The Honourable Artillery Company (1537)
Following a tip by IanVisits, a fellow London Historian and I went yesterday to The Honourable Artillery Company’s open evening. It was a great opportunity, since this site is normally closed to the public. The HAC headquarters is in City Road near Bunhill Fields Cemetery. It has its own cricket and rugby field in what must be one of the highest value patches of real estate in the world.
Raised in 1537, the HAC is the oldest extant unit in the British Army. Today it is a territorial unit, its gunnery function mainly for ceremonial purposes, although its troops still do active service in an infantry role. They put on a superb show. Here are some pictures. As we were leaving, I was delighted to find in the grand staircase a sculpture model from Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial, which I wrote about last November. My favourite London monument.
We pass the HAC HQ nearly every working day on the way home and it has always seemed a rather mysterious entity to me.
I have peered through the gates at the end of what is perhaps a stub of Finsbury Street where it crosses Chiswell Street but that’s as near as I have come accessing the site.
I know that the HAC also has a Detachment of Special Constabulary and that “Officers serving in the Detachment, who include City and Metropolitan Police Special Constables, retain the Detachment’s unique identity by wearing the HAC Regimental Titles, in addition to their Divisional identification” (from their own Web site), and I am puzzled by this close relationship. I thought that the police and the armed forces were supposed to be separate and that civilian policing was to be undertaken only by the civilian police except in situations of extreme disorder when the army can be called in but as the army.
If serving Special Constables are at the same time serving members of HAC, that would seem to come dangerously close to breaching that principle.
They are a unit that had sir so and so as a gunner, and many more like that. They have fought in nearly ever war.
They have an excellent small museum which is worth visiting, as well as a very good archive (complete with obliging archivist). And did you know that Ted Heath was a member?
Thanks Simon, isn’t it funny almost a year since I posted this. I know because the HAC open day is this coming Tuesday and I’ll be going again, with others. But first we’re going to Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich for a guided tour with the curator. Do you fancy it?
Sadly I can’t make Tuesday, but I have used the RA Archives in the past. They have some very valuable stuff.
Now, if you could organise a trip to the Royal Fusiliers Museum and Archives @ The Tower…
That’d be fabulous. The trouble being, of course, that we’d need to pay entrance into the Tower to reach the museum – way too expensive in my view. Maybe I’ll have a chat with them see if anything can be done.