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Signed and dated
- Febry 18th 1801
Hand
Notes
The country had been at war with France for over five years when Thomas Raikes, Governor of the Bank, submitted a proposal for arming staff to protect the bank. A corps of 450 clerks was led by Field Officers and Captains chosen from among the Directors and Lieutenants and Ensigns from the staff. On 24 May the Military Committee reported that 503 clerks had signed a declaration agreeing to serve in a volunteer regiment. The men would be 'clothed in Scarlet with Green facings, and white Kerseymere Waistcoats and Breeches'. Among the officers chosen, John Soane was appointed Quartermaster. In May 1802 the Regiment was disbanded after the Treaty of Amiens was signed. When war broke out again, the Corps was reinstated in May 1803 and continued to serve the Bank until 1 July 1814.
See also drawings SM volume 69/33, SM 9/2/1b and SM volume 75/94 for drawings of the Volunteers Dinner in the Rotunda.
Level
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).