Wha' shot the cheese?

**Kid Cossack** · 4th May 07, 02:12 PM

Gents, ladies, rabble, rabblettes:

Reading simultaneously The Steel Bonnets and The Complete McAuslan, both, of course, by George MacDonald Fraser. (And that, me laddies, be a right proper Scots name, no?)

In his discourse on his (or "MacNeill's") unease with servants, Fraser mentions a family member of one of his Jocks ribbing him about "Wha' shot the cheese?"

This is one of those bits of regimental lore, I fear, explication for which I must seek from a broader base of knowledge.

It is presented as a dig at his regiment.

Anyone care to explicate further?

**haukehaien** · 4th May 07, 04:07 PM

I found this, but can't be certain as to its accuracy, although it appears to be a bit of 92nd Highlanders' regimental lore, regardless of whther it's true or not.

http://www.napoleon-series.org/cgi-b...mes;read=56871

**Kid Cossack** · 4th May 07, 05:04 PM

Roger dodger, delta duck! Message received and understood: provenance unvouched for but presented for curiousity's sake. Yut!

**macwilkin** · 4th May 07, 05:56 PM

Yep, GMF was in the Gordons after his service in the Border Regiment in Burma.

BTW, the post about the insults to the BW -- I have read another variant of that story; if one wanted to start a fight with the 42nd, one would simply call for a pint of "broken square" in a pub where the Watch was gathered. The "broken square" in this story, though, refered to the Battle of Tamai in 1884 when the Dervishes broke the square. Kipling also refers to a "broken square" in his poem, Fuzzy Wuzzy.

T.