The Scottish Horse — Defence Series, Card #17

What "yeomanry" meant — and why this card is different

Cards #5–16 covered regular regiments: full-time professional soldiers of the line infantry, the Foot Guards and the regular cavalry (the Royal Scots Greys). The Scottish Horse belongs to a wholly different institutional category — the yeomanry. Yeomanry regiments were volunteer, part-time mounted troops with roots stretching back to 1794, when county gentlemen raised horsed units for home defence against the threat of French invasion. They were locally recruited, socially distinctive (traditionally drawing on farmers, estate workers and the landed classes who could ride and owned horses), and administered quite differently from the regular army.

The Boer War transformed the yeomanry. After the disasters of "Black Week" in December 1899, the British government realised that regular infantry could not counter the highly mobile, sharp-shooting Boer commandos. On 13 December 1899 the War Office decided to allow volunteer forces to serve in the field, and a Royal Warrant of 24 December 1899 created the Imperial Yeomanry — mounted infantry organised in county service companies of about 115 men, enlisted for a year and armed with rifle and bayonet rather than sword and carbine. After the war, the Militia and Yeomanry Act 1901 reorganised the whole force, and the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907 folded the yeomanry into the new Territorial Force from 1908, as a home-defence force whose members could not be compelled to serve overseas. The Scottish Horse was born directly out of this moment — and it is the first yeomanry regiment in this Defence series.

Origins in South Africa and the Tullibardine connection

The Scottish Horse has one of the most distinctive origin stories of any regiment in this series: it was first raised not in Scotland but in South Africa. In late 1900 the Caledonian Society of Johannesburg proposed forming a corps of Scots, and Scottish-descended colonists, already living in the country. Lord Kitchener — then commander-in-chief — approved, and gave the task to Major John Stewart-Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine, of the Royal Horse Guards, who had served under Kitchener on the Omdurman/Sudan campaign. The unit was gazetted on 15 December 1900, with its depot at Johannesburg, and recruiting proceeded in Cape Town, Durban and Pietermaritzburg, with Natal an especially important source. Tullibardine took the field with three squadrons on 4 February 1901.

Recruitment then widened well beyond South Africa. As Tullibardine himself testified, the Highland Society of London "sent out 386 officers and men," and his father, the 7th Duke of Atholl, "personally raised 831 men before the war was over"; the Caledonian Society of Melbourne recruited enthusiastically in Australia, providing a strong contingent of Victorians. A second regiment was formed, so that the two regiments together drew on three distinct pools: Scots in South Africa, Scots from home, and Australians of Scottish descent. This genuinely trans-imperial, diaspora-based recruitment — pulling Scots from three continents — is what makes the regiment's origin so unusual, and it is why later accounts sometimes disagree about whether it was "a South African regiment" or "a Scottish regiment." The accurate answer is: it was raised in South Africa, but built from the wider Scottish diaspora.

The Tullibardine/Atholl connection is central and creates a direct cross-reference to Card #19 (the Atholl Highlanders). John Stewart-Murray was styled Marquess of Tullibardine until 1917, when he succeeded as the 8th Duke of Atholl. The same Atholl family maintains the Atholl Highlanders — the ceremonial private regiment based at Blair Castle, and the only legal private army in Europe. The two units are institutionally distinct, but the family thread is real and visible: the Scottish Horse wore the Murray of Atholl tartan, its pipers wore Murray of Tullibardine, its stable belt carried the black-and-gold colours of the Duke of Atholl's arms, and the regimental pipe band was substantially drawn from musicians of the Atholl Highlanders. The Scottish Horse's spiritual home became Dunkeld, in the heart of Atholl country in Perthshire.

The Boer War context, honestly stated

The Second Boer War (1899–1902) was a controversial imperial conflict, and the site's "accuracy over patriotism" standard requires it to be presented as such — with more explicit acknowledgement than shorter Victorian campaigns elsewhere in this series may have required. After conventional Boer resistance collapsed in 1900, the Boers turned to guerrilla warfare, and the British under Lord Roberts and then Lord Kitchener responded with what is today called a "total war" strategy. This included a scorched-earth policy: according to the Anglo-Boer War Museum, the policy "led to the destruction of about 30000 Boer farmhouses and the partial and complete destruction of more than forty towns," alongside the destruction of crops and slaughter of livestock. It also included the internment of Boer and African civilians in concentration camps, where conditions were catastrophic. The Anglo-Boer War Museum records that 26,370 Boer women and children — some 81% of them children — died in the camps; the National Army Museum states that "in all, 28,000 Boers, mainly women and children, died in the camps," and that around half that number of Black Africans died in separate, worse-provisioned camps (Encyclopaedia Britannica gives an estimate of 13,000–20,000 African deaths). The suffering became an international scandal, exposed most famously by the British humanitarian Emily Hobhouse. Kitchener also divided the veld with barbed wire and blockhouse lines and ran systematic "drives" to trap the commandos.

