The Soldier
Before the trowel there was the rifle. His professional study of how firearms improve was the seed from which his entire anthropology grew.
Augustus Lane Fox was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1845, at eighteen. He rose through the slow economy of the Victorian army — captain by purchase in 1850 — but his real education began in 1852, when he was posted to the small-arms sub-committee at Woolwich, in the experiments that led to the army's adoption of the rifle-musket. He was sent to France, Belgium and Piedmont to study musketry instruction, and in 1853 became principal instructor at the new School of Musketry at Hythe, author of the official manual.
It was there that the idea came to him. Watching the rifle pass through its successive stages of improvement, he saw that the whole history of the weapon could be told by arranging its forms in order of development. He began to collect the stages. That collection — and the conviction behind it — would become the founding principle of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Commissioned
Ensign, Grenadier Guards, 16 May 1845
Campaign
Crimea, 1854–55; the Alma; brevet-major
Rank on retirement
Lieutenant-General, 1882
Honours
FRS 1876 · FSA 1864 · DCL Oxford 1886
A soldier's record
The sequence of service, in the regimental manner.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1845 | Ensign, Grenadier Guards |
| 1850 | Captain |
| 1852 | Woolwich small-arms sub-committee; studies musketry in France, Belgium and Piedmont |
| 1853 | Principal instructor, School of Musketry, Hythe |
| 1854 | Serves in the Crimea; Battle of the Alma; brevet-major |
| 1857 | Lieutenant-Colonel |
| 1861 | Special service in Canada |
| 1862–66 | Assistant Quartermaster-General, Southern District, Ireland |
| 1867 | Colonel; half-pay — six years free for archaeology |
| 1877 | Major-General |
| 1882 | Retires; honorary Lieutenant-General |
| 1893 | Honorary Colonel, South Lancashire Regiment |
The theory from the gun
How the musketry years formed his view of culture.
The observation
Mechanisms do not leap from form to form; they are perfected by small and patient steps, each improvement building on the last.
The series
Arrange the successive forms in a line and the whole sequence of development lies visible at once — no dates required.
The generalisation
What is true of the rifle is true of the pot, the loom, the bow, the boat: all human invention evolves by type. This is the theory that would reorganise the museum.
“My attention was first drawn to this subject forty years ago, when, in the year 1852, I was engaged as a subaltern officer on the sub-committee of small arms at Woolwich... it occurred to me what an interesting thing it would be to have a museum in which all of these successive stages of improvement might be placed in the order of the occurrence. I made a collection of arms at that time, which was the foundation of the present museum.”