Exhibition focuses on link between Royal Scots and Hearts

The Royal Scots Regimental Museum is staging an exhibition, with particular focus on the importance of team working and sport in the military, hosted by Heart of Midlothian FC.

The event part of the football club’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations and runs until Wednesday 10 July (10am to 4.30 daily) and admission is free.

The exhibition provides a poignant reminder of the supreme sacrifice made by the 1914 Hearts team with their footballers being the first in the United Kingdom to enlist to fight for their country at the outbreak of World War 1. 

Many of them volunteered to join the 16^th Battalion of The Royal Scots, famously known as McCrae’s Battalion, and the exhibition also covers significant events in Regimental history such as the Gretna rail disaster (1915), the Gallipoli campaign (1915), the Battle of the Somme (where 454 Royal Scots were killed on of July 1, 1916), the Battle of Kohima (part of the Burma campaign in 1944) and the First Gulf War (1991).

Some of the items on display have never been seen publicly before and a research area has been included to enable families to find out more about their relatives who served with The Royal Scots.

The exhibition hosts and guides are volunteers who served in The Royal Scots and who want to give something back through comradeship, promoting the unique heritage of the Regiment. They are fondly named Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard.

Lianne Parry, Hearts Head of Heritage, said: “It is wholly appropriate in our Sesquicentennial Year that we should highlight one of the most historically important episodes in Hearts’ long and rich history.”

Colonel Martin Gibson, representing the Royal Scots Museum’s Outreach Team, said: “We are determined to tell the story of The Royal Scots from 1914 onwards and to highlight the close and enduring connection between the Regiment and Hearts FC which began at outbreak of WW1.

“So many men from our capital city served in our Regiment. It is so important that their achievements and sacrifices are never forgotten.”