It is not known when the Band of the 26th Foot first started to take shape, though it seems certain that it was not during the first century of the Regiment's history, for an inspection report of 1785 states confidently 'No Band'.

There were, however, pipers as early as 1713, records showing that they were distinguished from other ranks by the wearing of a single heron's feather in the front of their bonnets. With the formal establishment of pipe-majors and pipers for Highland regiments after the Crimean War, the Lowlanders also claimed the same privilege; it is recorded that the central plank of the Cameronians' case was the evidence of an unnamed bandmaster who recalled in 1862 that there had been pipers in the Regiment when he had joined some 30 years earlier.

Though the identity of this bandmaster has been lost with the passage of time, his presence in the Regiment in the 1830s is the first reference we have to a band in The Cameronians; it can be assumed that the band had come into existence some time earlier.

The first bandmaster for whom full records survive was Josef Sommer. Trained at Kneller Hall, he had served with the 17th Foot prior to his appointment to the 26th in 1874. His confidential report of 1889 was signed by Major S H Lomax and was fulsome in its praise: 'I cannot speak too highly of him, either as a Bandmaster or as to his personal character.' He left in 1890 to take up a position with the Hyderabad Contingent and subsequently to become Director of Music of the Royal Engineers.

A photograph taken of the 90th Foot in Noweshera in 1866 shows 33 bandsmen together with 26 buglers, despite an official establishment for battalion bands at the time of just 22 musicians and 16 buglers.

Amongst those in the photograph is Sergeant Bullard, who had joined the 90th sometime in the 1860s and was for a period the acting Bandmaster in the rank of sergeant. Later on, having attended a course at Kneller Hall, he was appointed to the 24th (2nd Warwickshire) Foot, and killed in action in 1879 at the Battle of Isandhlwana. Whether he was replaced immediately is unknown, but in 1882 the first recorded bandmaster was appointed, with the move of William Fitzgerald from the 28th Foot.

With the amalgamations of 1881, Scottish dress was introduced for the Lowland regiments, and both the Battalions of The Cameronians chose to adopt the Douglas tartan of their first Colonel, the Earl of Angus. Being Scottish Rifles, they also retained the Scottish helmet and doublet, but in a dark rifle green with black buttons.

Band of the 90th Foot, c.1877

During the Boer War, most of the men from the 2nd Battalion Band were employed as stretcher bearers or riflemen. The 1st meanwhile were stationed in the Punjab. Front-line service was also seen in the Great War.

In June 1929 Lawrence Dunn was appointed Bandmaster of the 1st Cameronians; he was to remain with the Regiment for two decades, some of that time spent with the 2nd Battalion.

Stationed in India in the late 1930s, the bandsmen of the 1st Battalion saw a full range of military life: 'Stretcher bearing, khud climbing, digging, wiring and weeding are calls of the day,' recorded the Band Notes in the regimental magazine The Covenanter in 1936, whilst at a battalion rifle meeting that year, the Band beat all other platoons, with the pipes coming in second. Musical duties were not forgotten, however, and weekly retreats and concerts were also given.

During the same period, the bugle section was also flourishing and had sufficient strength of numbers to perform in its own right.

The 2nd Cameronians spent much of the inter-war era at home. 1939 saw the Band engaged in ceremonial duties at the Tower of London, and Brigadier Barclay records in his History of The Cameronians, Vol III the retirement that year of Bandmaster Leslie Seymour who had been with the Battalion since before the Great War:

He departed in April and all ranks gave him a rousing send off. Subsequently, Mr Seymour took up a musical appointment in the Channel Islands and only just succeeded in getting away when the Germans occupied the islands.

My Seymour's new (and short-lived) appointment was with the Royal Guernsey Militia.

He was replaced by Mr Dunn of the 1st Battalion, who had the task of re-building the Band after the War. The range of a concert programme given in Queen's Park, Glasgow with the 2nd Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders in July 1945 suggests that the process was already well under way:

Coronation march Overture Suite Selection Tone Poem Potpourri Post Horn Trio Selection Overture Regimental Marches

Le Prophète Light Cavalry Three Bavarian Dances Sullivan Selection Finlandia The Thistle Vivacity White Horse Inn Solonelle 1812 Within a Mile o' Edinboro' Town Highland Laddie God Save The Queen

Meyerbeer Suppé Elgar arr. Godfrey Sibelius arr. Myddleton Barsotti Benatszky Tchaikovsky

With the disbandment of the 2nd Battalion, Laurie Dunn returned to the 1st, taking the Band on a posting to Gibraltar in October 1946. A variety of engagements included being the pit orchestra for a production of The Gondoliers, playing chamber music at the Calpe Institute and providing music for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a Catholic procession a long way removed from the Cameronians' Presbyterian history.

Mr Dunn remained with the Cameronians until his commission in 1949 to become the first Director of Music of the Royal Engineers (Aldershot). The Band was then in Trieste, and the promotion of Mr Dunn was accompanied by the departure of Band Sergeant North and several of the more experienced musicians. The new Bandmaster, Clifford Pike, was therefore obliged to rebuild. The fact that he was successful is evidenced by the Kneller Hall inspection some five years later, when the Band was classified as 'Outstanding', the highest grade possible.

Under Cliff Pike's leadership, an old custom was revived of giving a concert in the Sergeants' Mess immediately after church, to which officers and families were also invited. And the traditional involvement of musicians in regimental sport was also upheld, as Captain Pike later remembered:

The Band were indeed very popular and this was further enhanced by the Battalion winning the BAOR Basketball Cup, in which the team consisted almost entirely of Band members. The Battalion was also finalists in the BAOR Hockey Cup and here the team was represented by six or seven bandsmen.

Amongst more official engagements undertaken during their posting in Germany, the combined Band, pipes and drums played at the Liberation Celebrations at Brunssum, Holland in July 1955.

The late-1950s saw a 14-piece dance orchestra created from the ranks of the military band. It proved highly popular, though it faced some intense competition from a rival dance band formed by the pipes and drums.

In the same period both military and pipe bands made prestigious overseas visits, the Band to the Nairobi Festival of Remembrance in November 1957, and the pipes to Amman to beat retreat with the Band of the Jordan Arab Army.

Band of The Cameronians, Scarborough 1953
Bandmaster C Pike

Even more memorable was 1961, a year in which the Band not only played a successful tour of the UK, including seasons in the Glasgow Parks and the Edinburgh Tattoo, but also accepted an invitation to visit Germany. There it combined with the 3rd Musickorps of the Bundeswehr to play a concert at the Musikhalle, Hamburg attended by veterans of the Afrika Korps to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the birth of Erwin Rommel. The Cameronians' contribution featured pieces by Wagner, Leutner and Lehar.

The reforms of 1968 saw the disappearance of The Cameronians and its Band. This fiercely independent regiment, whose antecedents went back to 1650 and the National Covenant that bound the Presbyterian cause to the restoration of the Monarchy, chose to disband rather than face amalgamation.