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Featured in the Antiques Trade Gazette, no.1621 (week ending 10 January 2004), page 18, having sold for £7,500.
Edward Trotter Bannerman (1735-96)
was the second son of Sir Alexander Bannerman of Elsick, 3rd baronet, and his
wife Isabella, heiress of the family of Trotter of Horsley in Yorkshire. The
3rd baronet was a Jacobite sympathiser, who raised a small unit in
Aberdeenshire for the cause in 1745, served with it at Culloden in 1746 and
fled to France, where he died in 1747. His eldest son, who became Sir
Alexander, 4th baronet, in 1747 and who was also something of a Jacobite, sold
Elsick and inherited his wife’s property of Horsley, where he died without
male heirs in 1770. Upon his death, the title devolved upon his younger
brother, who became Sir Edward Trotter Bannerman, 5th baronet.
Commissioned
ensign in 1755, Edward Bannerman joined the 36th Regiment of Foot, which had
just returned to England from garrison in Gibraltar; he served with the 36th
for the next twenty-five years. Promoted lieutenant in the second battalion in
1756, he was involved in raids on the French coast during the early years of
the Seven Years’ War (1757-63) and transferred to the first battalion in
1758, serving with that battalion at the siege of Belle Isle in 1761. In 1763,
he was promoted to command the colonel’s company, in the rank of
captain-lieutenant, and obtained command of his own company, in the rank of
captain, in 1764; later in 1764 the 36th moved to Jamaica for nine years’
service on that island. Returning home to England in 1773, the 36th spent two
years recruiting to restore its depleted strength and in 1775 was posted to
Ireland to replace a regiment sent from there to America, where the
Revolutionary War was brewing.
Ireland represented the principal
springboard for a foreign power’s invasion of the British Isles and so was
kept securely garrisoned; its own internal troubles also involved the army in
acting as a police force in the island. Once France and Spain entered the
American war, in 1778 and 1779, the threat of invasion became stronger - as did
that of insurrection - and the regular army struggled to provide a garrison and
a police force in Ireland as well as to fight in America. In many respects,
Ireland between 1692 and 1782 was in a similar position vis-à-vis
Britain as were the American colonies prior to 1776: its Parliament prevented
from independently enacting legislation and its trade strictly controlled.
Until 1776, Ireland’s position seemed unlikely to alter but the American
war provided a catalyst for the change that had been wanted there for so long.
With the escalation of a colonial revolt into a world war in 1778, patriotic
Irishmen banded together to form units of Volunteers, whose ostensible aim was
the protection of Ireland from foreign invasion but whose subsidiary aim was
legislative independence and free trade. Too close to home to ignore, too
well-armed to resist with the depleted regular forces to hand and too necessary
for the defence of Ireland from invasion, the Volunteers eventually achieved
their aims. Just as many in Britain were in sympathy with the cause of the
American colonists, so many - too - saw the justice of the cause of the Irish
Volunteers: one of these sympathisers must have been Major Sir Edward
Bannerman, Baronet, 36th Regiment of Foot.
Bannerman was promoted to become the
36th’s major in 1778 and, as the regiment’s senior administrative
officer, would have travelled across Ireland, where his regiment was dispersed
by companies, for the next two years. Although it is possible to speculate that
Bannerman’s Jacobite ancestry may have made him sympathise with those who
would resist the London government, there was nothing remotely Jacobite about
the Volunteers of Ireland of 1778: it was a largely Protestant and bourgeois
movement and particularly demonstrated those traits in such strongholds of
mercantile Protestantism as Londonderry.
Between 1778 and 1784, Londonderry
raised eight different units of Volunteers. The potential for military
confusion in the city must have been considerable, especially with few trained
soldiers to exercise command, and so the Londonderry Battalion was formed in
May 1780; it brought together four of the eight units into one cohesive whole,
each component retaining its independence as a company of the parent battalion.
Six months later, Bannerman, who may - unofficially - have been involved in the
creation of the Battalion, sold his commission as major of the 36th and became
the executive commanding officer of the Londonderry Battalion. His experience
as a regular soldier would have been invaluable in the training and
administration of this unit of Volunteers and his achievement is recognised by
the award of this gold box, which would have been commissioned for presentation
to him between the formation of the Londonderry Battalion in May 1780 and
Bannerman’s retirement from the 36th Foot six months later.
Sold as lot 121 by Lyon and Turnbull,
Edinburgh, Scotland,
on 10 December 2003.
Reproduced by courtesy of
Lyon and Turnbull, auctioneers. |
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