Regimental Colours & Battle Honours: The System, the Symbolism, and the Scottish Exceptions

This card applies the site's three-tier framework.

• Established (documented): the practical battlefield origin of Colours; the 1743/1747/1751/1768 regulatory sequence; the end of battlefield use (1881 Laing's Nek; ban since 1882); the mechanics of the honours system (committees, the 1882 Battle Honours Committee, WWI/WWII selection rules); the Assaye/third-Colour distinction; the Scots Greys eagle capture and cap badge.
• Shared/Traditional: the religious meaning of Colours and the consecration ceremony — a real, continuing practice, but one whose supposed medieval/ancient pedigree rests on regimental and ceremonial tradition rather than a documented date of formalisation. The "drums as altar" (drumhead) origin story is similarly traditional.
• Disputed / requires correction: several individual "saving the Colours" narratives (Melvill and Coghill at Isandlwana; the fabricated Inkerman story; the disputed Waterloo eagle credit) and any sweeping claim of a distinct Scottish battle-honours system. We flag the "sacred Colours" mythology and the "saving the Colours" narratives explicitly as needing careful treatment.

Origins and battlefield function of Colours examined

The word "Colours" is literal: regimental flags took their name from the uniform colours and insignia of the men who carried them, so that in the chaos of a battlefield soldiers could see where their unit stood. On smoky, dusty fields fought at close order, and without modern communications, a large, distinctive flag was a genuine command tool — a rallying point that upheld both cohesion and morale. This practical function is thoroughly documented and is the historically correct starting point; the later reverence grew out of the flag's battlefield utility, not the other way round.

Before standardisation each company carried its own Colour — ten or twelve to a regiment at the Restoration — with a design drawn from the colonel's arms or badge. As infantry tactics changed around 1700 the number fell to two or three. A sequence of royal warrants under George II (1743, 1747, 1751) then imposed order: two Colours per battalion, the first the King's Colour (the Union throughout), the second the Regimental Colour in the regiment's facing colour, and — decisively, in 1751 — a ban on the colonel putting "his Arms, Crest, Device, or Livery" on the regiment's appointments. The detailed 1768 warrant fixed sizes and devices. The Colours were entrusted in battle to the most junior officers — the ensign (infantry) and cornet (cavalry), whose very rank-titles derive from names for the flags — supported by veteran NCOs; from the Napoleonic era the senior NCO of this "colour guard" was the colour sergeant.

To lose a Colour to the enemy was the deepest disgrace, symbolising complete defeat; to capture one was among the highest battlefield achievements. That equation explains the ferocity of the fighting around Colours — and also why, as the 19th century progressed and open-order fighting replaced line and square, the colour party became a fatal liability rather than an asset. By the 1880s the maths had turned: at Laing's Nek in January 1881 the 58th (Rutlandshire) Regiment bore the brunt of the defeat, losing 74 killed and 101 wounded — around 35 per cent of its strength — and carried its Colours into action for the last time in British Army history. After a government debate prompted partly by the loss of the 1/24th's Colour at Isandlwana in 1879, it was ruled that Colours would no longer be taken on active service; since 1882 none have been.

The battle honours system explained

A battle honour is an award of a right, by the Crown, for a military unit to emblazon the name of a battle or campaign (usually a place and a year, e.g. "Cambrai 1917") on its Colours. Crucially, it is granted to the regiment as a whole even when won by a single battalion, and it records official recognition of participation in an approved action, not a simple ranking of bravery.

The system grew piecemeal. Very few honours existed before 1800. The first British battle honour was "Emsdorf" — won by the 15th Light Dragoons at the Battle of Emsdorf on 14 July 1760 and granted by Royal Warrant in 1768, uniquely borne on the regiment's helmets, guidons and appointments rather than on a Colour. The earliest honour chronologically is "Tangier 1662–80". The first honour emblazoned on Colours in the modern manner came in 1784, when four regiments that held Gibraltar in the Great Siege were ordered to bear "Gibraltar" on their second Colour. For decades awards depended heavily on the persistence of individual colonels petitioning Horse Guards, which produced inconsistency: honours for battles like Dettingen (1743) were not granted until 1882.

Order came with the first Battle Honours Committee in 1882, chaired by Major-General Sir Archibald Alison, directed to weigh long-unrecorded claims from the Marlburian and North American wars. Thereafter a settled bureaucratic process developed, refined for the two World Wars: a Historical Section produced material; a Battles Nomenclature Committee framed a report for the Army Council; a Battle Honours Committee set the conditions and adjudicated claims; and regimental committees (of at least five officers, including past and present commanding officers) submitted evidence that their unit qualified — commonly, that its headquarters and 50 per cent or more of its strength had been present. The sheer scale of the Great War made it impossible to emblazon every honour, so from 1922 regiments selected up to ten Great War honours (later, similarly, for the Second World War) to carry on the King's/Queen's Colour, while older honours remained on the Regimental Colour. Design and conformity are policed by the Inspector of Regimental Colours, an officer of arms (the post created in 1806; the design of all colours, guidons, standards and badges passes through this office). Artillery, which carries no Colours ("the guns are their colours"), receives honour titles instead; rifle regiments, historically skirmishers with no need of a rallying flag, carry no Colours and inscribe honours on cap and belt badges — a tradition The Rifles perpetuated in 2007 when its forming regiments gave up their Colours.

