Page 113 - Who Was Sapper Brown

A brief overview of the Royal West Kents The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment was an
infantry regiment of the British Army from 1881 to 1961. It was formed by the amalgamation of the

50th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Foot and the 97th (Earl of Ulster’s) Regiment of Foot. It was popularly,
and operationally, known as the ‘Royal West Kents’. In 1961 it was amalgamated with The Buffs (Royal

East Kent Regiment) to form The Queen’s Own Buffs, The Royal Kent Regiment. Its lineage is continued
through the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, named in honour of Diana, Princess of Wales, and

which is the senior English line infantry regiment of the British Army, part of the Queen’s Division.

The 1st Battalion, Royal West Kents, after taking part in the Egypt Intervention of 1882 and fighting in the
Battle of Tel el-Kebir on 13 September 1882, spent two years, from October 1882 to September 1884, on

garrison duty in Cyprus. Five of the first seven burials in Polemidia cemetery are those of soldiers from

the Royal West Kents. The Regiment had arrived from Egypt ‘in a most sickly and debilitated condition’,1
‘and with enteric fever among the men’,2 so much so that four of these soldiers died within days or weeks

of their arrival.

The first 16 burials in Polemidia British Cemetery – the absence of deaths between June and early October is ex-
plained by the Regiment being away in the cool Troodos Hill Station during the hot summer months.

This pattern generally repeats itself in subsequent years.

1 Army Medical Department Annual Report (1882)
2
Ibid, (1883)

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