Overall: 51cm (20.1in) x 62cm (24.5in)
No. 2 Company Colour bearing the Prince of Wales’s feathers - ‘Three feathers argent, quilled or, out of a Prince’s coronet or. A Badge of Edward, son of Edward III, granted by William III in 1696 - ensigned with a King’s Crown in the centre and the Company numeral on a scroll below’; mounted to a board inscribed verso in pencil in an unknown period hand ‘Picked up on the sands at Dunkirk / It was the Company Colour of the 2nd Batt. [sic] Coldstream Guards / commanded by Captain The Lord Frederick Cambridge / who was killed on the Doyle Canal at the beginning of / the retreat towards Dunkirk May 1940’. Flag: 45cm (17.75in) x 61cm (24in). Framed and glazed.
The present ‘camp flag’ or ‘military bunting’ accompanied No 2 Company when 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards deployed to France with 7th Guards Brigade in Major-General Bernard Montgomery’s 3rd Division, II Corps, British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in September 1939. No. 2 Company was commanded by Captain Lord Frederick Charles Edward Cambridge (1907-1940). He was born Prince Frederick of Teck and was the younger son of Adolphus Cambridge, 1st Marquess of Cambridge, formerly the Duke of Teck, and thus a nephew of Queen Mary and George V.
At the German invasion of the Low Countries on 10 May 1940, 1st Coldstream Guards joined the advance into Belgium, moving to Vilvorde outside Brussels, then to Louvain and Herent, on the Mechelen-Louvain canal. Here, in the face of m retreating Belgian troops and refugees that attracted persistent enemy bombing, the Coldstreamers first engaged German troops on 14 May having dug widely dispersed slit tenches under the trees on the canal bank. An assault across the canal in the Battalion area was repulsed next day, but during the action Lord Frederick Cambridge, commanding No 2 Company, was killed by artillery fire. ‘The loss of this popular figure, the first Coldstream Guards officer killed in the campaign, was a shock. The Battalion counter-attacked towards the canal, but on 16 May the Germans crossed in the Belgian sector. Worse news followed; German tanks had broken through over the River Meuse eighty miles further south, outflanking the Maginot Line and threatening the BEF’s flank’. Captain CHS Preston took over No 2 Company, until he too was killed on 30 May.
The regimental history relates how another of the battalion’s camp flags found its way home via the Dunkirk evacuation: ‘Months later the 1st Battalion Commanding Officer’s Bunting, battle-scarred and bloodied, arrived at Regimental Headquarters from HMS Winchelsea which had carried Colonel Cazenove back from the beaches. It now [1951] hangs in the 1st Battalion Sergeants’ Mess, a symbol of the Coldstreamers who maintained traditional standards and discipline under very difficult circumstances during the Dunkirk campaign’.
Sources:
Dawnay, N.P. (1975) ‘The Standards, Guidons and Colours of The Household Division, 1660-1973’.