Regimental amalgamations have been part of the history of the British Army since its beginnings, but they are no less traumatic because of that. This year's amalgamations, which are part of the government's modernisation of the army, will further reduce the number of UK regiments.
But what will happen to the museums that represent these regiments when they disappear? The Gordon Highlanders Museum charts the history of a regiment that was first raised in 1794. It was amalgamated in 1994 when it became part of the Highlanders and again earlier this year when the Highlanders was combined with five other regiments to form the new Royal Regiment of Scotland.
'Regimental collections have this issue that when the regiment no longer exists, who is the audience?' says Sarah Malone, the curator of the Gordon Highlanders Museum. 'In our case, the Gordons no longer exists, nor does its successor, the Highlanders.'
The route the museum took was to invest in facilities to attract new audiences and embrace amalgamation as part of the history it is representing. The museum reopened in April after a £1.2m redevelopment that included £501,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
'We felt quite strongly that if we didn't invest in attracting new audiences, the museum would become obsolete,' Malone says. 'We decided we needed to increase our education facilities and move away from what were very static displays to create a flexible space. These changes have helped make the history of the regiment meaningful and accessible to as wide an audience as possible.'
Appealing to a broad range of people is not something that comes easy to all army museums, particularly the regimental ones that are constrained by finances and tricky locations on military property.
There are about 150 army museums in the UK, which range from large institutions such as the Tank Museum in Bovington to a number of small sites that only open by appointment. About 70 are funded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), while there are also independents and local authority-run operations.
Amalgamations are just one of the issues they have to deal with. Regimental museums in particular have all the problems that affect small museums, plus a few more. Many army museum curators and directors say they struggle to deal with demands from outside such as accreditation, the Disability Discrimination Act and health and safety legislation.
As well as these, army museums need to take into account legislation such as the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, which has affected firearms controls.
Army museums also have to cater for a wider range of needs than most mus-eums. This is because they have a responsibility to their regiment, as well as the MoD and the public. In addition to keeping their regiment's history alive, one of their key roles is training new recruits.
'Recruits are taken on a visit to the regimental museum to be shown the material artefacts of the regiment's past as part of their basic training,' says Erik Bramall, who has served in the army and also written about regimental museums as part of a museum studies course in Manchester.
'It forms a small part of the induction and training process instructing the soldier in the history of the new "family" to which he now belongs.'
The Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham is one of the larger army museums and it has a Designated collection. It has to deal with a lot of interested parties, including the MoD; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council; and a number of Royal Engineers charitable trusts.
'We have a whole series of funding streams, which makes an army museum a very complicated animal to run,' says Richard Dunn, the director. 'In the last year, we put together a strategic plan to bring together the objectives of these different components. It is easy in the sector to have ideas thrown at you, but the plan maintains coherence.'
Funding is another important issue. 'A lot of people can make the assumption that because we have a Designated collection that equates to a great building and a huge staff,' Dunn says. 'Our collection is in the same bracket as the Fitzwilliam and the Ashmolean, but I don't have access to the same number of staff.'
But the Royal Engineers Museum is expanding, and has formed a joint £500,000 project with the Chatham Historic Dockyard to develop a building at the dockyard that will include open storage displays of heavy equipment. It is also moving the Royal Engineers' library into the museum building and creating an accessible research facility. All these will be part of a planned HLF bid.
Funding is also a key issue for smaller army museums, such as the Gurkha Museum in Winchester, which needs to generate about £80,000 a year of profit to meet its financial commitments. The museum gets between 12,000 and 18,000 visitors a year. It is very active, but would like to do more, including employing a permanent exhibitions officer.
'One of the dilemmas of regimental museums is do we have the means to generate extra income to better operate other things such as archives?' says Gerald Davies, the curator of the Gurkha Museum. 'Getting money from grants is very time-consuming, but if you want to have museums of excellence that cover specialist things, then funding needs to come down a bit lower. It is a fundamental issue for all small museums - how do you get to the next level of excellence?'
Although the MoD does fund many army museums, historically they have not been a core concern. Stephen Wood worked as a curator at London's National Army Museum between 1971 and 1983 and was then the keeper of the National War Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle until 2000. Wood, who advises Edinburgh's Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Museum, says: 'The MoD does not fund its museums particularly well and the museums are being asked to do too much with too little money.'
Wood says it is particularly difficult when the role of the curator falls to the regimental secretary, who has a range of other responsibilities at regimental headquarters and sometimes might not even be based near the museum.
