Poetic plea for Black Watch to be saved from merger

A POET has penned a unique tribute to the Black Watch in a last-ditch attempt to persuade the government to abandon its plan to merge the Scottish infantry regiments.

Ursula Fanthorpe, from Gloucestershire, wrote Keeping the Watch to help the campaign to save the regiment from Ministry of Defence cuts.

It was commissioned by Owen Humphrys, a former Black Watch captain, vociferous regimental campaigner and the grandson of Field Marshall Earl Wavell.

Lord Wavell was one of the regiment’s most illustrious members. He was, briefly, Supreme Allied Commander during the Second World War and had a love of poetry, publishing a best-selling collection called Other Men’s Flowers.

Captain Humphrys said he commissioned the poem to draw attention to the threat to all the regiments which the government wants to merge or disband. He hoped it would be read by ministers before they made their final decision later this week.

KEEPING THE WATCH

Always awake. That’s the job. Always.

Not dozy nightwatchmen, who shout on the hour

All’s well! It never is. The Black Watch,

Awake at all the hours there are, know better.

Mopping up after the Old Pretender,

Endlessly eyeing choleric disarmed clans,

Here they go, another branch of the great tree,

Rooted in history, sprouting in present air,

Linked in brotherhood by the red hackle,

The dark plaid, the wars. Slipstream of tradition

Dockets their honours in places far from Scotland -

Fountenoy, Seringapatam, Waterloo,

Tel-el-Kabir, Mons, Ypres, Passchendaele -

And so on, grim sweet tally of lives, of deaths

In endless foreign fields.

They did, they do

So much. The stoic wives, the anxious children.

We need their watchfulness, all the world over.

Don’t put them down.

U A FANTHORPE