At Twickenham on Saturday, Lieutenant Corrie Cross stood on the touchline as the British Army Women defended the Babcock Trophy, dispatching the Royal Navy 78-0.

A few weeks earlier, on March 20, she had been capped for the Army Women’s Senior XV against Canada Under-21 at Aldershot, the cap presented by Major-General Nicholas Cowley, Commandant of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and vice-president of the Army Rugby Union.

“I never imagined I would be playing for the Army in the UK, stepping on to Twickenham, the home of rugby,” she said. “It’s the two halves of my motivations in life coming together.”

The pathway that brought the 27-year-old Royal Bermuda Regiment officer to a senior army squad began, as these things often do, with a chance meeting. On an RBR exercise in North Carolina, Cross fell into conversation with the regimental sergeant major from the Cayman Regiment, who put her in touch with the colonel of the Wales University Officer Training Corps. By November 2025, she was trying out for the British Army Women’s XV. She has been training with the squad and with Wales UOTC consistently ever since.

She is now in the final stretch of a one-year MBA at Cardiff Metropolitan University, with a view to graduating in September 2026. Before Cardiff, she worked as a claims analyst at RenaissanceRe in Bermuda. Before that, she studied architecture at Coventry University in England. The life experiences in and out of uniform, on and off the pitch stack up quickly when you list them, but Cross balances them all.

“The army has a great way of bringing the best out in you,” she said. “It is a great platform for excellence and self-awareness. Being in the army teaches you how to be self-confident, how to stand your ground, and how to speak in a way that is effective and clear.”

Three years before earning her first cap with British Army Rugby, in May 2023, she wore a different uniform in front of a different audience. Cross was Guard Commander of the Royal Bermuda Regiment’s honour guard at Horse Guards Parade for the coronation of King Charles III.

The full-scale rehearsal at RAF Odiham on April 30 ran a long ten hours, but a photograph of her from that rehearsal ran on the BBC. On the day of the parade itself, the Bermudians marched alongside the Royal Gibraltar Regiment. In the ranks beside her was her first cousin, Kirk Wilks Jr, a lance corporal.

“I’m lucky I was chosen,” she said. “In the moment, we did so much rehearsal I felt like I could do it in my sleep.” Of her cousin, she said simply: “Having my first cousin there with me added an extra sense of pride.”

Ask Cross how she carries it all and the answer is short. “Shared joy is double the joy, and shared hard is half the hard.” It is the kind of line that sounds like a motto because it has had to be one. The military, sport, the architecture degree, the MBA, the analyst’s desk, the rugby union committee work — none of it lives in separate compartments.

The inter-services rugby campaign closes on May 16 at Kingsholm against the RAF. The Army Women are chasing a clean sweep. Cross is competing for a place in the matchday squad as a travelling substitute at No 8, and she is realistic about the contest. A place on the bench against the RAF would round off a year that began with a UOTC introduction, passed through Aldershot, and arrived at Twickenham.

Wherever the next posting takes her, the centre of gravity is not in doubt. “Ultimately,” she said, “Bermuda is my favourite place on the planet.”

That sense of where home is rubs up against a gap she encounters at unit training nights and on the pitch. Her army team-mates, she says, are often puzzled by her presence.

“They look at me like, what are you?” She explains each time: British Overseas Territory, British citizen by birthright, Sandhurst-trained, same as you, just operating slightly differently. None of them, she says, have any idea Bermuda even has a regiment.

That gap in understanding is why she backs efforts to have the First World War battle honours of the Bermuda Militia Artillery and the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps recognised on the colours of their successor regiment, the RBR.

“Getting those honours would help educate a lot of people, not just in Bermuda, but in the wider army context,” she said. “Why not give us what we’re owed? Not special treatment — justice treatment, in line with what other units were recognised for.”