Die hard (phrase)

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The phrase die hard was first used during the Peninsular war to describe the 57th Regiment of Foot (Middlesex regiment). This was as a result of the action at the Battle of Albuera (1811) of Colonel Inglis who upon being badly wounded refused to retire from the battle but calmly and repeatedly said "Die hard 57th, die hard!" as his regiment was in the midst of exchanging brutally close range musket volleys.

The term was later used to deride several senior officers of the Army who sought to maintain unchanged the system bequeathed to them by the Duke of Wellington, and who strenuously resisted military reforms enacted by Parliament starting in the late 1860s.

In British politics the term "die hard" was later used to describe those members of the House of Lords who, during the crisis caused by the Lords' rejection of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" of 1909 refused to accept the diminution of the Upper House's powers by the Parliament Act.

It was later used to describe those members of the Conservative Party, including Winston Churchill, who refused to accept any moves towards Indian independence in the 1930s. Again this opposition was powerfully concentrated in the House of Lords.

Many of the die hards, though obviously not Churchill, flirted with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and some even became active sympathisers with Adolf Hitler and called for a negotiated peace in the crisis of 1940.

The term is now commonly used to describe any person who will not be swayed from a belief, and was used as the title of the popular action movie series Die Hard, all starring Bruce Willis as supercop John McClane.