Black Watch Regiment: Grenadier of the 42nd at Waterloo (NAP0105)

Grenadier of the Black Watch, 1815

A feather bonnet with a red hackle and a diced band, a red coat with white lace and wing epaulettes, the dark government tartan, diced hose and a canteen marked 42nd. He is running with the musket already at the point of balance and the bayonet fixed. Every element of this uniform is a claim about who these men were, and most of them were decided by politics rather than by tailoring.

A regiment created to police its own people

The Black Watch began in 1725 as independent companies raised to keep order in the Highlands after the Jacobite risings — Highlanders employed to watch Highlanders. The name comes from that duty and from the dark tartan they wore, in contrast to the red-coated regulars. In 1739 the companies were regimented, and a policing force became a line regiment of the British army.

Why the kilt survived at all

This is the part worth knowing. After the defeat of the 1745 rising, the Dress Act banned Highland dress in civilian life for a generation — but it exempted the army. So for decades the only Scotsmen legally entitled to wear a kilt were the ones serving the crown that had banned it. The garment was preserved by the institution that had every reason to suppress it, and came back into civilian use afterwards partly through the prestige of the regiments.

The red hackle and the wings

The wing epaulettes mark a flank company — grenadiers, the tallest and steadiest men, posted on the right of the line. The red hackle is the 42nd’s own: a distinction the regiment carried from the 1790s and defended fiercely, of the kind that armies grant instead of money and soldiers value more than money.

The kilt as campaign dress

Romantic in a painting, difficult in the field. Wool holds water, mud reaches the knee, and a Belgian June that rained all night is not the Highlands. The bare knees in this picture were a real disadvantage in bad weather and a real advantage crossing wet ground, and the regiments argued about it for a century.

Quatre Bras, two days before

The 42nd’s hardest hour in this campaign came on 16 June at Quatre Bras, where French lancers caught the battalion in the act of forming square — the worst possible moment, when the formation is neither a line nor a square. They closed it with the enemy already inside and lost their commanding officer doing it. Two days later, at Waterloo, they were back in the line.