Although Bermuda had maintained its own militia from 1612 until the end of the American War of 1812, it had been allowed to lapse thereafter due to the large garrison of regular soldiers that had been established following US independence.

The reason for the military garrison in Bermuda was ultimately the protection of the Royal Naval dockyard on Ireland Island.

If, despite the best efforts of the artillery, enemy vessels succeeded in landing military forces on Bermuda (which was most likely to be achieved using small boats to cross over the reefs to reach beaches on the South Shore), the infantry was expected to tackle them, in the worst scenario, making a fighting withdrawal into the forts and the dockyard itself.

Captain Charles Spencer Brown Evans-Lombe, of the Prince of Wales's Leinster Regiment (Royal Canadians), arrived in November, 1894, to oversee the raising of the Corps, and became the first Adjutant.

The BVRC was originally divided into three companies (A, B, and C), one each located in the West End, the centre, and the East End of Bermuda (these being the three military districts into which Bermuda was divided by the garrison, with the districts controlled respectively from Clarence Barracks on Boaz Island, Prospect Camp, and St. George's Garrison, with the overall Command Headquarters at Prospect Camp).

To these were added four Permanent Staff, attached from the Regular Army, including Captain Evans-Lombe, a Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM), and two Non-Commissioned Officers (NCO).

Recruitment into the BVRC was restricted to white males, aged 17 to 50, although the barrier to non-whites was achieved by requiring volunteers to be members of a rifle club.

The primary task the BVRC was given was guarding the coastline but it filled other roles, the most important of which defending the Royal Navy's dockyard on Ireland Island, which was the main base of the North America and West Indies Station of the Royal Navy, and oversaw the formation in Bermudian waters of trans-Atlantic convoys.

Despite operating under this constraint, the BVRC quickly formed a detachment in December, 1914, to send overseas to the Western Front.

[9] The Contingent left Bermuda for England in June 1915, travelling to Canada, then crossing the Atlantic in company with a much larger Canadian draft.

[11][12] Although commanders at the Regimental Depot had wanted to break the Contingent apart, re-enlist its members as Lincolns, and distribute them as replacements, a letter from the War Office ensured that they remained together as a unit, under their own badge.

In Britain, the Volunteer Force had been re-organised in 1908, absorbing the remaining militia and Yeomanry units, to form the Territorial Army (TA).

A volunteer could no longer quit with fourteen days notice, but had to complete the term for which he was enlisted, as was the case for professional soldiers in the British Army.

Its association with the Lincolnshire Regiment was made official, with the Lincolns taking on the paternal role it played with its own Territorial battalions.

A third local Territorial, the Bermuda Volunteer Engineers (BVE), was formed in 1931 to man Defence Electric Lights at coastal batteries, and absorbed the signals section of the BVRC a decade later.

The Regular Army artillery and engineering detachments to the garrison were withdrawn in 1928, with the BMA and BVE, respectively, assuming complete responsibility for their vacated roles.

The BVRC began mobilisation on 3 September 1939, even before news was received of the declaration of war, when Britain issued Germany with an ultimatum to withdraw from Poland.

This Contingent included two officers, Robert Brownlow-Tucker and Anthony 'Toby' Smith, who became Company Commanders in the Lincolns before the War's end.

This moratorium was not lifted until 1943, when both the BVRC and the Bermuda Militia (the BMI and BMA together) detached contingents to send overseas.

The last Regular Army unit (a detachment of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry) was withdrawn by 1955, and the Dockyard closed in 1958.

With no tasking under the War Office, and its successor, the Ministry of Defence, or under NATO, both units might have been disbanded, but the Bermuda Government, for reasons of its own, chose to maintain them entirely at its own expense.

A new role began to appear as Bermuda moved into the 1960s, when increasing tension resulting from the racial division and inequity of Bermudian society occasionally spilled over into violence.