Real life Sharpe sword makes the cut at museum

A TWO-hundred-year-old cavalry blade which once belonged to a real life Sharpe has gone on display at Leeds City Museum after being acquired from an antiques dealer.

The sword had been presented to Captain William Jackson by his loyal soldiers back in 1800 for his “enduring attention to them in his duty”.

Much like Bernard Cornwell’s eponymous hero Sharpe, Captain Jackson was a tradesman who rose to become a popular officer in the Leeds Volunteer Infantry.

Leeds Museums and Galleries’ curator of social history Kitty Ross said: “Different periods of history become fashionable when there’s a period drama associated with it.

People pull quite a lot of images from the way its depicted on TV, so a lot of people’s view of that period will be based on Sharpe and that sort of drama, but hopefully it will also spark their interest in seeing what the history is.”

The unit Captain Jackson commanded – which was formed in 1794 during the height of the War of the First Coalition – was in charge of defending Yorkshire against the French invasion which, incidentally, never happened.

And though the Leeds Volunteers never fought against an enemy, they did carry out regular military exercises and helped to extinguish fires in the local area.

Kitty added: “They seem to have spent a lot of time just marching around in uniform and they were a bit like officers you get in Jane Austen who just run off with the younger sister.

“But the sword is something that has a real connection with local history and it’s also a lovely item in its own right, it’s got a lovely inscription on it which is dedicated to this particular gentleman and is written in a way that implies that he was a good and popular officer with his men.”

The blade isn’t the only thing from the Napolean era on display at the museum, there are also paintings with one showing the infantry parading on Wakefield’s Heath Common.

Kitty said: “We used to have a uniform in connection with the volunteers but it’s been on display for a long time and we can’t keep 18th century textiles on display indefinitely – so we had somewhere to instantly put the sword on display.

“It’s something that was owned by a real Leeds person at a particular point in history and you can see it for real here in the city museum.”