Know your Brown Bess from your SA80? Museum fires up for summer with hands-on weapons demonstrations

This August, Shrewsbury Castle’s Soldiers of Shropshire Museum is ramping up their hands-on weapons demonstrations, running every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, included free with museum entry. 

Backed by an expanded team of weapons experts, the museum is offering more hands-on experiences and engaging insights into historic and modern firearms.

Using the museum’s handling collection of firearms, the demonstrations take visitors on a 303-year journey of British Army firearms evolution, from 1722 to the present day. A key theme is how firearms have both shaped and responded to the changing nature of warfare and the battlefield. 

The Land Pattern Musket, popularly nicknamed ‘Brown Bess’, is the oldest firearm the team feature in a line-up that includes the British Army’s current standard-issue rifle, the SA80. The Brown Bess was the British Army’s first standard-issue infantry firearm and in service from 1722 to beyond 1838. As one historian dryly remarked, ‘if you ever found yourself on the receiving end, it was the unaimed shot - or one aimed at somebody else - you had to worry about’. 

As part of the musket family of firearms, the Brown Bess was inaccurate when used by individual marksmen and slow to reload, but when used in a tactic called ‘volley fire’ it was devastating. Volley fire saw ranks of soldiers forming a cohesive line and firing simultaneously to create a concentrated wave of leaded violence.

A bone chilling firearm in the museum’s handling collection is the Russian Mosin-Nagant Model 1944 rifle. The weapon was designed near the end of the Second World War specifically for use in urban warfare and the anticipated house-to-house, hand-to-hand fighting of a Soviet Union Red Army advance through Nazi occupied eastern and central European cities. The key feature enabling adeptness within such an environment is a permanently mounted but folding spike-bayonet.

For weapons demonstrator Ben, the widespread adoption of rifled firearms with their grooved barrels, which enhanced accuracy and range, combined with the 1846 invention of the Minié ball - a conical bullet designed for rifled barrels - gradually transformed warfare from the mid-19th century.

Whereas lethality and incapacitation had formerly relied on volley fire to compensate for inaccuracy and slow reloading, the mass deployment and continued development of rifled firearms encouraged more dispersed and mobile tactics. Over time, rifles have enabled soldiers to become more independent, shaping each individual into a self-reliant combatant.

Beyond the weapons demonstrations, this year for the first-time visitors to the museum can put their shooting skills to the test with a newly installed weapons simulator featuring the SA80 rifle. Replicating the British Army’s Annual Combat Marksmanship Test, the simulator offers an urban range with pop-up targets designed to test reaction speed and an outdoor range to test precision and marksmanship.

Weapons demonstrator Stuart, a Royal Navy veteran, currently holds the top spot on the leaderboard. Stuart quipped he was pleased to have 'dispelled the myth' that Royal Navy personnel are 'awful at shooting'. Can you prove him wrong?