REDCOATS TO RED ROSES

This third volume of a four-volume History of The Queen's Lancashire Regiment 1689-1899 picks up the story after the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and carries it forward to the 1850s. It was a period when the main effort of the Army shifted, after 22 years of fighting France and her satellites, largely in Europe, to protecting British interests across the globe, from Canada and the West Indies to India and Australia.

During this period British forces took part in only one conflict with a Europe- an power, the war in the Crimea against Tsarist Russia. The 30th and 47th Regiments fought with great distinction throughout that gruelling campaign, earning two Victoria Crosses, but suffered losses approaching Great War intensity.

In the forty years after Waterloo the 30th, 40th, 47th and 59th Regiments were involved in six major conflicts in or related to India. Three Of these were undertaken to deal decisively with the predatory robber bands, turbulent local warlords and disruptive usurpers who had become accustomed to inflicting destruction and misery across central India.

As the responsible power, Britain had also to deal with external threats to India. In this volume we describe the achievements of the 40th Regiment in the First Afghan War, which were a timely response to an earlier disaster in that country. There were also two overseas interventions mounted from India: in 1819 against the fanatical pirates of the Persian Gulf, dealing them a blow from which they never recovered, and in 1824 to subdue the Burmese King of Ava, "ho had unwisely invaded states under British protection. The 47th Foot took part in both these successful campaigns.

In all these campaigns the casualties in combat were far outnumbered by those caused by disease, which even in peacetime India could reach some seventy fatalities yearly in a British garrison battalion. But even this crippling annual toll cannot compare to the terrible fate of the 59th and 82nd Regiments in January 1816, when a triple shipwreck on the coast of Ireland claimed the lives of some 548 men, women and children, far more than ever fell on a single day on any battlefield in the long and eventful histories of either of those regiments.