EVERYONE loves colourful ceremonial uniforms. Together with the music and grandeur of a great State occasion, the sight of mounted and marching soldiers in formation is the essence of pomp and circumstance. By contrast, the camouflage uniforms that soldiers wear on operations are designed with the opposite in mind. They blend with their surroundings: a windswept desert, a dense jungle or an inner-city battleground. Yet uniforms were not always like that, in design or purpose.
As Allan Mallinson explains in , it was in the New Model Army, Britain’s first standing army formed in 1645, that British soldiers began to ‘wear a true uniform—red’. Oliver Cromwell knew the type of officers he wanted: ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than what you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.’ There was no place in this new army for those who were officers merely because they were Members of