Scottish regiments and documented distinctive practices

Scotland's regiments sit inside the same system as the rest of the Army, and manufactured claims of a separate Scottish honours regime should be resisted. That said, several genuine documented distinctions exist.

• The Assaye Colour (a rare third Colour). For its part in the Battle of Assaye (1803) — where every officer was killed and the survivors were led out by the regimental sergeant-major — and for long service in India, the 74th (Highland) Regiment received an honorary third Colour from the East India Company. That distinction passed to the Royal Highland Fusiliers and now to 2 SCOTS, who uniquely among infantry carry a third Colour on parade. (The 78th Highlanders also received a special third colour for Assaye, with the elephant device.) The Assaye Colour is an honorary Colour and is not consecrated in the way the Queen's and Regimental Colours are.
• The Scots Greys' eagle and cap badge (cross-reference to Card #26 only). At Waterloo, Sergeant Charles Ewart of the Scots Greys captured the eagle of the French 45th Régiment de Ligne; the eagle remains the regiment's cap-badge device and "Waterloo" its principal honour. Card #26 tells this story in full; here it simply illustrates that capturing an enemy standard could itself become an enduring honour. Note the well-documented mythbusting caveat: modern research shows the Greys did not gallop into a full "charge" (as in Lady Butler's Scotland Forever!) but advanced at little more than a walk through their own infantry into a French column already in disorder.
• The Royal Regiment of Scotland's consolidated Colours. On amalgamation in 2006 the new regiment inherited 339 battle honours across its antecedents — far more than any Colour can bear — so a regimental committee selected those to be emblazoned, "conferred by Royal Authority and agreed by the Inspector of Regimental Colours." Its battalions carry identical Queen's and Regimental Colours differentiated only by a Roman numeral, plus the Assaye Colour for 2 SCOTS.
• Other Scottish distinctions that are not Colours-honours. Some famous Scottish "distinctions" belong to dress and custom rather than to the battle-honours system: the Black Watch's red hackle (traditionally tied to Geldermalsen, 1795, though the regiment's own museum notes evidence the hackle was worn earlier, during the American War of Independence) and the Scots Greys' bearskin cap (the only British cavalry so entitled) are honoured distinctions of dress, not emblazoned battle honours. It is worth being precise about the difference.

The "saving the Colours" narratives examined with rigour

Because losing a Colour meant disgrace, feats to save them became the stuff of Victorian legend — and legend is exactly the problem. Some episodes are solidly documented acts of courage: Lieutenant Matthew Latham of the 3rd (Buffs) at Albuera (1811), horribly mutilated defending the King's Colour, is well attested and was commemorated with a special gold medal. Others need caveats:

• Melvill and Coghill at Isandlwana (1879). The story that two lieutenants heroically bore the Queen's Colour of the 1/24th to safety across the Buffalo River is the most mythologised of all. The documented facts: Melvill was ordered to save the Colour; Coghill assisted; the Colour was lost in the river and recovered ten days later (during the 3 February 1879 expedition to Fugitives' Drift), and now hangs in the Havard Chapel, Brecon Cathedral, where Queen Victoria ordered a silver wreath of immortelles attached to its pike; both men died and received posthumous VCs in 1907. But the celebrated "dash with the Colours" was heavily embroidered by the Victorian press, and senior contemporaries — notably Sir Garnet Wolseley — were scathing. In his South African journal, after visiting the graves at Fugitives' Drift (entry of 3 August 1879), Wolseley wrote: "I am sorry that both of these men were not killed with their men at Isandlwana instead of where they were. I don't like the idea of officers escaping on horseback when their men on foot are killed. Heroes have been made of men like Melvill and Coghill, who, taking advantage of their horses, bolted from the scene of the action to save their lives… it is monstrous making heroes of those who saved or attempted to save their lives by bolting." Modern historians note the two were the only 1/24th officers to leave the field and that some regard the Colour as, at best, a partial justification for flight. The heroism is genuine; the tidy heroic narrative is not.
• The Inkerman fraud (1854). Colour Sergeant Poolfield Davies of the Grenadier Guards told the press he had valiantly saved the Colours at Inkerman, and Cassell's Illustrated Family History duly lauded him — recording that "Davies defended his colours with the utmost tenacity, and literally mowed down the enemy who made a rush to capture them" — and a commemorative mug was produced. As the National Army Museum records, "this story was a complete fabrication. Davies had played no part in the battle at all," and later versions of the mug substituted a Sergeant Thomas in the role, who probably did not perform the deed either. This is the clearest documented case of "saving the Colours" mythology as outright invention.
• The Waterloo eagle credit dispute. Even a real capture could be contested: the 1st (Royal) Dragoons' taking of the French 105th's eagle at Waterloo produced a lasting argument between Lieutenant Alexander Kennedy Clark and Corporal Francis Stiles over who actually seized it.

