The Queen's Birthday Salute -Trooping the Colour - June 1957

(AUDIO ONLY)

The Queen's Birthday Salute by the Royal Artillery Band in honour of the 31st birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.

-Royal Birthday Cremony
-21-Gun Salute

Featuring the Herald Trumpeters of the Royal Regiment of Artillery
Major S.V. Hays, director and narrator

Recorded: 13 June 1957, Hyde Park, London

I. The Royal Regiment performed by the Herald Trumpeters.
II. The Royal Artillery Slow March
III.The Keel Row
IV. Bonnie Dundee
V. The British Grenadiers
VI. 21-Gun Salute

Notes on the programme:
Recorded here are the musical festivities and open-air sounds of the Royal Birthday Celebration, which each June brings a major part of London's cheering population to London's Hyde Park. (The date of these official birthday celebrations bears no relation to the actual birthday of the monarch; it is annually set by the Lord Chamberlain's office, about eleven months in advance, for some day in the early summer when good weather may be expected.)

Heard in this video are trumpet fanfares, slow and quick marches, booming guns, clattering horses, and a full musical programme by the Royal Artillery Band, which is one of the most celebrated organisations in English history, extending back for more than two centuries. Major S.V. Hays, director of the Royal Artillery Band, narrates each event.

In the mid-17th century, the ceremony of "Trooping the Colours" was instituted, and it has remained to this day an integral part of the Royal Birthday celebration. The original purpose of the ritual of "Saluting" or "Trooping" the "Colours" was for the troops, many of them mercenaries, to become familliar with the colours of the regiment to which they would rally in battle. Then the ceremony was transmuted in purpose to what it is now, a review by the soverign of the troops.