Qualla: Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum

Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Own work by Chris Ryland, CC BY-SA 3.0. The building started life recording cargoes. Sydney Smirke designed it in 1845 to handle the foreign trade pouring through the Port of Gloucester - timber, corn, salt, tobacco - and it kept that role for more than a century. By coincidence Smirke also designed the building that now houses the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. So when the customs clerks finally packed up and left in the 1970s, the Gloucestershire Regiment moved in with their archive, their medals and their stories, and the Victorian customs house at Gloucester Docks became the Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum. It still smells faintly of brick dust and gun oil, the way a regimental museum should.

Image: Own work by Chris Ryland | CC BY-SA 3.0

Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: Two Regiments, Two Counties

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philafrenzy, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum tells the story of two units that drew their recruits from the same soil: the Gloucestershire Regiment, which traced its origins to the 28th (North Gloucestershire) Regiment of Foot raised in 1694 and the 61st (South Gloucestershire) Regiment of Foot, and the Royal Glo...

Image: Philafrenzy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: Four Victoria Crosses

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0. Four men whose Victoria Crosses are held here tell four very different stories. Herbert Taylor Reade of the 61st Regiment won his at Delhi during the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Daniel Burges of the Glosters earned his commanding the 7th Battalion in Bulgaria in 1918, despite being se...

Image: Philip Halling | CC BY-SA 2.0

Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: Imjin

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. The most recent significant acquisition in the museum is a service revolver collected from Gloster Hill - or Hill 235, as the maps called it then - where the 1st Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment made their last stand against overwhelming Chinese forces on 25 April 1951. The...

Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0

Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: Dunkirk, Burma, Trenches

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Gunns, CC BY-SA 2.0. Other rooms unfold chronologically. The World War I rooms display weapons, drawings and the small artefacts of trench life. A lifelike tableau reconstructs a 1916 dugout. World War II tells the bitter rearguard story of the Glosters at Dunkirk in 1940, where the battalion held po...

Image: Chris Gunns | CC BY-SA 2.0

Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: The Building Itself

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the early 1840s the old custom house in Gloucester was no longer big enough for the port's traffic. Work on the new building began in April 1844, and the contractors made a late decision to face the walls with Painswick stone rather than the planned brick - which is why the mu...

Image: Philip Halling | CC BY-SA 2.0