Highland Dress in the British Army: A Uniform Tradition, Examined

Origins and early military adoption

Highland dress entered British military service through the Independent Highland Companies — locally recruited troops used to police the Highlands. After the 1715 rising, General George Wade re-raised six such companies in 1725, and their commanders were instructed to provide plaids "as near as they can of the same sort and colour." These companies were nicknamed Am Freiceadan Dubh, "the Black Watch," a name usually linked to their dark tartan and their watch-keeping duties. In 1739 they were amalgamated into a regular regiment (the 43rd, renumbered 42nd in 1749) — the first true Highland regiment of the British Army.

The tartan they wore — the plain dark blue, green and black check known as the "Government," "Black Watch" or "42nd" sett — became the first tartan clearly adopted as a state military uniform. Here the honest scholarly position matters. Peter Eslea MacDonald, head of research at the Scottish Tartans Authority, stresses that no piece of Government tartan survives from before about 1795. As he told CBC News in 2022: "I have calculated that before about 1780 some 14 miles of it was woven for the military… And not one piece is known to have survived before about 1795, so that truly is the Holy Grail." Everything said about the original pattern is therefore inference from portraits, letters and later pattern books, not from a documented design event. James Scarlett reconstructed that the companies probably began with a simple blue/black/green check to which each commander added distinguishing over-checks, with a common pattern emerging around 1733; the consistent regimental sett is documented "by 1749 or 1757 at the latest."

Popular sources often say the sett was an "old Campbell" tartan or was designed by "over sixty weavers" on Grant lands in Strathspey. These are traditional claims, not established fact: Scarlett found "no very good grounds" for the Campbell-origin theory, "though perhaps it is descended from one." The idea that the pattern was deliberately chosen to be clan-neutral (so as not to favour the Campbell, Grant, Munro or Fraser companies) is a reasonable reading of the "same sort and colour" order but is not something the leading scholars state outright — it should be treated as interpretation.

Crucially, during the Proscription years (1746–82), enlisting in a government Highland regiment was one of the few legal ways for a Highlander to wear the kilt — a point covered in detail on Card #31 and noted here only in passing. The military thus became the custodian and shop-window of Highland dress precisely when civilian use was banned.

The "invention of tradition" question, examined with nuance

This is the core mythbusting content, following the precedent of Card #28. In 1983 the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper published "The Highland Tradition of Scotland" in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition, arguing provocatively that "the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention." He made three claims: that Ossianic Gaelic literature was substantially fabricated; that the modern small kilt was invented in the 1720s by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson; and that clan tartans were essentially a 19th-century creation.

The nuanced verdict of subsequent scholarship is that Trevor-Roper was largely right on chronology but overstated the cultural conclusion. On tartan specifically:

• The formal clan-tartan system is genuinely a late-18th/early-19th-century development. Until then people wore tartan by preference, availability and district, not by clan rule. Naming began with Wilsons of Bannockburn (towns, regions, notable people); the Highland Society of London formalised "clan" tartans from 1815, inviting chiefs to certify a pattern — and some, such as the chief of Clan Donnachaidh, admitted they had no idea what their "clan tartan" was. National Museums Scotland states that the extent to which clan tartans are a valid avenue of expression "remains a source of controversy," and that "during the 18th and 19th centuries this living tradition was reinvented to suit the social, cultural, and political landscapes of Georgian Britain."
• But the "everything was invented" line is now heavily qualified. The Rawlinson kilt-invention story rests on a single anonymous 1785 letter and has been substantially refuted; depictions of the féileadh beag (small kilt) exist before Rawlinson, and the "great kilt" name itself implies a pre-existing small version. Hugh Cheape of National Museums Scotland — author of Tartan: The Highland Habit — shows that elaborate tartan dress mattered in late-medieval Gaelic society, and that "finely made and richly coloured tartans were the Highland equivalent of Renaissance fashion." Even Trevor-Roper conceded tartan was a common feature of Highland dress by 1745.
• The military dimension is central to the nuance: regimental tartans came first, and clan tartans grew partly out of them. As the standard account puts it, "regimental tartans, along with regional or district ones, led to the development of clan tartans in the late 18th to mid-19th century," after which "the flow of influence reversed, and many regiments adopted clan tartans."

The most colourful chapter is the Sobieski Stuarts — two Welsh brothers, John and Charles Allen, who reinvented themselves as grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie and in 1842 published the Vestiarium Scoticum, purporting to reproduce a 15th-century manuscript of clan tartans. It was denounced as a forgery, yet many of its invented setts passed into use as "official" clan tartans and are still worn. Trevor-Roper called it "shot through with pure fantasy and bare-faced forgery."

