Warriors In Scarlet: The Life and Times of the Last Redcoats
Chichester historian Ian Knight, a leading authority on the Anglo-Zulu wars, casts his net wider for his latest book Warriors In Scarlet: The Life and Times of the Last Redcoats (Macmillan hardback).
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Always a
00:06 great pleasure to speak to Ian Knight, one of our foremost experts on the Anglo-Zulu
00:11 wars. But for your latest book, Ian, you are casting your net further with the new book,
00:17 fabulous looking book, which you just happen to have a copy of with you.
00:20 I do.
00:21 Warriors in Scarlet. Tell me about the book, what was the thinking behind it?
00:28 I have to say it is a terrific cover. I can say that because I had no input on it whatsoever.
00:34 It was by the publishers. But, you know, please do judge this book by its cover because it
00:39 looks great. Even if you're not interested in the subject, go and buy it because it just
00:43 looks brilliant anyway.
00:44 A fascinating story between the pages, focusing on a particular era, isn't it?
00:49 It is. It's on the early Victorian army. So it looks at the accession of Queen Victoria
00:57 and what the British military was doing at that point in the late 1830s. And it goes
01:01 through to the 1860s. And the reason that I chose that particular period is that it's
01:07 the last of the red coat era. It's the period in which the red coats, which had been so
01:15 prominent during the Napoleonic wars, Waterloo and all that, are starting to be faded out
01:20 amongst the British military. And that's systematic of all sorts of other changes, beginning of
01:28 social change, beginning of weapon technology change and all the rest of it. So it seemed
01:33 to me this was the end of an era. And I wanted to have a look at that.
01:37 But you're also looking at the start of an era because this is the era where, as you
01:41 were saying, the British army started to learn how to operate and act as a major colonial
01:48 power, a world power.
01:50 Absolutely, yes. I mean, there's always a bit of a tendency with general histories of
01:55 the British army to kind of skip from Waterloo, maybe touch on the Crimea, which I do look
02:00 at in the book, but then jump through to the end of the 19th century and sort of present
02:05 the idea that it's a fully formed colonial experience. And of course, it wasn't. Britain
02:12 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars was pushing out into the world in all sorts of
02:17 new areas, often involving conflict. Dare I say we weren't always the good guys in some
02:23 of those experiences. But it was the British military that were then at the sharp end of
02:29 this experience and quite often having to learn different military techniques around
02:34 the world in difficult terrain against a very, very varied range of opposition.
02:42 And I wanted to look, there's a lot of eyewitness material in the book. I wanted to get people's
02:47 experiences of that. What was it like to be shipped around the world and find yourself
02:52 in a totally alien environment and then fight against people who are very different to yourselves?
02:58 So that was the kind of, yeah, the thread that holds the book together.
03:03 Fantastic. Well, it looks beautiful as a book and it sounds absolutely fascinating. Ian,
03:09 thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts on it. Really lovely to speak to you again. Thank
03:12 you. Thanks very much, Phil.
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