The 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards was a cavalry regiment in the British Army, first raised in 1685. It saw service for three centuries, before being amalgamated into the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards in 1922.
The regiment was first raised as the Earl of Arran's Regiment of Cuirassiers in 1685, by the regimenting of various independent troops, and ranked as the 6th Regiment of Horse. In 1691 it was re-ranked as the 5th Horse, and in 1746 transferred to the Irish regiment establishment where it was the ranked 1st Horse. It returned to the British establishment in 1788, as the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards.
Perhaps the most notable engagement of the regiment was at the outbreak of World War I on 22 August, 1914, when a squadron of the regiment became the first members of the British Expeditionary Force to engage the German army outside Mons; four patrolling German cavalrymen of the 2nd Kuirassiers were surprised by two full troops of British cavalry, and after a brief pursuit several were killed, the Dragoons thereby firing the first United Kingdom shots of the war.
In 1921, it was retitled the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards and in 1922 was amalgamated with 7th Dragoon Guards (Princess Royal's), to form the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards.
Read more about 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards: Battle Honours, Colonels —with Early Names For The Regiment
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“a highly respectable gondolier,
Who promised the Royal babe to rear
And teach him the trade of a timoneer
With his own beloved brattling.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)