British Military Band on Parade, London Park, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

British Military Band on Parade, London Park, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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British Military Band on Parade, London Park, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-227EB2

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A British military band marches in full ceremonial order down a broad tarmac avenue lined with mature plane trees — the kind of setting that in the 1950s suggested either a royal park or a large garrison ground, and that the Ministry of Defence maintained with the conviction that a nation which could still put on this much gold braid and synchronized footwork had not entirely lost the war. The drum major leads in the orange-and-black full-dress uniform that identified several Rifle or Light Infantry regiments, his mace held at the carry with the practiced casualness of a man who has rehearsed this exact trajectory several hundred times. Behind him the band stretches back in matched ranks, every cape pressed and every shako straight, performing the central British military belief that sufficiently impressive turnout constitutes a form of foreign policy. The whole procession has the quality of something that costs an extraordinary amount of public money and that nobody in the crowd would dream of suggesting should stop. The regiment had spent the better part of the previous decade learning that empires end; the answer, apparently, was to march more precisely.

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