© Richard Moss / Culture24
Richard Moss takes a tour of the Royal Engineers Museum with Director Richard Dunn and Head Curator Rebecca Nash, to look at a Designated collection bursting with fascinating objects and stories.
Anyone who visits the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham expecting a straightforward lesson in the history of bridge building and mere military mechanics is in for a pleasant surprise.
Sure, there are Bailey bridges, pontoons, Mulberry harbours, saps, trenches, irrigation systems, vast architectural projects and impressive technologies aplenty – but the Museum's stories and exhibits touch on nearly every aspect of British military heritage – from the Napoleonic era onwards.
It’s a collection that reflects the men who have served in the Corps over the last 200-odd years. Many of them were evidently voracious collectors, not to say aesthetes and adventurers, who lived up to the Corps' motto ‘ubique’ – everywhere.
“When the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers were trained together at the Royal Academy at Woolwich the top five per cent that passed their exams would be sent to the Engineers,” says Rebecca Nash, Head Curator at the Museum. “Because they were intelligent and interested, obviously they collected a lot – they had their feelers out.”
Judging by some of the photos of Royal Engineers officers in the farther flung regions of the Empire – there’s a touch of non-conformity too.
© Richard Moss / Culture24
“The officer Corps had the sobriquet of 'mad, married or Methodist'," adds Museum Director Richard Dunn. “In the days of bought commissions here were guys who could only enter by dint of their intellect, so they must be mad and quite eccentric. They also tended to be older and many were Low Church families and Methodist. There’s a touch of social reform to this part of this army.”
Moving past a detailed contemporary model illustrating the French and Spanish siege of Gibraltar during the American War of Independence, we stop to look at the detailed siege lines, firing lines, magazines and saps running up to British lines.
“It’s a fantastic example of survey work bearing in mind it was all done from the ground,” explains Rachel. “We believe it was done to show the fortifications the Corp was working on.” It’s a foretaste of detailed model making peppered throughout this Designated collection.
After Gibraltar it seems the Corps began to learn some hard lessons in combat engineering, thanks to the experiences of the Peninsular Wars. In the Napoleonic galleries among the tunics, sabres and locks of hair sits a bullet-holed officer’s sash that once belonged to the father of the Engineers, General John Pasley.
The Napoleonic galleries © Richard Moss / Culture24
“The holes in it you can see are where he was wounded,” says Rebecca. “It’s a typical military piece, it’s got the bloodstains, bullet holes and everything like that on it.”
It’s also a flamboyant and characteristically Georgian accoutrement, which also had practical uses. “There’s a family story that says it was used to lower the body of General Sir John Moore into his grave after his death during the Peninsular Wars,” adds Rebecca. For the Museum it signifies the real birth of the Corps as combat engineers.
Pasley’s agitation for proper training in the face of superior French military engineering brought him to the attention of Duke of Wellington, which led to the eventual creation of the Royal Engineers school that the Museum now partly occupies.
On the wall opposite is the map used by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.
Cobbled together on the eve of the battle from at least four Royal Engineers field surveys, it was transported from Brussels to Wellington’s HQ at Quatre Bras by a young staff officer.
Snob the dog and a Russian helmet from Crimea. © Richard Moss / Culture24
Along the way he had skirmishes with French cavalry, suffered concussion and lost his horse. The weathered document eventually played its part in helping Napoleon meet his Waterloo – look hard enough and you can see the strokes of genius – Wellington’s pencil marks.
The team at the Museum are currently working on ambitious plans to make more out of exhibits like these. An extensive redevelopment will not only overhaul the whole gallery collection and revamp the displays, but also make connections with the colossal paper and photographic archive held in the Library, which is also part of the Designated collection.
“We’re walking through a number of galleries earmarked for development,” says Richard. “The Museum is in the middle of an eight-year programme that will see galleries rebuilt, and the collections redisplayed and updated.”
Amongst the many ideas are plans to introduce a V2 rocket into the central hall, which currently hosts the post war collection, as well as an overhaul of the impressive medal collection (which includes 25 VCs) and the creation of a new immersive trench and tunnelling experience in the World War I galleries.
Part of the Gordon collection of Chinoiserie. © Richard Moss / Culture24
The redevelopment links into a wider scheme to interpret the historic defences of Medway, but one of the tangible outcomes for the Napoleonic collection will be the display of their fine collection of Waterloo teeth – dentures made from the healthy teeth of the fallen. As Richard later tells me with quiet understatement, “all sorts of peculiar items are held.”
Moving into the Victorian Galleries where the story of Empire, conquest, victory and defeat is told, the human stories come thick and fast.
A recreated Crimean hut (courtesy of the current Royal Engineers) is packed with weaponry, a Russian helmet and Snob the dog – so named because of his penchant for the officer’s mess. He was eventually buried (excepting what’s here in the case) with full military honours.
