What is that tall helmet the Palace Guard wear called?

[brainshrub]

And what is the history behind those furry helmets?

[JailBush]

1. No offense, but your post would be far more intersting if it was titled

"What would George W. Bush call those tall helmets British Palace Guards wear?"

Possible answers:

1. Big fur hats for palace guards

2. Palace guard helmets

3. Wizard of Oz hats

4. Big furry beer mugs

5. Texan chipmunks

6. Queenie hats

[zx22778a]

14. They were originally worn by Napoleon's Imperial Guard

At the end of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon, in a last desparate stroke, sent his Imperial Guard, 30,000 men, all at least six feet tall, in vast columns to break Wellington's line. They had never before been defeated in battle. When they couldn't get through and retreated, the entire French army collapsed and started to flee the battlefield.

To bring this back on topic, the Imperial Guard wore the tall bearskin hats. The British regiments who defeated them adopted the hats and have been called the "Guards" regiments ever since.

Damn there's a lot of commas in that first sentence.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. A

H E M M I T. Hemmit. He's standing there thinking: "Damn! I gots me soooooooooome Hemmit!".

Really. I used to live in Kensington. Heard it all the time. :evilgrin:

Please note: I really did live in Kensington for a time. On Gore Rd.

[louis-t]

10. hemmit! bwa-ha...

hysterical! I almost choked on my chocolate bar.

[mlawson]

3. "Bearskins", I believe.

[Kellanved]

7. correct

http://www.grenadierguards.org.uk/
http://www.grenadierguards.org.uk/ceremonial.shtml

[scarlet_owl]

4. I have always heard it called a "busby".

[scarlet_owl]

8. And here's a link to support this:

http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/busby

[leftofthedial]

5. they are called "The Palace Guards' Tall Helmets of Doom"

Here's how they came to wear them:

You know how they stand at rigid attention and don't move even if you make faces, yell "Boo!" and what not?

Until the 60's they wore little caps that looked kind of like miniature baseball caps.

Well, back in the 60's a couple of my friends and I were in the UK for a couple of weeks. We found a roadkilled hedgehog and for a lark we put it on one of the guard's head! We thought it looked so styling that we went back out into the countryside and ran over as many hedgehogs as we could find, brought them back to the Palace and put them on the heads of all the guards. They couldn't move to take them off, so they're still on!

Glad I could help clear that up.

[hlthe2b]

6. Were they ever worn in actual combat?

God, they must be hot and unwieldy in the summer time....

[DifferentStrokes]

13. For a certainty when the bears were wearing them

Otherwise, they're strictly for dress and parade.

Found an interesting history, tracing the origins back to Waterloo.

http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:BbLdd2CXxeUJ:www.news-star.com/stories/081497/world2.html+bearskin+palace+guards&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Five elite infantry regiments -- the Coldstream, Scots, Welsh, Irish and Grenadiers guards -- sport the tall bearskin hats. The distinctive hats were adopted to commemorate Britain's 1815 victory over Napoleon's forces at Waterloo, where France's elite troops, the Imperial Guard, had worn bearskins to appear more intimidating.

--much more including efforts to replace the skins with synthetic fabric to appease PETA. Results have been uniformly horrid (pun intended because this is a funny story).

:-)

[Field Of Dreams]

9. Why is there a guinea pig in the picture?

:hi:

[louis-t]

11. That's his lunch..

[Field Of Dreams]

12. I thought only Wesley Clark ate guinea pigs ...

or was it kittens?

(Don't jump on me Clarkies, I'm one of you!) :7

[ZoCrowes]

15. They're called

Tall Fuzzy Guard Hats

[The Magistrate]

16. The 'Tall Hats', Sir

Are known as shakoes, with the 'a' pronounced as in shake. The basic cylindrical hat, like a top-hat without the brim, was the universal headgear of European infantry after the eclipse of the cocked hat late in the eighteenth century. Those of line regiments were of felt, those of England's Guard regiments eventually, as several have mentioned above, adopted the bearskin of Napoleon's Guard. For some reason, armies are prone to adopt the headgear of successful forces: after the Prussian victory in 1870, there was a vogue for spiked helmets, which adorned briefly U.S. and English dress uniforms.