GEORGE, LORD BINGHAM
(EARL OF LUCAN)
Lieutenant-Colonel 17th Light Dragoons (Lancers)
1826–1837
CHAPTER XI
HOME SERVICE, 1823–1854
1823.
On their way home the Seventeenth touched at St. Helena, where they found an Army List, and therein learned for the first time that they had become a regiment of Lancers. Such were the fruits of the inspection held at the Queen’s Riding-house in Pimlico six years before. There also they heard of the death of their Colonel, Oliver Delancey, who had held that rank since 1795. He had entered the army as a Cornet in the 14th Dragoons in 1766, and joined the Seventeenth as a Captain in 1773. He had therefore held a commission in the regiment for close on fifty years when he died in September 1822. He had gained some slight reputation as a pamphleteer, and he was for many years a Member of Parliament, but it was as a soldier and an officer in the Seventeenth that he had made his mark, in the New England provinces and Carolina. He was succeeded by Lord R. Somerset, a distinguished Peninsula officer.
On the 18th May the regiment arrived at Gravesend, and marched to Chatham, where all the men, with the exception of some fifty, including non-commissioned officers, were invalided or discharged. At Chatham they returned their carbines into store; it was nearly sixty years before they received them again; and, in accordance with regulation, ceased to shave their upper lips. It must have been rather a curious time, that last half of 1823, between the growing of the moustaches, the learning of the lance exercise, and the constant influx of recruits. In those days it was, as a rule, rare for a regiment to receive above a dozen recruits in the year; 1823. and though the heavy mortality in India had caused the rapid passage of many men into the ranks, yet we may guess that the fifty old soldiers, many of whom had probably brought back with them a liver from the East, were not too well pleased at being flooded with five times their number of recruits. The spectacle of 250 bristly upper lips must in itself have been somewhat disquieting. But recruits came in fast. Before the year was out the regiment numbered 311 men, or little below its reduced establishment, viz. six troops of 335 men with 253 horses.
The acquisition of the lance, of course, brought with it a certain change of dress. Lancers being of Polish origin, the Polish fashion in dress was of course imperative. The shako was discarded for ever, and a lance cap of the orthodox shape introduced in its place; the upper part thereof white as at present, and the plume, as ever since 1759, red and white. The officers, besides a huge pair of epaulettes, wore aiguillettes of silver, and were generally very gorgeously attired. For we are now, it must be remembered, in the reign of King George IV., and therefore every uniform is at its zenith of expense and its nadir of taste. Hence, the first lance caps were so high and heavy that they were a misery to wear; and the jackets, though in pattern unchanged, were made so tight that men could hardly cut the sword exercise.