British Heavy Artillery (1899-1915)
Handbooks and Histories
The nicest thing a fellow historian ever said about my work was ‘ah, Gudmundsson … his footnotes have footnotes’. In honor of that compliment, paid by the late Dennis Showalter, I endeavor to provide readers with the easiest possible access to the sources I use to write and illustrate particular pieces. In keeping with this practice, I will, from time to time, publish an article that provides a guide to sets of sources that, while created systematically, have since been cast to the winds.
Students of British ordnance in the age of straw hats and spats invariably find much of interest in the handbooks that the War Office published for particular guns, howitzers, and mortars. In particular, these provide both line drawings of the piece in question and authoritative data about weight and dimensions, particularities and performance.
Many of these can be found with the aid of the keywords ‘War Office’ and ‘handbook’. However, while such searches turn up a few of these works, as well as interesting manuals of other sorts, they miss quite a few. Likewise, while the first online collections I visit when looking for English-language materials - those of the Internet Archive and the Hathi Trust - hold a handful of these booklets, their holdings proved disappointing.
Further searching led me to the State Library of Victoria, which has begun a program to digitize the many handbooks for British artillery pieces in its collection. Indeed, this dragon’s hoard of hoplophile treasures turned out to be so extensive that I recommend that readers looking for such material begin their search in Melbourne. Better yet, the quality of the digital images exceeds, by a country mile, that of most handbooks I have found at either archive.org or hathitrust.org.
8-inch RML howitzer (46-cwt) (1890)
8-inch RML howitzer (70-cwt) (1895)
10-inch BL gun (1904)
Notes:
‘BL’ indicates that the piece in question is loaded from the breech, with a round that consists of a separate projectile and bagged propellant.
‘RML’ tells us that the weapon is a ‘rifled muzzle loader’.
The year in parenthesis refers to the date of publication of the pamphlet, and not the date of adoption of the weapon.
The use of a photo of a young John Headlam at the top of this page renders homage to the three-volume history of the Royal Artillery he wrote in the 1920s.
The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, Volume I (1860-1899) (With C.E. Callwell)
The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, Volume II (1899-1914)
The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, Volume III (Campaigns)
