Following the thin red line

The phrase thin red line, referring literally or metaphorically to the British army - from the former colour of their uniforms - is fairly familiar in the English language; so when we wanted to add it to the OED under the entry red line, I didn't imagine that it would be too hard to track down to its first recorded occurrence. But it proved to be a slippery customer.

It was generally believed to be associated with the Battle of Balaclava, which took place in 1854. It therefore seemed reasonable to assume that I would be able to find an 1854 first quotation, especially as the phrase was attributed in many later sources to Sir William Howard Russell, who was war correspondent for the Times during the Crimean War. We already had in our files what appeared to be the required quotation, taken from Bartletts Dictionary of Quotations:

I took the quotation to the Bodleian library..but still couldn't find it. This was the library researcher's equivalent of falling at the first fence

But this made me uneasy, because it read a bit oddly, and was suspiciously lacking a page number. On top of that, we had already sent this reference to a colleague in the British library, who had failed to find it in that or various other issues of the Times for October 1854. In case the problem was one of varying editions of the newspaper, I took the quotation to the Bodleian library to check in their copy, but still couldn't find it. This was the library researcher's equivalent of falling at the first fence; now a bit of ingenuity would be called for.

I went back to Bartlett's dictionary to check the original reference, and found that although there was an implication that the report was published on 25th, it might in fact mean it was a report of an action that took place on 25th. So I skimmed through subsequent numbers of the Times until I found in the issue for 14 November an account of the cavalry action at Balaclava. But here was another disappointment. It said:

The Russians on their left drew breath for moment, and then in one grand line dashed at the Highlanders. The ground flies beneath their horses' feet; gathering speed at every stride, they dash on towards that thin red streak topped with a line of steel.

This would explain the strangely garbled version in Bartlett; but "thin red streak" wouldn't do; where did our phrase first get used?

The next clue was in another reference that had also found its way into our files, this time from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which took as its source a book by Russell called The British Expedition to the Crimea, published in 1887. I found from the Bodleian that this was itself a later edition of his 1855 work entitled The War: from the Landing at Gallipoli, but that this still read "thin red streak". However, the next edition was published in 1858,and as this was the edition in which the title was first changed, perhaps this was where the phrase got changed too. Both the 1858 and 1877 editions were in the British Library, so back the query went, and returned with a note saying no luck in the 1858 copy, but with the successful quotation:

If anyone tells you it was first used actually at the Battle of Balaclava, don't believe them!

So that was the very first example of the phrase. If anyone tells you it was first used actually at the Battle of Balaclava, don't believe them!

But what is the story then behind this phrase? Why did it get changed? Did Russell make the change to his original dispatch himself when he was writing up the narrative version, deciding it sounded more pleasing? A clue may lie in another OED quotation, which shows the use of red line on its own (without the "thin"). There is a quotation from a letter of 1855 written by Mrs Duberly, an officer's wife in the Crimea. She says:

They advance, supported by the impenetrable red line, our infantry.

Is this an independent invention of hers, or does it indicate an early popular change to Russell's original phrase, which then enjoyed a life of its own and caused him to hybridize with his own "thin red streak" later?

These are the kind of questions which OED detective work can unfortunately never answer. We can meticulously pin down the documentary evidence; but the reasons behind word change and development remain elusive. And you can look at the OED entry for red line and never know how much word-hunting, with clues and false trails, went into it.

If you ever see thin red line earlier than 1877, let us know!