Who will guard the Guards?

Press, 8 February 1985, Page 15

Who will guard the Guards?

By

NINO LO BELLO

All the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men are not asked to put Humpty Dumpty together again — but they face another task every season when millions of tourists flood into London.

Often looked upon as “toy soldiers,” the troopers of the Household Cavalry on ceremonial duty at Horse Guards Arch on Whitehall are subjected to a barrage of abuse from rubbernecking visitors who get the bright idea of having some fun with the sentry on duty.

The colourful guard doing threehour stints of sentry duty must maintain his pose no matter what is said to him by spectators or what they do, because he is under strict military orders not to move unless it is a prescribed drill movement. Thus the Queen’s Guards — who are top-class fighting men with a glorious past that includes the famous Battle of

Waterloo — now find that their worst enemy in history is the mischievous tourist who knows 1 they cannot “fight back.” “The biggest nuisances of all are the girls,” explained one guardsman off duty. “They come up to us and make remarks like, ‘Ooh, isn’t he sweet?’ or ‘Whatcha doing tonight, soldier boy?’ We always behave with great dignity and restraint, but let me tell you that on a hot summer day in those heavy uniforms, you come damn close to having your temper snapped.”

As if verbal taunts are not enough, the female oglers take other liberties, particularly if they -have someone with a camera who wants a snapshot for the folks back home. A guardsman standing on dismounted duty near his booth may suddenly find little Joanie or big Jenny with an arm wrapped around his neck, leg, boot, arm or

rifle. Even that can be tolerable at times. But the girls can also apparently get rough when they take a mind to. Every guardsman in the corps can tell about the female tourist, invariably stickyfingered, who tries to push an icecream cone on to his lips for just one lick — or a lollipop, a French fried potato, a chocolate bar, or whatever else is in hand at the moment.

Then there is the type who gets a big bang out of dumping things down into his large shiny thigh boots when a sentry is seated on his horse. A favourite item for shoving down is the ice-cream cone, so that everybody can stand around and watch the soldier’s reaction as the ice-cream melts

inside his boot. On record is the case of a woman one morning who lifted her little son high enough so that he could urinate into the boot of a stone-faced guardsman. The Soldier, according to an official report, never moved. After every tour of duty, a guardsman will get back to barracks with his boots full of coins. For some reason people seem to' think that a soldier should be given a tip and that this is the way to give it. Consquently, a guardsman will jangle out about $3 in change every time he goes off duty. One sentry set a kind of record several years ago when he found nearly ?45 in small change had been put into his boots.

Rare indeed have been the occasions when a guardsman has reacted. There was the time once when a woman tourist had to have her fun by mimicking every move the sentry was making while he

marched up and down with his precise paces and turns. This went on for more than a half hour. Having had his fill of the guardbaiting spectator marching behind him step by step, the sentry came to his usual brisk stop. But instead of taking the expected one pace backwards, he took two and stamped his heavy shoe down hard in the traditional way. This time, however, the woman’s toe got stepped on rather hard. The trooper was given 10 days in the brig, loss of pay and a bad mark on his record for what the courtmartial called “irregular conduct unbecoming a soldier.” Now there is talk that because the Queen’s Guards have to put up with an awful lot, they may soon be positioned inside the gates. The men would not like this change because, they say, “we have never before retreated in the face of an enemy!”