Six Victoria Crosses were won during the Crimean War and the Corps was heavily involved in the siege of Sebastopol. The war also signalled the beginnings of a vast photo archive. Sapper photographers were despatched from the 1850s onwards to take pictures of this first media war – an evocative view of Balaclava harbour pays testimony to this fledgling art.
WWI paintings and ephemera displayed on a camouflaged wall. © Richard Moss / Culture24
Elsewhere a surprising collection of Chinoiserie, bought back from General Gordon’s stint in China during the Opium Wars, includes some surprisingly fine ethnographic items. Gordon’s army razed the Summer Palace in Peking to the ground – and returned to Chatham with a few souvenirs.
“We have the imperial throne, an exquisite roof tile, a jade bowl with a lotus on the bottom and the top of a human skull that was used as a libation cup,” says Rebecca. “The throne was in the officer’s mess for years and eventually came to the museum for safe keeping.”
The aesthetically alert General Gordon eventually came to a sticky end in Khartoum, when the Sudanese revolutionary army under the Mahdi sacked his palace and chopped off his head. You can see spears and railings from the fateful Palace siege, retrieved later by loyal members of the Corps.
The outcome of this act of rebellion was another campaign, this time by another famous engineer general, Lord Kitchener, who defeated the Mahdist army at the Battle of Omdurman. Impressive war booty from this exploit includes the golden minaret from the top of the Mahdi’s tomb, evocatively stained tunics and a padded uniform of a Mahdian officer.
A ghostly WWI German gas mask adapted from pickelhaube helmet. © Richard Moss / Culture24
There are many more stories of this sort as we file through displays of the Victorian era’s ‘brush fire wars’ but we are drawn towards a popular display, containing the bust of Colonel Chard VC. The likeness of the defender of Rourke’s Drift during the Zulu Wars is displayed together with his revolver and a selection of Zulu shields.
“We have had members of the Zulu Royal family here for special events and they get into a state of veneration when they get to this case,” says Richard. “We hold (Zulu King) Chetsway’s footprint taken by a sapper to make him a set of boots to go and see Queen Victoria after he’d been captured.”
Passing a large silver torpedo and a recreation of a Boer War blockhouse, we squint at a field table with the name of a VC winner scrawled into its surface and also examine aqueducts, theodolites, rifles, pith helmets and a monoplane wing that once belonged to American flight pioneer Bill Cody – part of a display revealing how Royal Engineers were the first to experiment with military aviation.
In the First World War galleries, which are again earmarked for redevelopment, Rebecca astutely points out how “you can’t really talk about World War I without talking about the Royal Engineers.”
World War Two bomb disposal. Sappers were 'given a shovel and stethascope and told to get on with it'. © Richard Moss / Culture24
The trenches were after all designed and developed by Royal Engineer sappers - as was the accommodation, the army camps, the postal service, transport systems and of course the tunnels. In addition the Corps handled many of the new technological developments of the conflict, like the introduction of the Mills bomb.
As a result the First World War collection is rich and absorbing but among the redolent battered pickelhaubes, grave markers, sepia photographs, gas masks and gas shells is a brief taster of the Museum’s collection of artwork.
After the familiar Nevinsons and Nashes of the Imperial War Museum it feels unusual to be looking at unfamiliar paintings of familiar places like Neuve Chapel and Sanctuary Wood.
But what really catches the eye is the work of the Royal Engineer’s camouflage detachment - including a papier-mâché general’s head used in the trenches as a decoy to tempt German snipers out of their lairs and some lively caricatures of German soldiers – used for target practice.
A Borneo airdrop dramatically recreated in the post war galleries. © Richard Moss / Culture24
From here the galleries and their displays get bigger. The rooms dealing with World War Two include Nissen huts, parts of pontoons, vehicles and even the impressive mechanical models used to develop and explain the Mulberry harbours that helped sustain the Normandy invasion.
A display about the Battle of El Alamein (where sappers cleared a path under fire before the advancing infantry) includes a series of anti vehicle personnel mines of the type that probably still litter the western desert to this day.
As we move into the post war gallery, with its impressive vehicles and walkways and the medal room where the human stories of thousands of ordinary sappers are remembered next to those of generals and heroes, it's apparent how, in its breadth and scope, the Museum has the potential to rival the national collections at the Royal Army Museum and Imperial War Museum in London.
Like the latter, human stories and the powerful tales that objects and archives can tell lie at the heart of the collection.
For the moment the Royal Engineers Museum seems a like a slumbering giant – a Pandora’s Box of artefacts, archives, photographs, medals and stories. I don’t think this will be the case for much longer.
The collection of the Royal Engineers Museum is a Designated collection.
