The order, when it came, was not one that soldiers expect to hear.
“There is no retreat from here, men,” said Sir Colin Campbell, riding along the front of the 93rd Highlanders. “You must die where you stand.” The men in front of him were the Sutherland Highlanders, and the dark regimental cloth of their kilts is still woven today as one of the two forms of Sutherland tartan.
It was the morning of 25 October 1854, on a low rise above the harbour of Balaclava in the Crimea. Behind the regiment lay the only supply port of the British army. In front of it, coming on at a trot, were several hundred Russian cavalry. The Turkish troops on either flank had already run. Every drill book of the age said that infantry facing horsemen must form a square. Campbell, who had been soldiering for forty-six years, did not think he had time, and did not think he needed to. He kept his men in line, two deep.
From somewhere in the ranks a private named John Scott answered him. “Ay, Sir Colin. An needs be, we’ll do that.”
The streak
On the ridge behind, the war correspondent of The Times was watching through a telescope. William Howard Russell saw the Russian squadrons sweep down the valley towards what he called, in his dispatch, a “thin red streak tipped with a line of steel.” The phrase was tidied by later writers into the Thin Red Line, and it has been in the English language ever since.
The Highlanders fired at long range, then again, closer. The cavalry slowed, swung to their left as if to turn the flank, met a third volley from the grenadier company, and wheeled away. It was over in minutes. Some of the younger soldiers were so keyed up that they started forward to chase horsemen on foot, and Campbell had to bellow at them: “Ninety-third! Ninety-third! Damn all that eagerness!”
Russell’s streak was red from the waist up. From the waist down, the men were wearing kilts in a tartan of blue, green and black, a lighter version of the army’s dark Government sett. It was the tartan of the place they came from, and it is still sold under that name.
Where they came from
The 93rd were Sutherland men, and how they came to be in the army is a story of its own.
Sutherland is the far north of the Scottish mainland, a huge, empty county of moor and mountain with a fringe of green along its coasts. The name is a Norse joke of perspective. To the Vikings who ruled Orkney and Caithness it was Suðrland, the land to the south. Its lords were the Earls of Sutherland, a line going back to about 1230, seated at Dunrobin Castle above the sea near Golspie. Their motto was Sans Peur, without fear, and their crest a wildcat.
In 1799 the Countess of Sutherland raised a regiment from her tenantry. It was done in the old way. The men of each parish were assembled, and an officer walked down the line with a snuff box and a bottle of whisky, offering a pinch and a dram to those he wanted. Refusing was not really possible, since the family who offered the dram also owned the farm. But the result was a regiment unlike any other in the army. The men were neighbours and cousins. They kept their own Gaelic-speaking congregation, sent their pay home, and were so well behaved that for years the 93rd had no need of the lash.
They paid heavily for that discipline. At New Orleans in January 1815 the regiment was ordered to halt in the open in front of the American earthworks and then, through a blunder, was given no further order. It stood there under fire until more than half its men were down.
And while they stood in Louisiana, their families were being put out of their homes. Between about 1807 and 1821 the Sutherland estate cleared the inland glens for sheep. The burning of Strathnaver and Kildonan is the bitterest memory in Highland history. Thousands were moved to the coast or went overseas, to Nova Scotia, Ontario, the Red River and later New Zealand. It was said that soldiers of the 93rd came home from the wars to find grass growing where their fathers’ houses had been.
That is why a tartan from the emptiest county in Britain is worn today by so many people who have never seen it.
Green to the front
The cloth itself has two forms, and both are correct.
The regimental version, usually sold as Old Sutherland, is the Government or Black Watch pattern woven in lighter shades. The Scottish Register of Tartans describes it as “the same as the Black Watch but usually woven in lighter shades with azure replacing the dark blue.” It adds a detail that any kiltmaker will enjoy. When the 93rd was merged with the 91st in 1881 to form the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the new regiment pleated its kilts to show the green stripe, where the Black Watch showed the blue. Two regiments in almost the same cloth could be told apart from behind at a hundred paces. Both regiments wore the kilt the same way too, with a sporran hung in front to do the work of the pockets a kilt does not have.
