Includes 47 coloured plates of uniforms.

Excerpt from Records of the Scottish Volunteer Force, 1859-1908 The present seems a peculiarly appropriate time when some record of the origin and history of the force should be compiled, as, firstly, its character and organisation have been changed and it has furnished the cadres for the territorial army of the future; and secondly, in a few years' time any attempt to arrive at data as to the earliest formations of the volunteer corps would be in vain. From the list appended to this Preface it will be seen how few are the efforts which have been made to commit to paper the histories of volunteer corps; indeed in the earlier days no records at all were kept in most cases. Nowadays, therefore, the bare facts disclosed by a study of army lists and other official documents can generally be only amplified by the personal recollections of those who took part in the movement in its early days. Those men are now passing away from among us, and with them their knowledge will be buried in the grave; so it becomes a pious military duty to collect as much as possible of what they have to tell and to record it in a per manent form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Originally published in 1975, The Volunteer Force is a study of the part-time military force which came into being to meet the mid-nineteenth century fear of French invasion. It survived and grew for fifty years until in 1908 it was renamed and remodelled as the Territorial Force. Composed initially of middle-class and often middle-aged gentlemen who elected their own officers and paid for their own equipment, the Volunteer Force soon became youthful and working-class, with appointed middle-class officers, a Government subsidy, and a minor military role as an adjunct to the Regular Army. This book examines the origins of the Force, the transformation in its social composition, the difficulties in finding officers who were ‘gentlemen’, the ambiguous status, of the Force both in the local community and in the Regular Army, and the political influence which the Force exerted in the early twentieth century. Above all it is concerned with the reasons for and the implications of enrolment; publicists argued that the Force was the embodiment of patriotism, and an indication of working-class loyalty to established institutions.

This work records the various Rifle Volunteer Corps (RVC) that were created throughout England, Scotland and Wales as a result of the formation in 1859 of the Volunteer Force. Listed under the counties in which they were raised and numbered are the RVC that were accepted by the War Office.

Lt.-Gen. Sir Garnet Wolseley commented that history would record the formation of the Volunteers Movement as one of the most remarkable events in the century. In this study of the Rifle Volunteer Movement, the author Ian Beckett has drawn from a wide range of primary source material such as official, regimental, local and private repositories. He has been able to put into perspective the Movement within the structure of the Victorian and Edwardian social, political and military affairs from its formation in 1859 to its absorption in the Territorial Force in 1908.