CULTURES OF BRASS PROJECT
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CULTURES OF BRASS PROJECT |
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The Diary of a Victorian Bandsman British publishers of military music 1770-1880
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The Diary of a Victorian Military Bandsman
The militia By the time he appeared in the 1861 census, Shepherd had been in the 1st Devon Militia for eight years. The regiment had its headquarters in Exeter. The militia was a county-based auxiliary force for home defence. The men retained their everyday trades and occupations, but they also received payment for their military service and committed themselves to annual training (usually for about a month), and to the possibility of being called up (or embodied) for periods when they might be stationed away from their headquarters but within the British Isles. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the militia fulfilled its home defence role while the country was at war with France. Subsequently it was run down and came to exist in little more than name, but in the early 1850s, against the backdrop of tensions that escalated into the Crimean War, measures were taken to revive it. A Bill of 1852 made voluntary enlistment the norm, in preference to the former method of selection by ballot. Men signed up for a limited term which they might choose to renew (as Shepherd clearly did). Shepherd must have been one of large numbers of men who enlisted in 1853 in response to the revival of the militia. He was still serving with the regiment in 1881, when the Cardwell reforms linked the infantry regiments of the regular army to counties, and incorporated the militia regiments into those infantry regiments as battalions. The 1st Devon Militia thus became the 4th Battalion of the Devon Regiment, as Shepherd mentions (p. 23), though it continued to be referred to locally as the ‘militia’. |