'Another problem is that the people who raise money are not natural fundraisers and they really do not have the time,' says Wood. 'Things have changed for the better over the past 40 years, but the pace of change is very slow.'
The MoD provides grant-in-aid funding of about £4.8m to the National Army Museum (NAM), and £5m-£6m is divided between the 69 other museums it funds. While it seems unlikely army museums will receive a big windfall from the MoD, the army is reviewing its policy towards its museums.
As part of this, it has consulted extensively with the Army Museums Ogilby Trust (AMOT), which is led by its director, Colin Sibun. AMOT was set up in 1954 to support the development of British Army museums and provides a range of services.
On the advice of AMOT, the review took as its starting point the view that there was nothing seriously wrong with the Army Board's 1998 policy towards museums, but it was not evenly and effectively applied. The policy requires army museums to make the public aware of regiments and corps and to contribute to the esprit de corps, or honour, of the army.
The new proposals, outlined in a recent AMOT newsletter, centre on a 'strengthened community of army museums, operating independently but cooperatively'. This is partly a reaction to previous criticism that the army has no coherent policy for its museums. Proposals to overcome this include the creation of an Army Heritage Committee and a more coordinated approach to things such as outreach work.
One of the review's other major recommendations is for the army's policy on museums to be expanded to include the National Army Museum. It is hoped that the NAM's representation on the new Army Heritage Committee will bring the NAM and MoD closer together.
The NAM has just begun a process of change and has been working with branding consultancy Wolf Olins on a three-year plan to redevelop the museum. The first changes to its galleries were made in April. Senior figures at the NAM are staying tight-lipped about other plans and it remains to be seen whether it will revisit schemes to complete the museum's buildings and facilities at Chelsea or to develop an outpost.
A project to redevelop Chelsea was abandoned in 2003 after a knock-back by the HLF, which also rejected the museum's plans for a second site in Richmond, Yorkshire, in the same year. The museum still tried to go ahead with the Richmond plan, but this was finally abandoned in October 2003 because of problems with procuring the site from the MoD.
Other army museums have had more success in winning money from the HLF for capital projects, following concerns a few years ago that the HLF was not being supportive. As well as the money given to the £1.2m redevelopment of the Gordon Highlanders Museum, the HLF has supported the £1.5m redevelopment of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Museum in Edinburgh, which reopened in May.
South of the border, the HLF pledged £8.5m in January 2005 as part of a £16m redevelopment at the Tank Museum in Dorset. The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers is spending £3.3m, including £2m from the HLF, on developing a new museum in Bury that will open in late 2008.
The Household Cavalry Museum in Windsor will reopen in spring 2007 after a £4.5m redevelopment that includes nearly £2m from the HLF. And this month saw the reopening of the King's Royal Hussars Museum in Winchester, which has been renamed Horespower after its £360,000 refurbishment that featured £144,000 from the HLF.
There are also more lottery bids on the way, with Stuart Eastwood, the curator of the King's Own Royal Border Regiment Museum, planning a bid for money to support a £1m move to a new location within Carlisle Castle.
As well as improving displays and facilities, army museums are also changing the type of people they employ. While there are still many ex-military officers as curators, more non-military people with museum backgrounds are joining. Some military staff are also taking professional museum qualifications.
Alison Hembrow, the education adviser at the Regimental Museum of the Royal Regiment of Wales in Brecon, carried out an analysis of staffing in regimental museums for a 2004 dissertation for her museum studies degree at Leicester.
Hembrow's initial impressions were that the museums and their staff, who appeared to be mainly male, military and amateur, were out of step with other museums. But she says she found that 'numerous examples of good practice and integration with the wider museum profession confirm that many regimental staff are setting high standards and are more in step with other museums than might have been expected'.
'A process is beginning and it will continue to evolve, where there will be increasing professionalism, an increasing number of women and more posts advertised,' Hembrow says.
Whatever the financial and staffing issues that have to be addressed, many people with an interest in army museums believe there are lots of positives for the future - particularly the high degree of public interest in military history.
Robert Crawford, the director-general of the Imperial War Museum in London, is also a trustee of the Royal Logistic Corps Museum Trust in Surrey. He believes it is important for regimental and corps museums to maintain their links with the aims of the army and also the needs of the public, with an emphasis on local community history.
'I wouldn't like to venture a critique of regimental museums because as a group they are so varied,' Crawford says. 'Undoubtedly, some probably need to inject professionalism, money and sort of shake themselves up a bit in order to make themselves more accessible to the general public, and raise standards of curatorship, conservation and so on.
