Light on a Famous Charge
THEY were not as light on their feet as they had been 40 years earlier and time
had taken its toll on their numbers. But in October 1895 the surviving members of the Charge of the Light Brigade rode, not into the Valley of Death, but into Birmingham.
Ever since that famous and fateful day, back in 1854, the Brigade had met to celebrate and commemorate in equal measure. But this was the first time they had met outside London.
For the members who lived up north the ride to the capital was becoming as arduous as that famous ride in the Crimea. So the capital of the Midlands was an acceptable half-way house and for three of the officers Sergeant Majors Howes and Dawes and Sergeant Parkinson it was their home town.
Few exploits of the British army filled the heart with such pride, or the hospital with such casualties, as that blind charge into the face of the Russian guns at Balaclava.
Of the 673 horsemen that had ridden down the valley one third had been killed or injured and three-quarters of the horses lost. But in the popular imagination the
casualties were far higher. This was a war when myth was stronger than statistics, the war of Florence Nightingale and Alfred Lord Tennyson, a war in which heroism took precedence over the niceties of winning and losing.
After all, no one remembers who won the Crimean War, but everyone remembers the Lady of the Lamp and Tennysons great poem.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Once Tennysons poem had been printed, it was pointless for the British army to conceal the fact that the whole thing had been a monumental screw - up
by the generals. Better simply to celebrate the gallantry of the moment.
And so they had continued to celebrate it almost half a century later. By the time the charge had reached Birmingham there were but 54 (plus one or two apologies) left out of the 560 that had survived the Russian guns.
Quartermaster Smith gave a spirited rendition of the poem to round off the evening, but that was the last of many songs, poems and musical interludes that
had taken the celebration late into the night.
The banquet,presided over by the Mayor of Birmingham, was served at the Royal
Hotel, a mammoth nine courses punctuated by reminiscences and fanfares. Certainly the meal took considerably longer to get through than the 25 minutes that the charge itself had lasted. In the middle of the evening General Calthorpe
vividly described the events at Balaclava and the trumpeters of the Balsall Heath
Artillery sounded the four fanfares heard that day in the valley, before the assembled company re-charged their glasses for yet another toast.
There was a reading of The Lady With The Lamp followed by a toast proposed by a veteran of Florence Nightingales nursing at Scutari. The celebrated lady herself sent her apologies in a touching letter.
Fight the good fight she wrote.You are the brave soldiers of God, who loves you
Finally the last toast was followed by the Last Post and all departed into the Birmingham night. They would meet again in 12 months time. Those, at least, who could keep out of that other Valley of Death for another year.
This is a newspaper report of the 1895 Regimental Dinner
Annie