PC colour question

[OC Richard]

Great photo there!

Yes Archer Green is an extremely dark green, often mistaken for black indoors or in poor lighting. Rifle Green is, I believe, the same, because the Scottish Rifles wore that same very dark green colour.

The path of the Archer Green doublet is, to me, a very interesting one, as it began as the particular colour of the pipers of the Cameron Highlanders, when a new costume was introduced for their pipers in the 1840s. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries the Scottish Infantry wore red jackets trimmed with their particular regiments' "facing colour", and musicians tended to wear "reversed colours" (jackets of the facing colour, trimmed in red). So you would see musicians of The Gordon Highlanders in yellow jackets &c.

So it was on all fours with tradition when The Cameron Highlanders introduced green jackets for their pipers, green being the regimental facing colour.

But! within a few decades all the other Highland regiments had put their pipers into Archer Green doublets too, regardless of their facing colours! Why? No one knows, but obviously people liked the way the pipers of the Camerons looked.

Then in 1914 Full Dress was withdrawn forever, and from then on the dressiest the Scottish soldier could ordinarily get was the khaki Service Dress. In 1953 though it was thought that a nicer dress uniform was needed and rather than go back to the original red the MOD decided on Archer Green for the whole of the Highland soldiery. Now with the creation of the RRS the entire Scottish army is in Archer Green, a strange turn of events for the once-unique green doublet of the pipers of the Camerons.

Anyhow about those other shades, we here in the USA would call the bright clear strong green "Kelly Green" (the colour of Glasgow Celtic &c) and I've heard the green halfway between Kelly Green and Archer Green called "tartan green" by Highland outfitters and the mills, it being the green used in Modern Colours tartans.

So anyhow I would call those three jackets, from Left to Right, Kelly Green, Tartan Green, and Archer Green.

Funny thing, there's a pipe band here that used to wear, rather than the usual pipe band black Argyll jackets, green Argyll jackets. Even though all the jackets were ordered from the same Highland Outfitter in Scotland, which was fully aware that all these jacket orders were intended for the same band, no two jackets were the same shade of green, exhibiting the range in the photo above from Kelly Green to Archer Green and every possible shade in between.

Every time I saw that band, the smaltzy Irish-American song "Forty Shades of Green" came to mind!

It's a truism in the pipe band world that when a band tries to do anything interesting/different/bespoke it nearly always "comes around to bite you in the butt" as we say, and the band, sooner or later, won't be able to match in things and will look all ahoo.