The Volunteer Force was a citizen army of part-time rifle, artillery and engineer corps, created as a popular movement throughout the British Empire in 1859.

Originally highly autonomous, the units of volunteers became increasingly integrated with the British Army after the Childers Reforms in 1881, before forming part of the Territorial Force in 1908.

Prior to the Crimean War, the British military (i.e., land forces) was made up of multiple separate forces, with a basic division into the Regular Forces (including the British Army, composed primarily of cavalry and infantry, and the Ordnance Military Corps of the Board of Ordnance, made up of the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, and the Royal Sappers and Miners though not including the originally civilian Commissariat Department, stores and supply departments, all of which, with barracks and other departments, were absorbed into the British Army when the Board of Ordnance was abolished in 1855).

Known collectively as the Reserve Forces, most of these had been allowed to lapse after the Napoleonic Wars, although the Yeomanry was maintained to potentially support the civil authorities against civil unrest, as at the 1819 Peterloo massacre, the Militia remained as a paper tiger, and rifle clubs were encouraged as the backbone against which the Volunteer force might be re-raised.

Following the Crimean War, it was painfully clear to the War Office that, with half of the British Army dispositioned around the Empire on garrison duty, it had insufficient forces available to quickly compose and despatch an effective expeditionary force to a new area of conflict, unless it was to reduce the British Isles' own defences.

[14] Tensions rose between the United Kingdom and France following the Orsini affair, an assassination attempt on Emperor Napoleon III on 14 January 1858.

[15] On 12 May 1859, the Secretary of State for War, Jonathan Peel issued a circular letter to lieutenants of counties in England, Wales and Scotland, authorising the formation of volunteer rifle corps (VRC, a.k.a.

Originally corps were to consist of approximately 100 all ranks under the command of a captain, with some localities having subdivisions of thirty men under a lieutenant.

[15] Although not mentioned in the circular letter, engineer corps were also formed, principally to place underwater mines for port defence.

Two volunteer units whose services had been accepted by Queen Victoria during the early 1850s became the two senior rifle corps of the new force.

[21] Unlike regular rifle regiments, the volunteer units had colours often made and presented by the women of the community.

Like the adult volunteers, the boys were supplied with arms by the War Office, for which they had to pay a fee, which reduced the longer they remained members.

[24] In 1862, a royal commission chaired by Viscount Eversley was appointed "to inquire into the condition of the volunteer force in Great Britain and into the probability of its continuance at its existing strength".

An annual inspection by an officer of the regular army was instituted, and efficiency standards were to be set by Order in Council, as were regulations for governing the Force.

The Act concluded by defining the counties to which the corps were to belong: for the purposes of the Act the Isle of Wight, the Tower Hamlets and the Cinque Ports were separate counties, with the Governor of the Isle of Wight, the Constable of the Tower of London and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports commissioning officers in place of the lord-lieutenant.

In 1872, under the provisions of the Regulation of the Forces Act 1871, jurisdiction over the volunteers was removed from the county lord-lieutenants and placed under the Secretary of State for War.

The volunteers finally saw active service during the Second Boer War, when the prolonged campaign necessitated an increase in the size of British forces in South Africa.