TWO Worcester men who kept a childhood vow to serve in the brigade of guards will be taking a coach-load of old comrades back to old barracks.

Ken Allen and Derrick Millington, both 74, are visiting Combermere Barracks in Windsor this week, alongside two dozen other former guardsmen.

Both men served for three years in the Household Brigade, Mr Allen in the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and Mr Millington in the Royal Horseguards – precursor to the Blues and Royals.

It only came about when during a 1951 trip to London by their class at Samuel Southall School, they saw a parade to music by mounted guardsmen.

Mr Allen, of Gilmour Crescent in Claines, said: “We both watched them and we both said, ‘we will join up with that when we can’. We both liked the look of that.”

Mr Millington recalls watching an early televised Trooping of The Colour and his father saying, “that’s what you want to do, then you’ll be a man”.

After serving three years, both men came out. Mr Millington ending up as regional sales manager for Domestic Electrical Rentals, and Mr Allen a self-employed engineer who trained at Archdales.

Mr Allen said about the trip: “It should be fun, because we’re going to get the women to try on the cuirasses (steel breastplates) – so they will have to breathe in.”

Mr Allen signed up aged 21, serving from 1959, and spent his first 12 weeks “square bashing” before going off for infantry training in Caterham, Surrey.

He remembers the bromide the Army gave the squaddies to limit their sex drive.

“One bloke said he could not seem to perform as usual, and the sergeant said ‘well, no surprise you’ve had about a gallon of bromide since you got here,’” joked Mr Allen.

For him, the look of the tall bearskin hat was the motivation to join the foot guards, with duties including guarding Buckingham Palace and escorting gold ingots into the Bank of England.

Mr Millington, of The Fairway, Tolladine, joined just before turning 18 and had such a knack with horses he ended up driving a carriage team on parades.

He said: “The horses were as good as the men. My horse Angela, if she saw the camera on her would take two steps forward and prick up her ears and look at the lense.”

Both remember the long guard duties, with the men sent off with just a glucose pill to put under their tongue. Mr Millington said: “If ever you passed out on parade you got seven days confined to barracks and didn’t you used to get some stick off the other chaps.”

Mr Allen said: “It changed you, because you came out with more discipline.”

Their trip has been arranged through the Worcestershire Grenadier Guards Association.

For more information, call Dale Carter on 01527 877749 or 07803 120151.