Geoffrey Powell - The History of the Green Howards

The Regiments badge today. It consists of the cypher of HRH Alexandra, Princess of Wales, interlaced with the Dannebrog, inscribed with the date 1875, the Roman numerals XIX below and the whole surmounted by the Coronet of a Princess.

I was greatly honoured when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Second asked me to become Colonel-in-Chief of the Green Howards. I become the fourth generation of my family to hold the post, following in the footsteps of my father, my grandfather and my great-grandmother. The Green Howards are indeed a family regiment.

The appointment marks also that close friendship between Norway and Great Britain, especially with those counties of North-East England in which lie the homes of so many of our soldiers, a friendship that has existed for many centuries past but one so greatly strengthened in recent years.

This book describes the sacrifices made by the Green Howards in the service of their country during the past three hundred years. It is a most interesting story which highlights the great strength of the British Army Regimental system.

BY
FIELD MARSHAL THE LORD INGE, KG, GCB, DL
Colonel, The Green Howards 19821994

This Regiment has been well served by its historians. Colonel Geoffrey Powells predecessors have ably told the story of its early years, of the part it played in the Second Boer War, the two World Wars of this century and the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s. His own previous excellent short volume in that fine Famous Regiments series of regimental histories has also made its contribution.

Until now, however, we have lacked a history of our Regiment available to all in a single volume. Nor have either the inter-war years from 1919 to 1939 or the decades that followed the Second World War been properly researched or described. This is the reason why I asked the author, an old friend and mentor, to write this book.

No one volume history can be comprehensive. To tell the story of our Regiment in all its detail would need a shelf of books. This book then is a distillation of the essence of our Regiments history, told in a readable manner. Researchers and others investigating a subject or incident in greater detail will have to go back to those earlier books, to the relevant issue of our Green Howards Gazette, or to other sources. To all of these the author provides the necessary pointers.

After reading this book and glancing through its sources, I have been especially impressed by the importance of the Green Howards Gazette as the repository for the details of our history. Without its articles on specific subjects and its routine accounts of unit activities, it would have been all but impossible for this history to have been written. I cannot emphasise too strongly the need for my successors to ensure the Gazettes continued publication.

History can be read for both profit and pleasure. The weapons of war continually change, as do the tactics for their use, but the human element changes little. There is much to be learned from these pages, written as they are by a soldier. And it will be a dull individual who fails to be moved to both pride and sadness by this stirring account of the deeds of his predecessors. Above all, of course, this book is a statement of the debt owed by both the nation and the Army to our regimental system.

The great success of the first edition of Colonel Geoffrey Powells Regimental history has made it necessary to reprint it in order to meet the demand. This has given the opportunity to add a new chapter covering the last ten years. This decade has been a very busy one in which the Regiment continues to play a full part in the nations history.

It is particularly appropriate that Brigadier John Powell, with his intimate knowledge of the last thirty-five years of the Regiments life, has joined his father in updating this excellent Regimental history; it is a fine example of the importance of the family in our Regiments history.

The Green Howards with fitting pomp and great zest celebrated their Tercentenary in July 1989, one year late because active operations had prevented their so doing at the right time. By a coincidence, the same had happened half a century before when one of the then two Regular Battalions of the Regiment was serving in a troubled Palestine and the other upon the North-West Frontier of India. Not until July 1939 was the 1st Battalion able to mark that two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in a proper manner; a few more weeks and the outbreak of the Second World War would have caused a further postponement.