Hello and question re feather bonnets

**HTTC** · 9th June 20, 03:48 AM

Hello everyone,

Thanks for letting me join the group!

I haven’t a clue which section, if any, this query might be better posted but I’m interested to know if anyone here has ever actually seen an Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders feather bonnet with six foxtails? Does anyone own one? I’d love to get my hands on one but I’m starting to think they’re the stuff of legend!

Yours aye

**OC Richard** · 9th June 20, 02:23 PM

Yes I've seen actual A&SH feather bonnets. All the time, in the band I played in back in the 1980s, because our Pipe Major wore one. We all had normal civilian ones with four tails. Come to think of it, I never did know where he got that thing. Probably from the same estate he got his magnificent silver & ivory pipes from, an old piper who passed away in the 1970s.

It's odd, isn't it, the way the different regiments had different numbers of tails. (Which are ostrich, not fox, of course.)

My understanding is that the Black Watch bonnets had four tails, the A&SH six, and the Gordons, Seaforths, and Camerons five.

That's the thing, in 1809 most of the Highland regiments were de-kilted, their Highland Dress taken away, leaving only five regiments to carry on the regimental Highland Dress traditions, the 42nd, 78th, 79th, 92nd, and 93rd.

How much more variety in Highland Dress we might have today if we had had eleven Victorian kilted Highland regiments instead of just five!

In any case I think it would be easy enough to own a six-tail bonnet, by ordering one that way. I wouldn't think it would cost much more. Genuine UK-made feather bonnets are expensive, though! When our band ordered them around 1980 they were $150. I see them now around $600 to $700. Which is why bands often get them from Pakistan nowadays.

**Jock Scot** · 12th June 20, 02:57 AM

Welcome, from Inverness-shire.

To add a bit of minute technical terminology to OCR's excellent and informative post above. If those "foxtails" had really been a tail from a real fox, then they are known as a "brush", I am not sure what the plural of that might be though. Brush (like sheep and sheep)? Brush's? Brushes?

**OC Richard** · 16th June 20, 04:25 PM

BTW this well-known c1890 photo shows just how ginormous an Officer's feather bonnet in the Argylls can be!

But he's the Colonel, he should have the biggest bonnet. And huge cuffs too.

I wonder it that's the South Africa medal they are wearing.