The Royal Artillery: Why the Gunners Have No Battle Honours

September 10, 2026

Most British regiments cover their colours and their badges with battle honours — the names of the actions they fought in, accumulated over centuries and displayed with enormous pride. The Royal Artillery has none. Not because they were not there, but because they were at all of them.

Ubique

Instead of a list, the Gunners carry one word: Ubique, meaning "everywhere". It is not a motto in the ordinary sense. It stands in place of the battle honours, on the grounds that artillery was present at effectively every action the British Army fought, and listing them would be both impossible and faintly absurd.

It is one of the great pieces of British military understatement, and it is the single most useful thing to know when you are looking at a Gunner badge: if the scroll says Ubique, you are almost certainly holding Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers material, because those two share it.

The Royal Artillery also carries Quo Fas Et Gloria Ducunt — "where right and glory lead" — which is the motto proper.

The gun

The badge centres on a field gun, and it is worth appreciating how unusual that is. Most British cap badges are heraldic: lions, crowns, wreaths, cyphers, mythical beasts. The Gunners put a piece of equipment on their badge, drawn as a gun rather than stylised into a device.

The gun on the badge has changed over time, which is a genuinely useful dating aid. A badge showing an older pattern of gun is an older badge, and identifying the gun narrows the period more precisely than most badge features will.

Gunner, not Private

The Royal Artillery uses its own rank titles, and they catch people out constantly:

Gunner in place of Private.
Bombardier in place of Corporal.
Lance Bombardier in place of Lance Corporal.

These are not nicknames — they are the official titles. A rank slide marked to a Bombardier is Royal Artillery, full stop, and that alone identifies loose insignia that would otherwise be hard to place.

The right of the line

There is a matter of precedence that Gunners will tell you about, and it is worth knowing because it explains a lot about how the regiment sees itself. On parade, the Royal Artillery takes a position of precedence when its guns are present — the guns themselves carrying the status that colours carry for an infantry regiment.

That is the logic behind the whole thing. The Gunners have no colours to carry, so the guns do that job, and they are treated with the same formality.

Collecting Royal Artillery material

It is a large regiment with a long history and a great deal of material in circulation. Things worth knowing:

The Ubique scroll is shared with the Royal Engineers, so check the rest of the badge before concluding which you have.
The Royal Horse Artillery is distinct and has its own identity and insignia within the wider Royal Artillery family. RHA items are generally scarcer and more sought-after.
Trade and qualification badges cover a wide technical range — gunnery, survey, air defence, observation — and are far less common than the cap badge.
The gun design dates the badge. Learn the sequence and you can date Gunner insignia faster than almost any other regiment's.

Why there is so much of it about

Artillery has always been a large part of any army, because guns need crews, crews need support, and the whole apparatus of moving and supplying ammunition sits behind them. That size, sustained over a very long period, means Royal Artillery insignia is plentiful and inexpensive.

Which makes it, like the logistic corps, an excellent place to start a collection — a great deal of genuine history for very little money, and a badge that is instantly recognisable across two centuries of variation.

The Royal Horse Artillery

Within the Royal Artillery sits a body with its own strong identity: the Royal Horse Artillery. It was raised to provide artillery that could keep pace with cavalry, which meant lighter guns, more horses and crews who rode rather than marched.

The RHA retains distinctions of dress and precedence that set it apart within the wider regiment, and its insignia and buttons are separately identifiable. For a collector this matters twice over: RHA items are scarcer than general Royal Artillery material, and they are frequently listed simply as "Royal Artillery" by sellers who do not spot the difference.

Sub-units and where the detail lives

Artillery organisation uses terms that differ from the infantry and are worth knowing when reading a marked item:

Battery rather than company — the basic sub-unit, and batteries carry their own numbers, names and traditions, some of them very old.
Regiment in the artillery sense means a grouping of batteries, which is not the same use of the word as in the infantry.

Named batteries are where a great deal of Royal Artillery history actually sits, and an item marked to a specific battery is considerably more interesting than a plain corps badge — and usually costs no more, because the seller rarely knows.

What to pay

General Royal Artillery cap badges are among the cheapest genuine British regimental insignia available, simply because the regiment is enormous and has been for centuries. Build the common material for very little, then spend selectively on Royal Horse Artillery items, named batteries, officer patterns and older gun designs. That is where both the scarcity and the interest are.