Another fine coat, and more Militia pages

So where has this been lurking? This wonderful coat, which to the best of my poor knowledge has never been recorded during its two centuries of existence, recently passed through Bosley’s auction. It is an officer’s, of the Leeds Volunteers, or Leeds Light Infantry, of 1820 to circa 1824, as mentioned in my post here on the little known, and rather undersized, volunteer revival of the ‘twenties. Click to enlarge.

The coat is distinctly up to date, while the yellow facings replay those of the Leeds Volunteers of 1803-08. (For whom, see this page. For the Leeds Local Militia of the intervening years, see this page.) The buttons in threes are not faithful to the 1803 uniform, which used the paired buttons of the 2nd West York Militia uniform, but they do, interestingly, recall the threes on the lapels of the Leeds Volunteers and 1st West York Militia of still earlier years (for whom, see this post and this page).

What appears here to be a pair of lapels is in fact a plastron with a scarlet underside, fully reversible. Lace, buttons, wings and turnback bugle ornaments are silver throughout. It’s a beautiful thing, and surely unique. Estimated at £2-3K, it went for four. One hopes that it might now be safe and accessible in public ownership, but one doubts it, these days.

Anyway, it’s a joy to see. What next – a uniform of the even more obscure and ritzy Royal Leamington Spa Loyal Volunteers of 1831-37? We can live in hope.

Meanwhile, two more Militia pages have been added to this site. One covers the 1st Royal Lancashire Militia, 1760-1816 – a bit of a monster page, this one, but hopefully of interest to someone. As a supplement, a second page covers the 2nd-5th Royal Lancashire Militia (previously the 1st-4th Supplementary Militia), 1797-1816 – not so lengthy, but maybe more interestingly obscure. Click these links, or use those up the top or at the right.

Some good images, plus info on drummers and rifle companies, if those are your things. With the Lancs Local Militia and Volunteers pages already up, that’s a county pretty much covered. More as and when.

1806 regimental colour

Light company

Broad lace (Pearse)

An East York militia uniform of 1760

Out of period for the main focus of this blog, I know, but study of the county militias in the War against France leads back naturally to their reestablishment in the late 1750’s. There can’t be too many surviving militia uniforms from that period; in fact there can’t be too many surviving uniforms of anything from that period, and the splendid 1760 outfit of Captain Thomas Plumbe of the Lancashire Militia, in the KORR Museum, is hailed as “the oldest, most complete, British army uniform in the world.” I wouldn’t know, but in that state of completeness it may well be. (Lots of photos of it here.)

All the more surprising then that a comparable officer’s suit of the East Yorkshire Militia for this period – coat, waistcoat, breeches – lies uncelebrated in the vaults of York Castle Museum. (The coat and waistcoat were sketched by C C P Lawson at Leeds Museum and Art Gallery, where they were once housed, for Volume II of his mega-study, which confirms the id.) The York online catalogue, such as it is, does not identify or group these items, and associates only the waistcoat and breeches. The three accession numbers are from widely different years, and the significance of this uniform may have been lost over the decades. I hope it is now recognised, for this is a remarkable and historically important uniform.

The scarlet coat is lined and faced buff, with ten buttons and silver laces on each lapel, four on each pocket and cuff, and one each side of the collar. The silver buttons are blank, with a striped pattern. Waistcoat and breeches are both buff. The waistcoat has twelve silver buttons and laces at the front and three on each pocket; the breeches have a tie and four buttons at each knee.

As sketched by Lawson

The waistcoat lace has not, as the online note suggests, faded from gold; silver lace and buff facings were the constant distinctions of the Beverley Buffs or Yorkshire Buffs, as the regiment was soon dubbed. (In fact a 1790’s silver gorget of the regiment in the National Army Museum is inscribed simply “The Buffs”.) R W S Norfolk, in his East Riding study, asserts that the men of the regiment were issued in 1760 with red coats faced buff with white lace, a white waistcoat and red breeches, but I’m not sure of his source for this; other ranks’ militia uniforms of this period are a bit of a mystery, to say the least.

One weird militia cap

This blog has been grievously neglected for several months. Family stuff; my apologies.

The more you look at the uniforms of a particular regiment in this era, the more you appreciate the deviations from the greater uniformity. Where colonels were allowed licence, such as in the clothing of musicians, this is especially so. Drummers are a particular headache, and faced with the arcane and variant complexities of drummers’ lacing, one begins to doubt the detail of many artists’ reconstructions.

Here’s an extremely weird drummer’s cap of the Royal Lancashire Militia from the notebooks of P W Reynolds in the V&A. (Many thanks to  Ben Townsend for the photo.) It’s a “Belgic”, or at least a sort of Belgic, attributed to the First Regiment of Lancs Militia around 1814, and Reynolds’s sketch is based on a previous sketch by “JCL”, whoever he or she was – Charles Lyall, maybe?

Reynolds’s assumption is that the cap was of black felt. The front is said to be 9 inches high, so about the norm, but the “pole”, which I understand to mean the cap part, though I’ve never seen that term used elsewhere, is just over 5 inches deep, so more shallow than usual – perhaps scaled down to fit a boy. The front is steeply arched – quite different to the squareish front of the standard Belgic, and so more reminiscent of the shape of the pre-1802 drummer’s fur cap. In place of the usual folding flap at rear is a drum badge, as previously used on the rear of drummers’ fur caps, measuring 2⅛ by 1½ inches and presumably in brass.

The circular plate at front is 3 inches in diameter, again presumably of brass, and Reynolds notes correctly that the elements of the design – “LANCASTER”, rose and wreath – correspond to those of the known Belgic cap plates of the regiment, which are of the standard size and shape. The peak is narrower than the norm at 1½ inches, though that is a feature seen on some officers’ and volunteer caps. JCL had noted that a “festoon” had been worn on the cap and that there was a small hole “in upper part of front”, presumably to take a tuft and cockade, but exactly where was not marked in his sketch.

The cap is said to have been seen at Hawkes’s, the military outfitters. Where is it now?  A search of the NAM inventory throws up nothing, though that’s not to be wondered at.

This cap raises all kinds of questions. Why the odd shape, and does it have any relation to drummers’ fur caps or to the tall fronted light infantry caps discussed in this post? Why the small plate when the front was tall enough to take the standard pattern? Does it actually date to circa 1814? Was it a regimental one-off? Or did other regiments adopt similarly mutant forms? And how much can we trust modern illustrations that show drummers of the period wearing the same caps and plates as everyone else?