Support

If you would like to support the Association, there are a number of ways to do so, from a regular monthly subscription, to volunteering to help out as one of our Members. You can also donate relevant objects to our archive and collection which will be safeguarded for future generations and shared with others.

As a Registered Charity, we are also able to claim Gift Aid on some donations, receive contributions from EasyFundraising and even have GoFundMe Projects.

Patreon

Our preferred first step for anyone wanting to support us is for you to subscribe to Patreon. This way you can receive a range of benefits, including access to our extensive digital archive of Vickers machine gun, Machine Gun Corps and wider military history documents and materials. You will see what is the essence of the Association and the unique material that we hold to support our understanding of the guns and the people that used them.

Patreon Membership

Patreon Membership

Join our Patreon page and become one of the Emma Gees Patrons.

There are various subscription options with different benefits but all can support us and access previews of videos, manual uploads and the online archive of Small Arms Committee Minutes and Ordnance Board memoranda, which describe British small arms development from 1900 until the Second World War.

Shop now

One-off

To support us on a one-off basis, donations are easily made through our website or PayPal Giving Fund or BuyMeACoffee and it doesn’t require you to set up a PayPal account.

If you are a UK Taxpayer and would like to register your donation as Gift Aid, increasing the amount we can receive through a claim to the Government, you can do so by completing the Gift Aid Form.

Donation

Donation

Please consider adding a donation to your order. Just change the quantity to what amount you’d like to donate.

To further enhance your donation with Gift Aid (meaning we can claim a further £0.25 on every £1 from the UK Government), please complete your address in the billing information and write GIFT AID in the customer notes. Alternatively, please complete this <a href="https://forms.offi&#8230;

Price range: £5.00 through £100.00
Shop now

Projects

If you’d like to support one of our specific projects then please take a look at the current list below and see what you can help with.

Volunteering and Membership

If you would like to go further than just contributing through Patreon and would like to actively volunteer to support the Association, then you can do so in person or remotely. The Association is a Charity managed by its Trustees with the formally appointed Members acting as an advisory and approvals ‘board’ to support them. The benefit of being a Member is being able to influence how the Trustees run the Association.

To become a Full Member, it requires confirmation of the existing Membership at a General Meeting. Prior to this, you will be a Provisional Member. You will demonstrate your commitment but contributing to the activities of the Association on a regular basis. There is no set minimum requirement as that varies but it will be considered by the Trustees to include examples of the following.

To register your interest, you can complete this FORM.

Be aware that not all members have access to the firearms and only selected individuals, shown to demonstrate the necessary competence, are selected by the relevant Trustees to become ‘servants’ of our firearms certificates. This requires additional checks with the Police forces in the areas we work and is entirely subject to the discretion of the Authority holders.

Remote Volunteers

We need lots of help and support to catalogue and describe the thousands of photographs, papers and other archive information that we have. This can be done remotely and we give you access to the documents that we need support with and the information on what we need to identify. By doing this, you are directly helping others find the photo or letter that would otherwise be sitting in a box or on a shelf waiting for someone to come along.

We share our archive through the National Archives Discovery Catalogue so it sits alongside the nation’s history ready for people to find. The digital images are then hosted through Patreon so people can access it anywhere in the world.

We use Microsoft Teams and other products to manage the digital aspects of the collection so any remote volunteers should be able to work with those platforms.

In-Person Volunteering

We have limited opportunities for people to support us in person. Due to the nature of our collection and the firearms it contains, we operate a limited number of working days where people can become involved with specific projects or the general housekeeping that is associated with a historic collection.

Outreach support through our events and even on our YouTube channel and social media is conducted by our volunteers as well.

Only after extensive training and background checks through the Police will any person be allowed to handle the firearms we have in the collection.

Donate an object

We may well be the right home for something related to the Vickers machine gun and its wider service, including archive material and photographs of people who used it. We would be interested in hearing from people that would like to donate physical items to the collection and we follow the Collection Trust’s standards to record and accession those items into our collection where appropriate.

We would be interested in anything directly related to the Vickers machine gun and people who used it, particularly members of the Machine Gun Corps and members of the regiments that provided machine gun battalions in the Second World War (Cheshire Regiment, Manchester Regiment, Middlesex Regiment, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, Kensington Regiment).

As a Registered Firearms Dealer, we are also able to accept surrendered or donated firearms that fall within our licence and authority conditions or can enable the disposal of items that do not.

Please contact us to discuss this.