The second version keeps the dark blue, green and black ground and lays fine lines of red and white across it. It was published in 1842 and again in 1850, and the register lists it as the clan tartan.
Anyone looking for Sutherland tartan today will find both, offered in Modern, Ancient, Weathered and Dress colourings, as made-to-measure kilts and as fabric, scarves, ties and sashes. The lighter regimental sett tends to appeal to people with a soldier in the family tree. The lined version is a little livelier, and stands apart from the many other dark tartans at a gathering.
The purse
There is one item in the old photographs of the 93rd that people always ask about: the great fall of hair hanging at the front of each man’s kilt.
A kilt has no pockets and never did. The belted plaid it descends from was a single length of cloth, and a Highlander carried his flint, his coins and his oatmeal in a leather pouch on his belt. The Gaelic for that pouch is sporan, which means nothing grander than purse. The earliest survivors are plain drawstring bags of deerskin. Around 1700 they acquired metal clasps, called cantles, and migrated from the hip to the front.
Then the army got hold of it. By the nineteenth century the working purse had become the sporran molach, the hairy sporran, a cascade of goat or horse hair with contrasting tassels, different for every regiment. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders became known for a black one with six white tassels, nicknamed the swinging six, and their officers and sergeants wore a sporran made from a badger’s head. Pipers still wear horsehair today.
Civilians kept the idea and sorted it by occasion, and that is the system a buyer meets now. A day sporran is plain leather, brown or black, closed with a flap and a stud, and right with tweed. A semi-dress sporran has a leather body and a fur front, for a daytime wedding in an Argyll jacket. A full-dress sporran has a metal cantle, a fur body and tassels on chains, and belongs with a Prince Charlie jacket and a bow tie. A good outfitter will carry each kind of sporran in genuine leather, with its chain and strap, alongside horsehair for band members and newer options such as matching-tartan fronts and vegan versions.
The last thing he fastens
Go forward a hundred and seventy years from Balaclava, and across an ocean.
It is a Saturday in June in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, where the ships from Sutherland landed. A man is getting dressed for his wedding in a room above the hall. He has never worn a kilt. His grandfather did, once a year, and the family’s name is in the 93rd’s muster rolls if you go back far enough.
His kilt is the dark Sutherland with the red and white lines. His brother buckles the straps for him. The jacket goes on, the waistcoat is buttoned. Hose up to the knee, garters, flashes turned out. Then the last thing: the sporran. His brother passes the chain round the back of the kilt, through the two small loops, and fastens it so the top sits a hand’s width below the waistcoat. It is grey fur with a chrome cantle, chosen because grey and silver look cold and clean against navy and green, and because the buttons on the jacket, the buckle and the kilt pin are chrome too. Someone had told him that was the secret: keep all the metal the same, and everything else falls into place.
His brother taps the sporran. “What have you got in there?”
“Phone. Card. Speech.” It is smaller inside than it looks. The rings are in the best man’s pocket, where they belong.
Later, when the fiddles start and the floor fills for Strip the Willow, he will slide it round to his hip the way the old hands do, so it does not bounce. Later still he will put it away in a cloth bag, brush the fur flat, and wipe the leather, and it will come out again for his brother’s wedding, and one day for his son’s.
Where they stand
The 93rd no longer exists as a regiment. Its descendants were folded into the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006. Strathnaver is still empty, with signposts along the road marking where the townships stood.
What remains is the painting that hangs in Edinburgh Castle, the phrase in the dictionary, and a pattern of blue, green and black that has travelled further than any of the men who first wore it. It turns up at weddings in Nova Scotia and Otago and North Carolina, worn by people whose families were told to move and did, and have been quietly standing their ground ever since.
