“Trooping the Colour: Memories of a Young Lieutenant”
by Kevin Harper – An Englishman Downunder
As the Trooping of the Colour returns this week to Horse Guards Parade in London, I find myself recalling, with a mix of pride and poignancy, my first time in attendance—not as a tourist or television viewer, but as a serving officer. The year was 1982. I was a young Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps, newly pressed and marching tall.
My mother and father were with me that day, seated among the guests, beaming. I remember glancing toward them just before the parade began and seeing something in their faces—love, yes, and pride—but also a quiet knowing that their son was now part of something older and greater than any one generation. Trooping the Colour is not merely ceremony. It is an inheritance.
In those days, Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II would still take the salute on horseback, astride the ever-faithful Burmese. The music swelled, the regiments moved with clockwork elegance, and London itself seemed to hold its breath. To be there—to be part of it—was a profound honour. It wasn’t about pomp or privilege; it was about service, discipline, and an enduring thread of national identity passed from hand to hand, shoulder to shoulder, standard to standard.
That year’s Trooping, on the 12th of June 1982, held a sobering distinction: it took place in the final days of the Falklands War. Victory was not yet declared, and the fate of many hung in the balance. A minute’s silence was held in honour of the Falklands Task Force—a rare and moving moment in a ceremony typically defined by pomp and precision. We stood not just as soldiers but as solemn witnesses to the courage and cost of conflict. Even as the Colour was trooped, our thoughts were with comrades at sea and on the wind-scoured islands far from home.
Now, in 2025, with His Majesty King Charles III preparing to take the salute as Sovereign, the tradition continues. New horses, new officers, new challenges—but the same indelible pageantry. The same pride. And though I am now thousands of miles away in Australia, that parade ground lives within me still.
Here, we observed the King’s Birthday Holiday on Monday past. But the heart of the tradition—the Trooping itself—will take place this Saturday in London. And I, like so many others, will pause, reflect, and watch from afar. There is something comforting about such continuity in an ever-changing world.
To those taking part this week—officers, musicians, guardsmen, and horses alike—I salute you. And to my fellow expatriates and loyal subjects abroad, let us raise a glass not only to the King, but to the colour, and all it represents.
God Save the King.
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