Foster 1069

Royal East India Volunteers Colours, c.1790s. Silk flag with wool embroidered East India Company crest at centre. See WD2425 for a watercolour of this flag in June 1799.

F1068-1069

Two flags of the Royal East India Company Volunteers.

A union flag and an ensign flag of the Royal East India Company Volunteers. Formed in 1796 by the East India Company in London, the REIV were set up to protect East India House and the Company warehouses ‘against hazard from insurrections and tumults’ and to assist the City government in times of disorder. By 1799 there were three regiments with about 1500 men. In 1834 the REIV were disbanded.

The flags, known as ‘colours’, were presented by Lady Jane Dundas, wife of Henry Dundas, at three public ceremonies. It appears likely that she embroidered three sets of colours. Henry Dundas wrote to Company director David Scott on 4 November 1796 that Lady Jane had taken a fancy that she ought to work a pair of colours for the East India Corps and that she needed instructions for the execution of this [C H Philips, The correspondence of David Scott Vol 1 1787-1799 (1951), p.88.] The British Library holds two watercolour paintings of the ‘Presentation of the Colours’ ceremonies to the Second and Third REIV regiments (WD2424 and 2425).

In 1834, when the REIV were disbanded, the colours were deposited in the library at East India House where there was a display of flags. In 1836 the bulk of the flag collection was transferred to Chelsea Hospital, but the Volunteer colours were not included. They were later found in the India Store Depot at Lambeth and hung in the Military Committee Room at the India Office in Whitehall. The colours were still on display there as late as 1963 in what was by then the Commonwealth Relations Office. Philips had seen them c.1951 and described them as follows. ‘One consists of a Union Jack with the royal monogram under a crown in the centre, the other of an ensign with a Jack in the corner and bearing on one side the East India Company’s arms and on the other the words Royal East India Volunteers.’

Few Volunteer colours of this period survive. The embroidery on the REIV colours is unusual since the designs in the centre have been described as ‘inevitably painted’ [James D. Geddes, Colours of British Regiments, vol. 3 (2002), p.200]. There was a format for the pair of colours – there was a union flag and an ensign. The ensign consisted of a sheet of silk which was the colour of the regimental facings (blue in the case of the REIV) with a small Union in the upper canton and a design in the centre.