But without exception, they manage collections of very considerable historical value and public interest. With adequate funding, and hopefully this new structure will help, these museums have an important future.'
But what will happen to the museums that represent these regiments when they disappear? The Gordon Highlanders Museum charts the history of a regiment that was first raised in 1794. It was amalgamated in 1994 when it became part of the Highlanders and again earlier this year when the Highlanders was combined with five other regiments to form the new Royal Regiment of Scotland.
'Regimental collections have this issue that when the regiment no longer exists, who is the audience?' says Sarah Malone, the curator of the Gordon Highlanders Museum. 'In our case, the Gordons no longer exists, nor does its successor, the Highlanders.'
The route the museum took was to invest in facilities to attract new audiences and embrace amalgamation as part of the history it is representing. The museum reopened in April after a £1.2m redevelopment that included £501,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
'We felt quite strongly that if we didn't invest in attracting new audiences, the museum would become obsolete,' Malone says. 'We decided we needed to increase our education facilities and move away from what were very static displays to create a flexible space. These changes have helped make the history of the regiment meaningful and accessible to as wide an audience as possible.'
Appealing to a broad range of people is not something that comes easy to all army museums, particularly the regimental ones that are constrained by finances and tricky locations on military property.
There are about 150 army museums in the UK, which range from large institutions such as the Tank Museum in Bovington to a number of small sites that only open by appointment. About 70 are funded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), while there are also independents and local authority-run operations.
Amalgamations are just one of the issues they have to deal with. Regimental museums in particular have all the problems that affect small museums, plus a few more. Many army museum curators and directors say they struggle to deal with demands from outside such as accreditation, the Disability Discrimination Act and health and safety legislation.
As well as these, army museums need to take into account legislation such as the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, which has affected firearms controls.
Army museums also have to cater for a wider range of needs than most mus-eums. This is because they have a responsibility to their regiment, as well as the MoD and the public. In addition to keeping their regiment's history alive, one of their key roles is training new recruits.
'Recruits are taken on a visit to the regimental museum to be shown the material artefacts of the regiment's past as part of their basic training,' says Erik Bramall, who has served in the army and also written about regimental museums as part of a museum studies course in Manchester.
'It forms a small part of the induction and training process instructing the soldier in the history of the new "family" to which he now belongs.'
The Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham is one of the larger army museums and it has a Designated collection. It has to deal with a lot of interested parties, including the MoD; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council; and a number of Royal Engineers charitable trusts.
'We have a whole series of funding streams, which makes an army museum a very complicated animal to run,' says Richard Dunn, the director. 'In the last year, we put together a strategic plan to bring together the objectives of these different components. It is easy in the sector to have ideas thrown at you, but the plan maintains coherence.'
Funding is another important issue. 'A lot of people can make the assumption that because we have a Designated collection that equates to a great building and a huge staff,' Dunn says. 'Our collection is in the same bracket as the Fitzwilliam and the Ashmolean, but I don't have access to the same number of staff.'
But the Royal Engineers Museum is expanding, and has formed a joint £500,000 project with the Chatham Historic Dockyard to develop a building at the dockyard that will include open storage displays of heavy equipment. It is also moving the Royal Engineers' library into the museum building and creating an accessible research facility. All these will be part of a planned HLF bid.
Funding is also a key issue for smaller army museums, such as the Gurkha Museum in Winchester, which needs to generate about £80,000 a year of profit to meet its financial commitments. The museum gets between 12,000 and 18,000 visitors a year. It is very active, but would like to do more, including employing a permanent exhibitions officer.
'One of the dilemmas of regimental museums is do we have the means to generate extra income to better operate other things such as archives?' says Gerald Davies, the curator of the Gurkha Museum. 'Getting money from grants is very time-consuming, but if you want to have museums of excellence that cover specialist things, then funding needs to come down a bit lower. It is a fundamental issue for all small museums - how do you get to the next level of excellence?'
Although the MoD does fund many army museums, historically they have not been a core concern. Stephen Wood worked as a curator at London's National Army Museum between 1971 and 1983 and was then the keeper of the National War Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle until 2000. Wood, who advises Edinburgh's Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Museum, says: 'The MoD does not fund its museums particularly well and the museums are being asked to do too much with too little money.'
Wood says it is particularly difficult when the role of the curator falls to the regimental secretary, who has a range of other responsibilities at regimental headquarters and sometimes might not even be based near the museum.
'Another problem is that the people who raise money are not natural fundraisers and they really do not have the time,' says Wood. 'Things have changed for the better over the past 40 years, but the pace of change is very slow.'