The fair conclusion, consistent with this series' standard: tartan and the kilt are genuinely old; the clan-tartan system and much Highland pageantry are substantially a Georgian and Victorian construction; and the martial "warrior race" imagery — as Card #28 found — was substantially manufactured. Highland military dress sits at the very centre of that manufacturing process.

Military-specific tartan and dress developments

Several developments were driven by the army rather than by civilian fashion:

• Regimental setts distinct from clan tartans. The Government sett was worn by many units, but some regiments developed variations by adding bright over-checks (the origin, for example, of what became "Grant" and other setts), and a few developed entirely separate tartans (the 75th, 79th/Cameron of Erracht, Fraser Fencibles). Wilsons of Bannockburn, the dominant supplier from around 1760, recorded weaving instructions for more than 200 setts — many of them only tentatively named — in their 1819 Key Pattern Book.
• The great kilt to the small kilt. Regiments raised in the late 1700s still used the belted plaid; by the Napoleonic Wars most had adopted the more practical féileadh beag, partly to make the dress easier for recruits unfamiliar with the older garment.
• Trews. Tartan trews (trousers) were worn as off-duty and campaign dress from the late 18th century, especially in hot climates, and became the standard Scottish dress of Lowland regiments after 1881.
• The full plaid served as blanket, overcoat and rain-cover for the musket lock on campaign — a genuinely practical garment before the era of issued greatcoats.
• Camouflage adaptations. As bright uniforms gave way to khaki, the tartan kilt was covered: a khaki apron over the front from the Boer War, and from 1915 a full wrap-around khaki cover, protecting the kilt and hiding its conspicuous colour in the field.

Practicality debates and the kilt's phase-out from combat

The kilt's suitability for modern war was debated honestly at the time, and the record is mixed rather than romantic. In WWI, newly raised battalions of men who had never worn a kilt complained of chafing behind the knees when wet, of lice breeding in the deep pleats, and of the kilt catching on barbed wire. Against that, in cold, muddy trenches the kilt was often warmer than sodden trousers and easier to remove to dry. The decisive problem was chemical warfare: after the Germans used mustard gas, bare skin under the kilt was dangerously vulnerable to blister agents.

Kilted troops nonetheless became an icon of the war, nicknamed the "Ladies from Hell" — though the phrase is almost certainly a myth in its usual telling. There is no documentation in German newspapers, letters, diaries or memoirs supporting German coinage; the story is reported by Allied soldiers and the British press (the earliest press use is the Dundee Courier, 28 September 1914). It should not be presented as a documented German coinage. What is real is the fighting reputation: German Army intelligence in 1918 rated the 51st (Highland) Division a "besonders gute Angriffsdivision" — an especially good assault division — while historians such as Benjamin Ziemann caution that the Germans were no more or less afraid of kilted troops than of any other Allied unit. The kilt survived into the opening of WWII but was formally withdrawn as combat dress in the first year of the war as unsuitable for mechanised warfare; the last kilted action is generally credited to the Camerons at the La Bassée Canal in May 1940. It has never returned to the front line.

Current ceremonial status and legacy, and the spread beyond Highland regiments

Highland dress spread well beyond genuinely Highland units. Lowland regiments originally wore standard British uniform and regarded tartan as foreign; the 1881 reforms gave them a distinctive Scottish identity through tartan trews, doublets and diced bonnets — while withholding the kilt (except for pipers) to avoid confusion with Highland regiments. English- and Commonwealth-raised "Scottish" units (the London Scottish, Liverpool Scottish, Canadian Highland regiments) adopted the kilt to signal Scottish identity, whether or not their men were Highlanders. Recruitment realities meant the "Highland" regiments long ceased to be predominantly Highland.

Why the dress outlived the Highland soldier: Devine's account

The historian T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), sets out the paradox at the heart of this card: Highland dress became most celebrated just as genuinely Highland soldiers became scarce.

established The privilege was unusual from the start. A few years after Culloden, Devine notes, the state was raising former rebels in concentrated units, allowing them the banned Highland dress and encouraging their own esprit de corps, privileges not given to the Irish (who far outnumbered Gaels in imperial service) or to Lowland battalions. Recruitment was enormous: by his figures, around 12,000 Highlanders served in the Seven Years War, and between 37,000 and 48,000 in regular, fencible and volunteer units during the French wars of 1793–1815, from a regional population of only about 250,000–300,000. Fifty-nine regular and fencible units were raised between 1740 and 1800.

