Slaughter of the regiments

Andrew Gilligan on what the army stands to lose by adopting ‘Starbucks’ regiments

W est Belfast in the autumn of 1982 was a bad place to be a British soldier. Booby-traps, like the one which destroyed Corporal Leon Bush, aged 22, of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, were routine, decidedly not news. Corporal Bush’s death, like most soldiers’, was quickly forgotten by everyone except his family.

It was, therefore, an enormous consolation to Corporal Bush’s blood relatives when they discovered that he had two families who wanted to keep his memory alive: themselves, and the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters. ‘They came to stay with the regiment at its base in Germany,’ remembers Patrick Mercer, a captain in the WFR at the time, and later its commanding officer. ‘We had a little silver statuette made. We called it the Leon Bush Memorial and we presented it each year as a prize for regimental competitions. Whenever we could, we had members of the family over from England to present the trophy, and it meant the world to them.’

This week the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, and every other traditional, single-battalion county regiment in the British army, effectively ceased to exist. The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, that worthy successor to Liddell Hart, announced that all will be either abolished or merged into what Mercer, now a Tory MP, calls ‘Starbucks regiments’, big, multiple-battalion regional franchises designed to uplift employee productivity, downsize overheads and deliver a more economically priced forward offer to key stakeholders in major war-fighting markets. The WFR will become part of a ‘Mercia Regiment’ covering the whole of the Midlands, from Hereford to Chesterfield. The fate of the Leon Bush Memorial is not yet known.

For sophisticates, the idea of the ‘family regiment’ is faintly amusing, an idea as dated and sentimental as the avuncular Dixon of Dock Green-style British bobby.