British Commonwealth of Nations: Six-Footers

COMMONWEALTH (British Commonwealth of Nations)

For the rum-tum-tum

Of the military drum;

And the guns that go boom! boom!

General Sir George Wentworth Alexander Higginson, age 100, height six feet, beloved as “The Father of the Guards,” author of Seventy-One Years of a Guardsman’s Life (1916), beamed exultantly last week at the news that the Grenadier Guards’ minimum height requirement has again been raised to the traditional six feet after being lowered to five feet ten a year ago because six-footers of good fighting calibre were growing scarce.

The Foot Guards, comprising the Grenadier Guards, the Coldstream Guards and the Scots, Welsh and Irish Guards are perhaps the most glamorously traditional of any extant fighting unit. Recently Londoners turned out by the tens of thousands as the Regiments of Guards assembled in their bright uniforms and beneath their 18-inch bearskin hats for the dedication of the Guards Memorial. Field Marshal H. R. H. the Duke of Connaught, uncle of the King-Emperor, unveiled the Guards Monument, taking in his hand as he did so the hand of General Higginson. Londoners cheered the Royal Duke and the Centenarian General. They cheered louder Edward of Wales as he wheeled smartly past as Colonel of the Welsh Guards at the head of his regiment. The Prince looked painfully thin in the costume designed for giants.

Curious tots vexed their parents by piping: “How can you tell one kind of a Guard from another?” Super-papas and super-mamas might have replied: “Although they all wear scarlet tunics with blue collars, cuffs and shoulder straps, blue trousers and towering, rounded bearskin hats, you should note that the Grenadier Guards wear a small white plume in the bearskin, the Coldstream Guards a red plume, the Scots no plume and the Irish a blue-green, (not “emerald”) plume. To further distinguish the Guards, the buttons on their coats are spaced in a different manner for each regiment.”