The MoD provides grant-in-aid funding of about £4.8m to the National Army Museum (NAM), and £5m-£6m is divided between the 69 other museums it funds. While it seems unlikely army museums will receive a big windfall from the MoD, the army is reviewing its policy towards its museums.
As part of this, it has consulted extensively with the Army Museums Ogilby Trust (AMOT), which is led by its director, Colin Sibun. AMOT was set up in 1954 to support the development of British Army museums and provides a range of services.
On the advice of AMOT, the review took as its starting point the view that there was nothing seriously wrong with the Army Board's 1998 policy towards museums, but it was not evenly and effectively applied. The policy requires army museums to make the public aware of regiments and corps and to contribute to the esprit de corps, or honour, of the army.
The new proposals, outlined in a recent AMOT newsletter, centre on a 'strengthened community of army museums, operating independently but cooperatively'. This is partly a reaction to previous criticism that the army has no coherent policy for its museums. Proposals to overcome this include the creation of an Army Heritage Committee and a more coordinated approach to things such as outreach work.
One of the review's other major recommendations is for the army's policy on museums to be expanded to include the National Army Museum. It is hoped that the NAM's representation on the new Army Heritage Committee will bring the NAM and MoD closer together.
The NAM has just begun a process of change and has been working with branding consultancy Wolf Olins on a three-year plan to redevelop the museum. The first changes to its galleries were made in April. Senior figures at the NAM are staying tight-lipped about other plans and it remains to be seen whether it will revisit schemes to complete the museum's buildings and facilities at Chelsea or to develop an outpost.
A project to redevelop Chelsea was abandoned in 2003 after a knock-back by the HLF, which also rejected the museum's plans for a second site in Richmond, Yorkshire, in the same year. The museum still tried to go ahead with the Richmond plan, but this was finally abandoned in October 2003 because of problems with procuring the site from the MoD.
Other army museums have had more success in winning money from the HLF for capital projects, following concerns a few years ago that the HLF was not being supportive. As well as the money given to the £1.2m redevelopment of the Gordon Highlanders Museum, the HLF has supported the £1.5m redevelopment of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Museum in Edinburgh, which reopened in May.
South of the border, the HLF pledged £8.5m in January 2005 as part of a £16m redevelopment at the Tank Museum in Dorset. The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers is spending £3.3m, including £2m from the HLF, on developing a new museum in Bury that will open in late 2008.
The Household Cavalry Museum in Windsor will reopen in spring 2007 after a £4.5m redevelopment that includes nearly £2m from the HLF. And this month saw the reopening of the King's Royal Hussars Museum in Winchester, which has been renamed Horespower after its £360,000 refurbishment that featured £144,000 from the HLF.
There are also more lottery bids on the way, with Stuart Eastwood, the curator of the King's Own Royal Border Regiment Museum, planning a bid for money to support a £1m move to a new location within Carlisle Castle.
As well as improving displays and facilities, army museums are also changing the type of people they employ. While there are still many ex-military officers as curators, more non-military people with museum backgrounds are joining. Some military staff are also taking professional museum qualifications.
Alison Hembrow, the education adviser at the Regimental Museum of the Royal Regiment of Wales in Brecon, carried out an analysis of staffing in regimental museums for a 2004 dissertation for her museum studies degree at Leicester.
Hembrow's initial impressions were that the museums and their staff, who appeared to be mainly male, military and amateur, were out of step with other museums. But she says she found that 'numerous examples of good practice and integration with the wider museum profession confirm that many regimental staff are setting high standards and are more in step with other museums than might have been expected'.
'A process is beginning and it will continue to evolve, where there will be increasing professionalism, an increasing number of women and more posts advertised,' Hembrow says.
Whatever the financial and staffing issues that have to be addressed, many people with an interest in army museums believe there are lots of positives for the future - particularly the high degree of public interest in military history.
Robert Crawford, the director-general of the Imperial War Museum in London, is also a trustee of the Royal Logistic Corps Museum Trust in Surrey. He believes it is important for regimental and corps museums to maintain their links with the aims of the army and also the needs of the public, with an emphasis on local community history.
'I wouldn't like to venture a critique of regimental museums because as a group they are so varied,' Crawford says. 'Undoubtedly, some probably need to inject professionalism, money and sort of shake themselves up a bit in order to make themselves more accessible to the general public, and raise standards of curatorship, conservation and so on.
But without exception, they manage collections of very considerable historical value and public interest. With adequate funding, and hopefully this new structure will help, these museums have an important future.'