Page 75 - The Royal Lancers Chapka 2017

REGIMENTAL JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL LANCERS (QUEEN ELIZABETHS’ OWN) 73
Lieutenant Colonel Purbrick with course staff and students at the Austrian Armed Forces CPP course in Vienna
MOD permission for the CPP unit to wear the Blue Shield. The College of Arms, however, said ‘nyet’. For those who have not had the privilege of visiting the College of Arms, it is a wonder- ful institution in which the Da Vinci Code meets Alice in Won- derland. Their ‘nyet’ was because it would be unacceptable for us to encounter a knight on the battlefield – and this is where the Da Vinci Code and Alice in Wonderland meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail – who was carrying the same shield! ‘Au contraire’, I countered, ‘it would surely mean that we were both on the same knightly mission?’ The bottom line is the Garter Principal King of Arms has generously authorised the wearing of the Blue Shield by the CPP unit. The final hurdle is the Army Dress Committee...
Top dit of the year. I was weaving my way to the dance floor at the Officers’ Ball in Vienna when I was tapped on the shoulder. I looked round to see a young Queens Dragoon Guards officer covered in scrambled egg. ‘Hello, sir’, he said, ‘who are you and what are you doing in Vienna?’ Just off for a dance, I responded. On being pressed for a longer answer I gave a one minute expla- nation of my CPP meeting with the Austrian Armed Forces ear- lier that day. ‘Can I stop you there, sir?’ Oh, dear, it’s only been a minute and I have bored him. ‘I think’, he went on, ‘that HRH the Prince of Wales would be very interested in discussing this with the Chief of the General Staff when they have their next private meeting’. The aforesaid young Queens Dragoon Guards officer was Major Harry Pilcher, Equerry to the Prince of Wales. Crikey, I thought, the chances of the Chief of the General Staff knowing about a minor project being run in his Headquarters by
a middle-ranking Reserve officer are next to zip. Nothing worse for my non-existent career than having the Chief of the General Staff ambushed by HRH about something going on in his own headquarters. Luckily, dear readers, the outer office then com- prised of a crack cavalry Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel, now Colonel, Marcus Mudd and Major Alex Bowie. I put an email together giving a short CPP brief and sent it to them and cc’d Harry. Nothing more was heard. The next time I was in Army Heqadquarters, I dropped in to see the outer-office contingent to ask where my email had got to. ‘Ah yes’, said Alex pulling it from the middle of a huge pile of very important staff work, ‘here it is’. The email had a significant number of scrawls on it. ‘Red ink correction before you showed it to the Chief of the Gen- eral Staff ’, I enquired in trepidation. ‘Oh, no’, said Alex, ‘that’s the Chief of the General Staff ’s musings before he had a good discussion about it with the Prince of Wales’. Grand strategic influence?
In the real world, you may have visited the Royal Academy courtyard between November 2017 and April 2018 and noticed my civvy street achievement of 2017 - the installation of the sculpture Physical Energy by GF Watts. It is an over-life-size sculpture of an heroic male figure on a rearing horse, an allegory of the human need for new challenges – of our instinct to always be scanning the horizon, looking towards the future. In the art- ist’s own words, it is ‘a symbol of that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of material things’. I’ve got two for sale, if the Regiment is interested......
TJGSP