This is the essential backdrop against which the Scottish Horse operated, and it should not be softened. At the same time, honesty cuts both ways: what is specifically documented about the Scottish Horse's own role is that it functioned as a mobile mounted counter-guerrilla unit, brigaded into columns that pursued Boer commandos, captured laagers, prisoners, wagons, cattle and guns, and guarded remount depots. The scorched-earth clearances and camp administration were driven by overall British policy under Roberts and Kitchener; the surviving unit-level despatches for the Scottish Horse record its combat actions rather than describing its involvement in farm-burning or camp operations. It would be unsupported to claim the regiment was uniquely responsible for atrocities, and equally unsupported to claim mounted columns of this era were wholly separate from the clearance strategy that defined the war's final phase. The honest position is that the Scottish Horse was an effective fighting unit within a war whose methods are rightly remembered as among the most contested in British imperial history.

The regiment's documented service in South Africa

The Scottish Horse expanded rapidly — the first regiment to six squadrons, the second to five, ultimately reaching brigade strength. Historian John Price's study Southern Cross Scots found that some 3,500 men passed through the two regiments, 914 of them Australians and New Zealanders, with 126 dying in service. It was commanded successively by Tullibardine, Major A Blair (King's Own Scottish Borderers), Lt Col C E Duff (8th Hussars) and finally Lt Col H P Leader (6th Dragoon Guards). The 1st Regiment served mainly in the Western Transvaal under a succession of column commanders (Flint, Shekleton, Cunningham, Dixon and Kekewich); the 2nd Regiment served in the Eastern Transvaal, notably in Colonel Benson's celebrated column.

Documented actions include:

• Vlakfontein (29 May 1901) — the regiment helped drive off one of the fiercest Boer attacks of the war.
• Vlakfontein (3 July 1901) — Lieutenant William John English, aged 18, of the 2nd Scottish Horse, won the Victoria Cross. His citation in the London Gazette (4 October 1901) records: "This Officer with five men was holding the right of a position at Vlakfontein on the 3rd July, 1901… Two of his men were killed and two wounded, but the position was still held, largely owing to Lieutenant English's personal pluck. When the ammunition ran short he went over to the next party and obtained more; to do this he had to cross some 15 yards of open ground under a heavy fire at a range of from 20 to 30 yards."
• Moedwill (30 September 1901) — General Delarey surprised the camp; the Scottish Horse, weakened by detachments, lost 3 officers and 17 men killed and many wounded, and behaved with conspicuous steadiness.
• Brakenlaagte / Bakenlaagte (30 October 1901) — in the disaster that killed the column commander Colonel Benson, the 2nd Scottish Horse's rearguard squadrons fought almost to annihilation trying to save the guns; of about 93 engaged at the key point, only a handful were left unwounded.
• Gruisfontein (5 February 1902) — under Major Leader, the 1st Scottish Horse charged and captured Commandant Sarel Alberts's entire laager, taking 132 prisoners; Kitchener singled out the regiment for "great gallantry."
• Rooival (11 April 1902) — the regiment shared in one of the last big actions of the war.

At the peace, the Scottish Horse, with the Imperial Light Horse, Johannesburg Mounted Rifles and Kitchener's Fighting Scouts, marched past Kitchener at Pretoria on 17 June 1902. The regiment's dead are commemorated on twin memorials — a Celtic cross with a superimposed claymore, erected in 1905, standing both on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle and on Caledonia Hill in Kensington, Johannesburg. The Johannesburg memorial is notable for naming four Zulu Scouts who served and died with the regiment — a rare early instance of Black soldiers being commemorated on a South African war memorial.

Lieutenant English's later life closes his story: born in Cork on 6 October 1882, he rose to lieutenant-colonel and died on 4 July 1941 of a cerebral haemorrhage aboard ship off Egypt while on active service with the Royal Ulster Rifles. His Victoria Cross had been presented on 1 July 1902 by the Prince of Wales (later King George V) at Horse Guards Parade, London.

