Royal Scots Fusiliers in the context of "Line infantry"

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (during the Second World War) and again from 1951 to 1955. For some 62 of the years between 1900 and 1964, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) and represented a total of five constituencies over that time. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.

Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire into the wealthy, aristocratic Spencer family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Mahdist War and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill was president of the Board of Trade and later Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers' social security. As First Lord of the Admiralty before and during the First World War he oversaw the disastrous naval attack on the Dardanelles (a prelude to the Gallipoli campaign) and was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George and served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. After two years out of Parliament, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning sterling in 1925 to the gold standard, depressing the UK economy.

Deneys Reitz (3 April 1882 – 19 October 1944), was a South African soldier, author, adventurer and statesman. Best known as the author of Commando (1929), which detailed his experience in the Second Boer War, he also fought against the Maritz rebellion, and in the First World War in Africa and Europe. In the 1920s he began a decades-long political career included multiple ministerial portfolios, culminated in the office of Deputy Prime Minister under Jan Smuts. A lawyer by trade, his eponymous firm Deneys Reitz Inc went on to become one of South Africa's leading firms. Reitz died in office in 1944 as South African High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

The son of Orange Free State President Francis William Reitz, Reitz fought as a Boer commando for the duration of the Second Boer War, including as a Bittereinder under General Jan Smuts in the Cape Colony. After the war, he refused to sign an oath of allegiance to Britain, and followed his father into exile. After a difficult period in French Madagascar, Reitz returned to South Africa at the urging of Smuts, settling in Heilbron as a lawyer. Under Smuts' tutelage he accepted the new Union of South Africa and reconciled himself to its membership of the British Empire. At the start of the First World War, he took up arms to lead local pro-government forces in the suppression of the Maritz rebellion. Reitz then served with the South African Army in the South West Africa and East African campaigns, before joining the British Army in order to fight on the Western Front. Wounded twice in the trenches, he was mentioned in dispatches and finished the war in command of the 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers.

The Highland Light Infantry (HLI) was a light infantry regiment of the British Army formed in 1881. It took part in the First and Second World Wars, until it was amalgamated with the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1959 to form the Royal Highland Fusiliers (Princess Margaret's Own Glasgow and Ayrshire Regiment) which later merged with the Royal Scots Borderers, the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), the Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons) and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to form the Royal Regiment of Scotland, becoming the 2nd Battalion of the new regiment.

The Royal Highland Fusiliers, 2nd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland (2 SCOTS) is an infantry battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

Prior to 28 March 2006, the Royal Highland Fusiliers was an infantry regiment in its own right, created by the amalgamation of the Royal Scots Fusiliers with the Highland Light Infantry (City of Glasgow Regiment) in January 1959.