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HM The Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh paid a two-day visit to Northern Ireland in August 1977 as part of The Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations. The Regimental Depot at Ballymena played a large part in supporting her visits to Hillsborough and Coleraine. On arrival at Hillsborough The Queen inspected a Guard of Honour mounted by the Ulster Defence Regiment.
HM King Edward VII visited the 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Fusiliers at Aldershot on 18 May 1909.
The first Presentation of Colours to The Ulster Defence Regiment took place when four battalions were presented with Colours by HM The Queen at Thiepval Barracks, Lisburn, Northern Ireland. The battalions receiving Colours were the 1st/9th, the 3rd, the 4th, and the 5th Battalion The Ulster Defence Regiment.
By 1799, the French Revolutionary Wars, following a period of relative peace in 1798, had resumed. The 89th Regiment of Foot, commanded by Lord Blayney, marched to Cork and, after embarkation on 3 January 1799, sailed via Gibraltar and Minorca to Messina. The Regiment arrived on 18 March and remained there for the rest of the year; one event during that time was described by Lieutenant Colonel Wilkie in 'Recollections of the Early Life of a Sailor' published in the United Service Magazine dated 1847.
On 5 March 1943, 117th Light Anti Aircraft Regiment Royal Artillery arrived in Algiers in North Africa where it soon became the Corps Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. Three weeks later when the remainder of its equipment arrived, the Regiment moved 500 miles eastwards to Le Kef. Here a Battery deployed for the first time guarding bridges, Corps Headquarters and Corps Troops.
Hugh Cochrane was born at Kilmallie, Fort William, Argyll, Scotland on 4 August 1829, and he joined the 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot as an Ensign on 13 April 1849. Having been promoted to Lieutenant, he was Adjutant of the Regiment from 1856 until 1858. He won the VC during the Indian Mutiny on 1 April 1858. His citation was published by the War Office in the London Gazette on 24 December 1858:
**_For conspicuous gallantry near Jhansi, on the
1st of April, 1858, when No. 1 Company of
For much of the 19th and early 20th century, most of the British Army was deployed policing the largest overseas empire the world had ever known. India - 'The Jewel in the Crown' - absorbed a very large proportion of these overseas deployments where British regiments served alongside regiments of the Indian Army.
Following the Indian Mutiny, many of the units of the Honourable East India Company were transferred to the British Army and in 1881 3rd Madras European Regiment became the 108th Regiment and later the 2nd Battalion The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
The United States led X Corps, commanded by Major General Edward M Almond and consisting of US and South Korean forces, landed at Inch’ŏn near Seoul on Korea’s western coast, some 150 miles behind the Korean People's Army (KPA) that was besieging the US Eighth Army around Pusan in the south of the Korean Peninsula. This audacious plan had been conceived by the United Nations Command's (UNC) commander, General Douglas MacArthur, and ten days later Seoul, was liberated.
Although the Indian Mutiny began in May 1857, the Government was unable to co-ordinate properly its counter measures until the end of the year. As there was much unrest in central India, General Sir Hugh Rose was ordered to form the Central India Field Force of two brigades with which he was required to defeat the many centres of rebellion then still existing. Included in his force was the 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment.
On 20 January 1963, President Sukarno’s government of Indonesia announced that it would be pursuing a policy of Konfrontasi following British proposals for an amalgamation of the Federation of Malaya, Singapore and British Borneo (North Borneo and Sarawak). Sukarno sought to explain the expansion of this new amalgamated Malaysia as nothing other than a continuation of British colonial influence in the region.