Establishment as a Yeomanry regiment

The two wartime regiments were disbanded at Edinburgh Castle on 1 September 1902, after repatriating the Australians and discharging the South Africans. The name and traditions were then carried in two directions. In South Africa, Tullibardine helped organise successor volunteer units, including the infantry Transvaal Scottish (raised 1902, still extant in the South African Army's reserve, wearing Murray of Atholl tartan) — so the regiment's overseas legacy did not vanish but transplanted itself into the South African military tradition.

In Scotland, the British Army regiment was re-constituted in 1903 as the Scottish Horse Imperial Yeomanry, with its headquarters at the drill hall on the High Street in Dunkeld. It became the county yeomanry regiment for Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, Elgin, Nairn and Argyll. When the Territorial Force was created in 1908, the Scottish Horse transferred into it, dropped the "Imperial" title, and had expanded to two regiments (eight squadrons in total): the 1st Scottish Horse (Perthshire) at Dunkeld and the 2nd Scottish Horse (Aberdeenshire, Elgin, Nairn and Argyll) at Aberdeen. The regiments were trained and equipped as dragoons. As a Territorial unit under the 1907 Act, its members were, in law, home-defence troops who could not be compelled to serve abroad — a defining feature of yeomanry status that mattered greatly when war came in 1914.

The First World War

On mobilisation in August 1914, the two peacetime regiments quickly raised a third, and the three formed the Scottish Horse Mounted Brigade in September 1914 under Tullibardine. After home-defence duties, the brigade sailed for the Mediterranean in August 1915. Diverted to Gallipoli, the men were dismounted and re-equipped as infantry, landing at Suvla Bay on 2 September 1915 — a striking illustration of how the Western Front and Gallipoli robbed mounted yeomanry of their horses. They served in the trenches until evacuated in December 1915, then moved to Egypt, where heavy losses led to the brigade's absorption into the 1st Dismounted Brigade on the Suez Canal defences in February 1916.

In autumn 1916 the regiment was permanently converted to infantry: on 1 October the 1st and 2nd Regiments were combined at Abbassia in Egypt, and on 15 October the unit became the 13th (Scottish Horse Yeomanry) Battalion, The Black Watch (Royal Highlanders). It moved to Salonika, serving on the Macedonian front (81st Brigade, 27th Division) from October 1916 to June 1918 — a theatre of comparatively lower intensity than the Western Front, dominated by disease, difficult terrain and static lines. In June–July 1918 the battalion transferred to France (149th Brigade, 50th (Northumbrian) Division) and took part in the final "Hundred Days" advance, fighting at Beaurevoir, the Selle and the Sambre in October and November 1918. Its heaviest concentrated loss came in these last two months: the regimental archive at Dunkeld preserves a notebook of the battalion padre, the Rev. Wilfred Callin, recording the names of ninety-three Scottish Horse soldiers who died in France in October and November 1918.

The 3rd Regiment had a different fate: converted into the 26th (Scottish Horse) Squadron, Machine Gun Corps, it served in Egypt, and provided a company to the Lovat Scouts battalion (10th Cameron Highlanders). The second-line regiments at home were converted to cyclists and later moved to Ireland.

Post-war lineage — examined precisely

Here the Scottish Horse diverges sharply from the regular regiments on earlier cards, which were amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland (the infantry) or into composite cavalry regiments. It was neither disbanded outright nor folded into a Royal-Regiment-of-Scotland structure. Instead it followed the distinctive post-1918 yeomanry trajectory.

After the war a commission reviewed the shape of the Territorial Force (renamed the Territorial Army from 1 October 1921). The lesson drawn from the war was that mass horsed cavalry was surplus: only the fourteen most senior yeomanry regiments were kept as horsed cavalry, and the great majority of the rest were converted — eight to armoured car companies of the Royal Tank Corps, and about twenty-five to brigades of the Royal Field Artillery between 1920 and 1922. The Scottish Horse was a special case. Reconstituted in the Territorial Army on 7 February 1920, it was reduced to a single regiment but uniquely retained as mounted "scouts", alongside the Lovat Scouts — a nod to the reconnaissance role at which both Highland units excelled.

In the Second World War the regiment finally lost its horses: in 1940 it was split to form the 79th and 80th (Scottish Horse) Medium Regiments, Royal Artillery. The 80th served in the Italian campaign (including Anzio) and the 79th in North-West Europe. This artillery conversion — exactly the fate the task flagged as common to yeomanry regiments — is the true institutional endpoint of the mounted Scottish Horse. In 1947 the regiment rejoined the TA and was transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps. Finally, on 31 October 1956, it amalgamated with the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry to form the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry/Scottish Horse, with headquarters at Yeomanry House, Cupar. Through a series of later reorganisations its lineage passes to today's Scottish and North Irish Yeomanry, whose "C" (Fife and Forfar Yeomanry/Scottish Horse) Squadron at Cupar carries the battle honours forward. The regiment's guidons are laid up in Dunkeld Cathedral, which also houses a memorial and the regimental archive.