The pattern is consistent with this series' treatment of the "invention of tradition": a real and dangerous battlefield object generated real acts of courage, which were then selected, dramatised and sometimes fabricated to serve imperial storytelling.

Decline and modern ceremonial status

The transition from tool to totem is datable. As warfare moved to dispersed, cover-using tactics through the mid-to-late 19th century, the massed Colour party became a target rather than a beacon. Isandlwana (1879) prompted parliamentary debate; Laing's Nek (1881) was the last carriage in action; and from 1882 Colours were banned from active service. The physical objects shrank accordingly — from roughly 6'6"×6' to the modern 3'9"×3' around 1865 — precisely because they no longer had to be seen across a battlefield.

Today the system is entirely ceremonial but far from vestigial. New Colours are consecrated — set apart, in the Army's own words, "from mere material things and declared sacred", blessed by the Chaplain-General on an altar built of piled drums (a "drumhead" that echoes battlefield field-services) — before being presented by the Sovereign or a royal representative, usually only once every 20–25 years. They are trooped: the annual Sovereign's Birthday Parade ("Trooping the Colour") on Horse Guards descends from a practice of showing the Colour to the troops so they would recognise it, and has marked the sovereign's official birthday since 1748, becoming a fixed annual event under George III. When retired, Colours are laid up in a chapel or cathedral and deliberately left to decay to dust — a symbolism of mortal service — after which the remains may be buried or cremated in consecrated ground. In Scotland the living continuity is embodied in the Royal Regiment of Scotland, whose six battalions received new Colours from the Queen at Holyrood Park in 2011, and in ceremonial acts such as the 2023 presentation of the Ballater Colour at Balmoral. Standing orders in most modern armies still require Colours to be destroyed rather than allowed to fall into enemy hands — a final trace of the old battlefield logic inside a purely symbolic object.

• In the 1760s the judge David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes) suggested in his private journal that discharged Highland veterans in each county be given "a pair of colours taken from the enemy", to be kept "for ever" as a spur to recruitment (Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, 2013).
• The rank-names "ensign" and "cornet" mean "flag." The most junior infantry and cavalry officers were named after the Colours it was their job to carry and defend.
• Rifle regiments carry no Colours at all. As skirmishers and sharpshooters they never needed a rallying flag; their battle honours go on cap and belt badges instead — a tradition The Rifles kept in 2007, deciding that riflemen "do not need to hide behind their colours."
• One soldier was arguably saved by a Colour. At Gandamak (1842), Lieutenant Thomas Souter of the 44th had wrapped the yellow silk Regimental Colour under his sheepskin coat; the Afghans mistook the bright silk for the garb of an important man and took him prisoner rather than killing him.
• 2 SCOTS carry three Colours — the only such infantry distinction in the British Army — thanks to the Assaye Colour granted by the East India Company in 1803.
• The Royal Regiment of Scotland holds 339 battle honours, from Tangier (1680) to Iraq (2003) — so many that a committee must choose which to emblazon.
• A Colour is meant to rot. Laid-up Colours in cathedrals such as Salisbury are deliberately left to disintegrate; one set of Wiltshire Regiment Colours hung for over 175 years before its remains were taken down for cremation.
• Colours can double as a battlefield altar. Draped over piled drums, they served as the altar for field services — the origin of the "drumhead" consecration still used today.
• The Scots Greys were the only British cavalry to wear the bearskin cap — a dress distinction, not a battle honour, traditionally linked to Ramillies (1706).

• The "sacred Colours" mythology. Consecration is a genuine, continuing practice and the Army itself uses the language of "sacred." But the claim that this represents an unbroken ancient or medieval rite is traditional, not documented: no authoritative or peer-reviewed source we located fixes a date for the consecration liturgy's formalisation, and the medieval-origins narrative comes from regimental and ceremonial texts rather than academic scholarship. Treat the "sacred" status as a real but layered, tradition-based meaning — much of it consolidated in the 18th–19th centuries — rather than a timeless fact.
• The "saving the Colours" narratives. These range from documented courage (Latham at Albuera) to embellished legend (Melvill and Coghill at Isandlwana, criticised by Wolseley and complicated by their being the only 1/24th officers to leave the field) to outright fraud (the Inkerman mug). Read every heroic Colours story with the same scepticism this series applies elsewhere.
• Scottish "exceptionalism." The documented Scottish distinctions are real but specific — the Assaye third Colour (2 SCOTS), the Scots Greys' eagle badge and Waterloo honour, and dress distinctions like the red hackle and bearskin. There is no separate Scottish battle-honours system, and the red hackle's Geldermalsen (1795) origin is itself contested by the Black Watch's own museum.
• Relationship to other cards. This card is the dedicated thematic treatment of the system. It does not re-narrate the individual regimental honour-lists implicit in Cards #5–14, and it references the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards / Scots Greys Waterloo eagle (Card #26) only briefly, as an illustration of captured-standard honours rather than a re-telling.