This belief is largely false. I won't go into detail but would instead point any interested student of arms to a new book that will be published by the Royal Armouries next year in which chapter 7 covers that fire and the number of arms lost in detail, the book 'British Ordnance Muskets of the 1830s & 1840s'.
Any new research is, of course, always good and it will be interesting to see the results.
My theory, and it is just that, was based on the information in Swords for Sea Service (p80) whose authors had access to the relevant records.
'All available swords were to be sent to the Tower for modification. The modified cutlasses were coming into service by the end of March 1841, but before little more than 1000 had been modified and issued a fire at the Tower destroyed large numbers and left the Navy seriously short of weapons, and on 9th November, 1841 it was recommended that 10,000 new cutlasses be ordered.'
This was approved on 3rd December 1841.
Note that May and Annis are specifically talking about cutlasses there is no mention of firearms or other swords or how many were destroyed or unserviceable due to heat damage. According to the footnotes the information comes from War Office documents hence the exact dates. New information can always come to light with further research.
What is definite is the shortage of cutlasses at this time and the subsequent difficulty in obtaining new ones when none had been made for decades.
One of the stopgaps to cover the shortfall was making cutlasses by cutting down the blades of 1796 heavy cavalry swords (there were 12000 in storage) and fitting them with cutlass grips and guards. It is unclear how many of these were made but there are a few examples extant, but probably no where near the 8-10,000 ordered as the manufacturers were starting to get their act together and produce new cutlasses in quantity by 1845 or so.
'However, the Tower was only one of many Stores'
This is a good point - perhaps there were other 1804's in storage elsewhere that could have been brought into service, but again surely they would have been stamped with a cypher at manufacture not issue, like the large stocks of GR firearms you mention, that lasted into William's reign.
The VR 1804 remains a mystery, I guess.
CC
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