Signal cannon relic

The small black-painted gun that sits on the Brighton Palace Pier today - now rather forlorn and out of place beside the men’s toilets and perhaps appropriately close to the thump of the funfair - is one of the surviving signal cannons from the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, which stood a few hundred metres to the east between 1823 and 1896. The Chain Pier operated as both a pleasure promenade and a working embarkation point for cross-Channel vessels, and its cannons played a practical role in that maritime life. They were fired to announce the departure or arrival of packet boats, to signal in thick weather, and occasionally to warn small craft off the pier’s immediate approaches. Contemporary guidebooks note that visitors often gathered to watch the gun being discharged before a steamer cast off, a brief spectacle folded into the pier’s daily rhythm.

The guns themselves were small muzzle-loading pieces mounted on simple timber beds, never intended for defence but for audible reach along the seafront and out to sea. Contemporary accounts confirm that a signal gun was kept on the Chain Pier and fired on ceremonial occasions. John George Bishop’s The Brighton Chain Pier: in memoriam describes how, during the celebrations for King William IV and Queen Adelaide’s arrival in 1830, ‘a signal gun was fired from the Chain Pier, as well as from the Battery, to indicate the welcome intelligence that their Majesties had arrived.’ Moreover, surviving pier toll records are said to indicate routine maintenance costs for ‘signals’ or ‘signal guns’, suggesting they were kept in regular working order through the pier’s lifetime. By the late nineteenth century, as the Chain Pier aged and cross-Channel services shifted west to the Palace Pier landing stages and to Newhaven, the signal guns fell gradually out of use.

The storm of 4-5 December 1896 destroyed the Chain Pier completely (see Brighton’s oldest pier), scattering its timbers along the beach. Some fittings were salvaged by the Palace Pier Company, including ironwork, lamps and at least one of the old signal cannons. It remained in storage for decades before being brought onto the Palace Pier as a heritage object. The weathered wooden carriage now visible beneath it is a modern reconstruction, but the barrel is original to the Chain Pier era. The small plaque on the pier deck dates it to the operational life of the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, 1822–1896, and stands as one of the last tangible artefacts from Brighton’s first great pier.

Sources: Wikipedia, Brighton & Hove Museums. PS: The full original name of the pier was the Brighton Marine Palace & Pier Company which explains the BM and PP initials on the wall behind the cannon.