The name of a town in Kent, used attrib., esp. to designate productions of its old dockyard and the Royal Arsenal, as Woolwich-gun, -hulk; also Woolwich-beds Geol. (see quot. 1859); Woolwich infant, a jocular name given to a class of heavy guns.
1794. Burns, Epist. fr. Esopus, 40. The shrinking Bard … dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks.
1859. Page, Handbk. Geol. Terms, Woolwich-beds, a name occasionally employed by English geologists to designate those beds of plastic and mottled clays, sands, and rolled flint-pebbles which lie between the ‘Thanet Sands’ and the ‘London Clay.’
1871. Ruskin, Fors Clav., ii. 21. The 35-ton gun called the ‘Woolwich infant,’ which is fed with 700 pound shot and 130 pounds of gunpowder at one mouthful.
1875. W. T. Vincent, Warlike Woolrich, 30, note. The name of the ‘Woolwich Infant’ … was suggested to the writer of these pages by Sergeant Major Adamson, of the Depot Brigade, Royal Artillery.
1876. Voyle & Stevenson, Milit. Dict. (ed. 3), 472. Woolwich Gun, a gun rifled on the French system, with this modification, that the grooves are shallower, and have their corners rounded off.