established The supply could not last. Devine records that by about 1800 Highland manpower was exhausted: the 79th rebuilt in 1798 had more non-Scots than Scots, and at least a third of the Black Watch at Waterloo were Lowlanders, Borderers or English. Hence the 1809 de-kilting. Scotland's share of the whole army fell too: in 1830 Scots were about 10 per cent of the UK population but 13 per cent of the army; by 1870 they were 8 per cent of the army and by 1913 7.6 per cent. In the 1850s officers complained that not enough Scots, still less Gaels, could be found for the kilted regiments, and by the end of the century some critics called them "cultural forgeries", recruited from the urban poor rather than the glens.

shared Why, then, did the dress triumph? Devine weighs royal patronage, from George IV's 1822 visit (where Major-General David Stewart of Garth, formerly of the Black Watch, shaped the ceremonial alongside Scott) to Queen Victoria's long attachment to "her" Highland regiments. But he argues the larger cause was the rising public esteem for soldiers after the Crimean War and the Indian Rising, amplified by a cheap press, and the fact that kilted troops photographed and painted so well. The battle painter Lady Butler found them "so essentially pictorial". Scottish soldiering as a whole was "highlandized", culminating in the 1881 dress for Lowland regiments; the Volunteers of 1859 added tartan flourishes; and the colonies raised their own kilted units.

shared Not everyone accepted the bargain. Devine quotes A. G. Macdonell's My Scotland (1937), which complained that Lowlanders in Highland dress did most of the fighting and dying in the First World War while the Highlander took the credit, one side contributing "an undeserved name" and the other gaining "an unearned fame". Devine's conclusion is that the bond between Highlandism, militarism and Scottish identity survived even the losses of 1914–18.

Today Highland dress in the British Army is ceremonial. The Royal Regiment of Scotland, formed in 2006 from the historic Scottish infantry regiments, wears the Government 1A tartan (the lightened Sutherland version of Black Watch inherited from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) in kilt and trews, with pipes and drums preserving antecedent regiments' tartans. The kilt is worn in No.1 and No.2 dress, not in combat. The garment that began as the working dress of a Gaelic region, was banned for civilians, was preserved by the state's own soldiers, and was then remade into a national symbol, now survives chiefly on the parade ground and in the pipe band — a fitting emblem of how thoroughly military service shaped Scotland's most recognisable dress.

• No Government/Black Watch tartan survives from before about 1795. Peter MacDonald calculates that roughly 14 miles of it was woven for the military before 1780 — most of it serving in the North American campaigns — yet not a scrap of the early cloth is known to exist; he calls a pre-1795 specimen "the Holy Grail."
• Regimental tartans came before clan tartans, and clan tartans grew partly out of them — the opposite of the popular assumption.
• The kilt some call "invented by an Englishman" — the small kilt attributed to Thomas Rawlinson in the 1720s — rests on a single anonymous letter published in 1785, and the story has been substantially refuted.
• The Vestiarium Scoticum (1842), source of many "official" clan tartans, was a forgery produced by two Welshmen posing as grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
• George IV wore a kilt with pink tights at his 1822 Edinburgh reception, a spectacle stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott that helped turn tartan into national dress.
• Kilted soldiers on the Western Front hid their tartan under khaki aprons — and after 1915 under a full wrap-around cover — for camouflage.
• The "Ladies from Hell" nickname is very likely a myth: no German-language source documents it; it appears first in the Allied press and soldiers' accounts.
• Highland regiments were "de-kilted" in 1809 to widen recruitment, and several only regained the kilt at the 1881 reforms.

• The "invention of tradition" question (handle with nuance). Trevor-Roper's thesis is influential but contested. What is well supported: the formal clan-tartan system is largely a late-18th/19th-century creation, and much Highland pageantry was consciously constructed around 1822. What is overstated: the claim that Highland culture, tartan and the kilt are essentially modern fabrications — later scholars (notably Hugh Cheape) show tartan mattered in Gaelic society long before. This card presents both, endorsing neither the romantic myth nor the total-debunk.
• The Government sett's origins are genuinely uncertain. The "old Campbell" derivation, the "sixty Strathspey weavers," and the "deliberately clan-neutral design" claims are traditional, not documented — and no pre-1795 specimen survives to settle the matter.
• The kilt's combat practicality. Present honestly: real advantages and real, ultimately disqualifying, disadvantages — not a purely romantic tale.
• How many regiments lost the kilt in 1809. Devine (2011) says five; some regimental accounts give six. Both agree five kilted regiments remained (42nd, 78th, 79th, 92nd, 93rd). Do not state an exact number without a regimental source.
• The "Ladies from Hell" nickname is of uncertain, most likely Allied/press, origin; no German-language source documents it, so it should not be stated as a documented German coinage.
• Scope note. This card is the dedicated thematic treatment of Highland military dress across the British Army as a whole. It does not re-narrate the individual regimental histories on Cards #5–14, nor re-tell the Proscription-era pacification story detailed on Card #31 (referenced here only in passing).