Tag Archives: The Royal Lancers

Keeping Clean

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80 Years Ago this month. A great original Kodachrome. Official caption: “Sergeant Elms of 16/5 Lancers and his tank crew at El Aroussa; Trooper Bates, Royal Armoured Corps, Signalman Bower, Royal Corps of Signals, and Trooper Goddard, Royal Armoured Corps, clean the 6-pounder gun of their Crusader tank while preparing for the drive on Tunis..”

By War Office official photographer Loughlin, G. (Lieutenant), IWM TR 939

The 16th/5th Queen’s Royal Lancers was formed in 1922 by amalgamating the 16th The Queen’s Lancers and the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, both of which were in India at the time.

As noted by the National Army Museum:

The new unit was posted back to Britain in 1926, before returning to India in 1937. It was still there on the outbreak of the Second World War (1939-45). Still a mounted regiment at the time, it sailed for England in January 1940 to mechanise.

The regiment initially provided motorised machine-gun troops to defend Britain against possible German invasion in the autumn of 1940. Once that threat had gone, it switched to training on Valentine and Matilda tanks in November 1940.

It deployed to Tunisia in November 1942, where it was re-equipped with Sherman tanks the following year. It then fought at Kasserine and in the final capture of Tunis in 1943.

In January 1944, the regiment landed at Naples. The mountainous Italian terrain was ill-suited to armoured warfare and so its soldiers often ended up operating as infantry. By the time of the German surrender in Italy in May 1945, the 16th/5th Lancers had pushed the furthest west of any unit in the Eighth Army, linking up with the Americans.

Post-war, the 16th/5th served as occupation troops in Austria, then a stint in Egypt, multiple deployments to West Germany, Aden, Cyprus, Beirut, Northern Ireland, and, finally, the First Gulf War before it was amalgamated in 1995 with the 17th/21st Lancers to form The Queen’s Royal Lancers, which was later merged in 2015 with the 9th/12th Royal Lancers (Prince of Wales’s) to form The Royal Lancers of today.

All That was Left of Them

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Via the National Army Museum, Study collection: 17th Lancers near Modderfontein farm, near Tarkastad, in what is today South Africa, 17 September 1901, during the Boer Wars. Known today as the Battle of Elands River, the skirmish involved a British cavalry squadron against a well-armed, albeit starving, Boer commando unit almost twice its size.

Chromolithograph after Richard Caton Woodville (1856-1927), 1901. Published by Gilbert Whitehead and Company Limited as a supplement to ‘Holly Leaves Christmas Number’, 1902. NAM. 1967-07-7-1

On 17 September the presence of a squadron of the 17th (The Duke of Cambridge’s Own) Lancers at Modderfontein farm, 25 km north-west of Johannesburg, was reported to General Jan Smuts, whose commando was starving and short of horses. Smuts ordered a section forward to locate the British cavalry, while he brought up the rest of his men. The advance section ran into a troop of the 17th Lancers which at first mistook the khaki-clad burghers for British troops from another column. When the Boers opened fire, bringing down several of the Lancers, the survivors withdrew to a low, stony ridge further down the road which was held by the rest of the squadron armed with rifles, a machine gun and a mountain gun.

At this point, Smuts arrived with the main body of his commando and attacked the Lancers from a hill to their rear. Close-quarter fighting developed in which the gun crew were killed; the rest of the squadron fought to the finish, though one troop, posted a little further away, was able to escape after expending all its ammunition, the last few rounds being used to shoot their horses to prevent them falling into the hands of the Boers. The total strength of the 17th Lancers engaged was 140, of whom four officers and 32 men were killed and four officers and 33 men wounded.

Smuts would go on to lead his commando for several more weeks in the Cape Colony, largely with the equipment and supplies captured from the British at Modderfontein.

As for the 17th, the regiment would fight in the Great War– earning 16 battle honours in France as both cavalry and infantry– but due to post-Irish independence drawdowns was amalgamated with the 21st Lancers to form the 17th/21st Lancers in 1922. Post-Cold War, the 17th/21st was further amalgamated with the 16th/5th Lancers to form the Queen’s Royal Lancers (QRL) in 1993, “The Death or Glory Boys.”

As part of the Army 2020 reforms intended to reduce the size of the British Army in line with the Strategic Defence and Security Review, it was announced that the 9th/12th Royal Lancers would amalgamate with the Queen’s Royal Lancers to form a single regiment, The Royal Lancers, in 2015, though still using the old “Death or Glory” badge of the 17th.

Modderfontein and all that.