Fonds GB 0210 WELHORSE - Welsh Horse (Lancers) Yeomanry Research Papers

The Welsh Horse (Lancers) Yeomanry was part of the Territorial Force of the British Army, and served as part of the Eastern Mounted Brigade (with the Norfolk and Suffolk Yeomanries) and later in the South Eastern Mounted Brigade (with the Sussex, West Kent, and Royal East Kent Yeomanries) during the First World War. The first regiment of the Yeomanry was raised throughout Wales in August 1914 under the auspices of Captain Owen Vaughan ('Owen Rhoscomyl'), and command was given to Hugh Edwardes, 6th Baron Kensington, as Lieutenant-Colonel. The headquarters of the Welsh Horse were initially in Cardiff, but they were subsequently moved to Newtown and later to Norfolk and Kent; most of the soldiers' training was carried out in Glamorgan, Pembrokeshire and Norfolk. Operating primarily as infantry, 1/1 Welsh Horse fought in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, before being amalgamated with 1/1 Montgomeryshire Yeomanry in 1917 to form 25 Battalion The Royal Welsh Fusiliers, which saw action on the Western Front. Two further regiments of the Welsh Horse (2/1 and 3/1) were raised in 1914 and 1915, with the purpose of providing support for 1/1; neither entered combat, since their purpose was to act as a Reserve (2/1) and to provide initial training (3/1), and both disappeared in administrative re-organisations in 1916 and 1917. The Welsh Horse (Lancers) ceased to exist as a separate Yeomanry after further re-structuring of the Army at the end of the War.

• In 1954, the writer Julian Franklyn was commissioned by William Edwardes, 7th Baron Kensington and the son of Hugh Edwardes, to produce a memoir of the Welsh Horse, a draft of which was completed in 1957, relying on Lord Kensington's own papers, official records, and an appeal in the press for information from former soldiers and their families, many of whom contributed their own documents. The memoir, entitled '"Copy their virtues" being a memoir of the Welsh Horse (Lancers)', was never published.