Staffordshire soldiers set to guard King for first time in history

Soldiers from the 22nd Signal Regiment, Royal Corps of Signals are stepping away from their usual role providing Communications to NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. Instead will take up positions at Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace, and The Tower of London.

The soldiers, made up of mainly soldiers from 222nd Signal Squadron, have been training five hours a day to prepare for the role. For many of the soldiers drill is not part of the day job.

Staff Sgt Durham, Drill instructor said: “Drill is not part of our lives as royal signal soldiers. So although we learn all the basics at training, for some of us it’s been a long time since we’ve had to do any meaningful drill.”

The Royal Corps of Signals provide the communications infrastructure to ensure the Army is always connected. A significant part of their work involves the safe and secure transmission of messages with Signallers using increasingly complex encryption and decryption methods to achieve this.

Signaller Jack Speight, Cyber Engineer said: “It’s a big privilege, it’s not everyday you get to go down to London and get an opportunity like it. It’s quite a prestigious thing where you’re given the opportunity to guard the King. I’m looking forward to it, it’s obviously something you’ll be able to look back on one day and think I got to do that in my career and not a lot of people do.

The 24 year old added: “From a base point where we started, obviously everyone’s new to this ceremonial drill; you cover the basics throughout your career. We’ve come on leaps and bounds, we’ve got a great instructor guiding us and everyone’s got a team ethos. We try to make sure we’re achieving the required goal and the standards that are needed of us.”

Major Rebecca Parkinson, Officer Commanding, 222 Signal Squadron, from Alsager described herself as Stoke born and bred and has family living in Packmoor, Tunstall and Burslem.

She said: “We’ve had about two months of preparing now since we had the role taken on and in that time there been a lot of demanding, all the equipment that we need, that’s taken up a lot of the teams time to do. As well for the past month we’ve been on the parade square for about five or six hours a day preparing for it.

“The last time I did drill was at Sandhurst and that was about 12 years ago. So it’s dusting off the cobwebs of what we’ve been taught throughout basic training and just refining it again, making it ready for the palace.”