1. The Scottish Horse was raised on foreign soil. Unusually for a British regiment, it began life in South Africa in 1900, formed at the suggestion of the Caledonian Society of Johannesburg from Scots and men of Scottish descent already in the colonies.
2. Three continents, one regiment. Its ranks were filled from Scots in South Africa, drafts sent from Scotland (including 831 men raised personally by the 7th Duke of Atholl and 386 sent by the Highland Society of London), and Australians of Scottish descent recruited via the Caledonian Society of Melbourne.
3. A teenage VC. Lieutenant William John English won the Victoria Cross at Vlakfontein on 3 July 1901 at just 18 years old; he later rose to lieutenant-colonel and died at sea off Egypt in 1941.
4. Its founder became a duke — and ran Europe's only private army. John Stewart-Murray, the Marquess of Tullibardine who raised the regiment, succeeded as 8th Duke of Atholl in 1917; the Atholl dukes still maintain the Atholl Highlanders (Card #19), the only legal private army in Europe.
5. Black soldiers named on a 1905 memorial. The Johannesburg Scottish Horse memorial records four Zulu Scouts who died with the regiment — a rare early example of Black soldiers commemorated on a South African war memorial.
6. It lost its horses at Gallipoli. In 1915 the mounted Scottish Horse was dismounted and re-equipped as infantry to fight at Suvla Bay — and it never returned to a true cavalry role in the field.
7. It became a Black Watch battalion. From October 1916 the regiment fought as the 13th (Scottish Horse Yeomanry) Battalion, The Black Watch, in Salonika and on the Western Front.
8. It ended up firing guns, not riding horses. In 1940 the Scottish Horse was converted into two Royal Artillery medium regiments; one fought at Anzio. Its modern descendant is a squadron of the Scottish and North Irish Yeomanry.

• "Raised in Scotland and sent to South Africa" — a common oversimplification. The regiment was raised in South Africa, from Scots and Scottish-descended men already there, with later drafts from Scotland and Australia. Popular accounts that describe it simply as a Scottish home regiment shipped south get the origin backwards; conversely, calling it purely "a South African regiment" understates the home-Scotland and Australian contingents.
• Casualty figures are not available as a single authoritative total. For the Boer War, the twin memorials list roughly 124–125 names (the IWM War Memorials Register records 124; a photographic count of the Johannesburg plaques recorded 125, including four Zulu Scouts) covering deaths from combat, wounds, disease and accident. John Price's Southern Cross Scots recorded 126 deaths among the roughly 3,500 who served, and Tullibardine separately testified that of 157 officers, "14 were killed or died." No single published regimental death total beyond these figures was located. For the First World War, no precise full-war death total for the 13th (Scottish Horse Yeomanry) Battalion could be verified online; the best-documented figure is the padre's notebook recording 93 Scottish Horse men who died in France in October–November 1918, its heaviest concentrated loss. Treat any single "total casualties" figure with caution.
• The Zulu Scouts count varies. Sources differ on whether three or four Zulu Scouts are commemorated; the most specific account names four (Bayisana Noondo, Jele Butelezi, Theophilus and John Basuto). This is a genuine source discrepancy, noted here rather than resolved.
• The Boer War's contested legacy. The regiment's battlefield record was praised in contemporary despatches, but those despatches are self-interested imperial documents. The war's defining methods — scorched earth and concentration camps — killed tens of thousands of civilians and are properly remembered as among the darkest episodes of British imperial policy. Celebrating the regiment's gallantry without this context would breach the site's "accuracy over patriotism" standard.
• Distinct institutional status versus earlier cards. Unlike the regular infantry regiments (amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland) or the regular cavalry, the Scottish Horse was a yeomanry regiment that was reduced after 1918, converted to Royal Artillery in 1940, and amalgamated with the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry in 1956. Readers should not assume it followed the same lineage pattern as Cards #5–16; it did not.
• Two "Scottish Horse" successors after 1902. The name continued both as the British Territorial regiment (this card's subject) and as a short-lived Transvaal volunteer regiment (disbanded 1907); the related infantry Transvaal Scottish, also founded by Tullibardine, still exists in the South African Army reserve. These are related but separate institutions.