Tag Archives: Household Cavalry

Pulling stumps after 215 years

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After 215 years, the Household Cavalry has marched out of their barracks at Windsor for the last time. The HCav– consisting of amalgamated Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards, and 1st Dragoons– have called Combermere Barracks on St Leonard’s Road, about one mile from Windsor Castle, home since the reign of King George III of American Revolution fame.

The battalion-sized unit, an armored recon force, currently uses the Alvis FV107 Scimitar ARV along with Panther and Wolfhound wheeled vehicles and is being moved 150km to the West, as part of a massive reorganization of the British Army, to Bulford in Wiltshire (on the Salisbury Plain) where they will be co-located with the Kings Royal Hussars, another scout unit, and transition to the new General Dynamics Ajax AFV. They will be replaced this summer in Windsor by the 1st Battalion, Welsh Guards, who are being upgraded from their home at the Army Training Centre in Pirbright, Surrey.

The Household Cavalry on Saturday were allowed to march, with bayonets fixed and sabers on display, through Windsor on their way out of town, with HRH The Princess Royal, who is Colonel of the Blues and Royals and Royal Armoured Corps Colonel, taking the Salute as the Regiment passed the Windsor Guildhall.

Of note, the 200~ horse soldiers of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment will remain at their London Hyde Park Knightsbridge Barracks, with members rotating with the HCR in Bulford between public order and field service. Some three-quarters of a mile from Buckingham Palace, the various Horse Guards have been in residence there since 1795.

In the UK, standards are interred

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From The Army in London – HQ London District, the chronicle of how a circa-1953 unit standard was retired for good, to the cold earth.

Here lies The Sovereign’s Standard of the Royal Horse Guards

“Battered and tattered, its duties done, the once glorious gold and scarlet Standard of the Royal Horse Guards (Household Cavalry) was taken from its place of honour high in the rafters of the Royal Military Chapel in Wellington Barracks, placed in a shroud and, as prayers were said, troopers paid their respects, and a silver trumpet sounded the Last Post, it was laid reverentially to rest in the sacred soil of the Guards Chapel Garden in Birdcage Walk.”

Its final resting place, the Sovereign’s Standard is laid to rest in the sacred soil of the Guards Chapel Garden — at The Guards’ Chapel.

More here