t necessarily live in Scotland.  Members saw early action in many campaigns, notably the Boer War and the first wave dispatched to fight in World War 1. Affiliation with this group for much of the 19th and early 20th century  expressed a particular kind of diasporic Scottish identity, and clearly continues somehow to do this, in the complicated identity politics of the 21st century.

The structure of the book is simply chronological and tracks the wars of the British imperial past alongside listing names and biographical information about Pipe Majors and Drum Majors – nothing there is surprising.  However, the level of anecdotal detail and insider-humour highlight that the author himself was for a long time a volunteer himself.

The book suggests that this regiment and its musicians provided a focus for the London-based Scots who shaped, for better or for worse, a kind of Scots-British identity that has played a regular part in in public life ceremonials in the modern era.  From the outset, their members demonstrated both Scottish and British patriotic fervour.  Early backing came from the Highland Society of London, for example, a group of aristocratic Scotsmen who were very active in re-positioning Highland tartan as an acceptable unionist dress and in articulating a new narrative for post-Jacobite identity.  The Highland Society promoted London-based military piping competitions (pp.34-36) for the militias of the Napoleonic period, and continued to play a strong role in advocacy for the London Scottish Regiment through to its formalisation mid-century.  Clearly, the regiment was a home-from-home for many Scots in the south.

When ‘kilted regiments’ were established in the regular army in 1854, pipers began to become more common and fully incorporated rather than supernumerary to regimental payrolls within the regular army (p.43). Arrangements for the London Scots to be recognised as an official regiment within the British Army were confirmed in 1859 (p.46). In the London context, rather than the separate regional affiliations of regiments in Scotland, the general grouping of ‘London Scots’ contained Scots from many different parts of the home nation: all, therefore, wore a standard ‘Scottish’ regimental uniform that replaced specific tartans with a Hodden grey-khaki kilt, plaid and jacket, and a darker blue-green Glengarry. Sporrans and dirks completed the look.  Clearly Scottish, but not too “tartany”. Performances of Scottish military identity in London feature in many of the illustrations in this generously illustrated book: Scottish, but not too Scottish.

Most recently, the UK government’s Future Soldier report (2021) laid out a vision for a new, leaner army, and suggested that the London Scottish may be reformed into being a part of the Scots Guards, possibly creating a new 1st Battalion London Guards Pipes and Drums; i.e. not necessarily specifically and separately ‘Scottish’ but generically British (p.360). The book ends on a note of slight uncertainty; it’s not quite clear how “Scottish London” identity will go forward under the new arrangements.  Given wider national politics, that caution seems appropriate.

The fine detail of the book is exhaustive, and possibly not for every general reader, but there is a lot in that detail that could be helpful in understanding how this kind of music has built and sustained British affinities over the last 2 centuries: the idea of a “London Scottishness” blending diverse Scots into one, Scottish, unitary identity was certainly thought-provoking.  You don’t always feel specifically “ethnic” until you leave home – and then you encounter what a particular national identity looks like as it is bounced back to you.  Intriguing.

Further Reading (and visiting)

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