British Army's White Helmets to disband after 90 years

published 3 August 2017

Descendants of the daring despatch riders of the First World War, the British Army’s White Helmets, founded in 1927, will disband in this, its 90th year. Previously known as the Red Devils and the Mad Signals, they’re just as good at leaping through rings of fire and forming 21-man pyramids atop a string of Triumph motorcycles as they ever were, but the riders’ skills are, sadly, no longer required.

‘Messages haven’t been delivered in this way for a very long time,’ says OC Capt Jonathan McLelland. ‘With the move towards cutting-edge capabilities, the Royal Signals is now modernising its image to show it’s truly a leader in a digital age.’

The 22-strong team of Royal Signals volunteers will go out with a bang - its penultimate performance will take place in the Grand Ring of the Chatsworth Country Fair (September 1–3, www.chatsworth.org), which will also feature the comparably balletic Cossack Warriors, performing the death-defying equestrian art of dzhigitovka for the first time at the event. Leaping from a horse at full gallop, sliding under its belly, balancing in a handstand atop a saddle at high speed or charging atop a string of horses, they’re descended from original Cossack warriors of three centuries ago, for whom dzhigitovka was a military technique used for dodging bullets or arrows.

The White Helmets’ final public performance will take place at the Preston Military Show at Fulwood Barracks, Lancashire, on Saturday, September 16. For further details, visit www.facebook.com/prestonmilitaryshow

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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