Waterloo 200

Discussion in 'Prewar' started by Deacs, Jan 29, 2015.

  1. Deacs

    Deacs Well i am from Cumbria.

    Excellent Shaun thanks for sharing your experience with us.

    Regards Mike.
     
  2. idler

    idler GeneralList

    But surely there were 4-6 times as many colours about (2 per bn) than eagles (1 per regt of 2-3 bns), so we did at least twice as well as them!
     
  3. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

    Hi

    Very good choice of origin for the heroine's family!

    Minor point, it is Plattdeutsch, and a speaker of same would most certainly say Plattduetsch to drive the point home. :)

    My late grandfather only spoke Platt to his children, so I understand the local variety (Nienburg/Weser area), but can't speak it myself.

    All the best

    Andreas
     
  4. Rich Payne

    Rich Payne Rivet Counter Patron 1940 Obsessive

    I see that no-one answered this question. Belgium, of course hasn't really existed very long but the area has been much fought-over. I enjoyed Richard Holmes' 'Fatal Avenue' which details all of the major conflicts in this part of the world.

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fatal-Avenue-Travellers-Battlefields-1346-1945/dp/1844139387
     
  5. smdarby

    smdarby Well-Known Member

    Sorry - I didn't see this either. According to one reliable source I spoke to tickets for the re-enactments and commemorations at Waterloo sold out months ago. Best avoiding the whole area around that time and visiting before or after.
     
  6. toki2

    toki2 Junior Member

    Thanks Rich. I enjoyed Richard Holmes history programmes so I am sure I shall appreciate this book. I always like to know about a country before I visit.
     
  7. toki2

    toki2 Junior Member

    Thanks for that smdarby. We would not have made it anyway as it did not fit in with our itinerary. We have had to rein ourselves in as regards places to visit as it was becoming a gallop through NW Europe in 5 weeks. My main aim is to visit the places mentioned in the war diary plus a few key museums and war cemeteries where some of my Dad's colleagues lie. Also got to factor in 'rest' days plus food shopping, laundry etc. (etc. means sampling local wines/ beers so no driving)

    Waterloo can wait for another trip.
     
  8. TTH

    TTH Senior Member

    Hi

    Very good choice of origin for the heroine's family!

    Minor point, it is Plattdeutsch, and a speaker of same would most certainly say Plattduetsch to drive the point home. :)

    My late grandfather only spoke Platt to his children, so I understand the local variety (Nienburg/Weser area), but can't speak it myself.

    All the best

    Andreas

    Yes, I did spell "Plattdeustch" correctly in my manuscript at least, but I will have the other character say it as you suggest. The informant speaks like a Wurttemberger because that's where her parents were from.

    By the way, Minne Schoenberg, the mother of the Marx Brothers, was from the old Kingdom of Hannover too. As children, the Marx Brothers spoke Plattdeutsch in their home, not Yiddish. When Groucho visited his mother's home village of Dornum in the 1950s he and the locals understood each other perfectly.
     
  9. Tricky Dicky

    Tricky Dicky Don'tre member

    There are 2 entries in UK, Waterloo Medal Roll, 1815 on Ancestry for Fredk Brandt:


    Name: Fredk Brandt
    Rank: Private
    Regiment: 1st Light Battalion King's German Legion
    Sub Unit: 1st Company


    Name: Fredk Brandt
    Rank: Private
    Regiment: 2nd Line Battalion King's German Legion

    Thought it might be if interest following on from post 32

    TD
     
  10. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Battle of Waterloo at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

    https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-chelsea-flower-show/exhibitors/2015/gardens/the-living-legacy-garden

    The garden progresses from the bleakness and brutality of the Battle of Waterloo 200 years ago, through the greening and flowering of the landscape, to an abstraction of the iconic architecture of Wellington College, the memorial to the Duke of Wellington. The design reconciles the drama and violence of the battle with a progressive and positive future.
    Elements of the garden have been inspired by the landscape and terrain of Waterloo that Wellington used to his advantage, the battle formations that successfully repelled attack, the regimental colours of British and Allied troops, the eight aptitudes central to the teaching of the College and the materiality of the College itself, marked with the personal carvings of current pupils and alumni.
     
  11. dbf

    dbf Moderatrix MOD

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32941560
    Video in link
    .
    http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-...in-legos-for-waterloo-anniversary-2015-5?IR=T


    and then there's this
     
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  12. Paul Reed

    Paul Reed Ubique

    Members of the forum might like to know that following a visit I made to the new Waterloo Memorial Museum last week, it appears the remains of the KGL soldier found during the works is now on display in the museum. This was something myself and many others were not comfortable with. Several people have now launched a cause to have him properly buried and they have a Facebook page here:

    https://www.facebook.com/pages/Peace-for-Friedrich-Brandt/1451785605121951?fref=ts
     
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  13. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

  14. dbf

    dbf Moderatrix MOD

    I found this to be an interesting angle

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/15/battle-waterloo-news-aggregation-journalism-brian-cathcart

    [​IMG]
    News travels slow … T Fielding’s engraving of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Photograph: Hulton Getty

    Brian Cathcart
    Friday 15 May 2015

    Two hundred years ago in 1815, London had more than 50 newspapers – morning papers, evening papers, Sundays, weeklies and twice-weeklies. And that spring, we may assume, the editors of those papers were preparing to deal with news on the grandest scale. Only a year earlier, a vast alliance of European kingdoms and empires had, after enormous effort, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte and packed him off into exile. But now, like some monster in a Hollywood blockbuster sequel, the French emperor was back, and threatening to do his worst.

    The great alliance had to be revived, Bonaparte was declared an outlaw and armies were reassembled all over the continent to take him on again. By late April, there was little doubt that the first shots of the new war would be fired on France’s northern front, its border with Belgium, and it was there that the Duke of Wellington was mustering his forces.

    News stories do not come much bigger, you might think. Yet here is a curious fact: not one of the editors of those 50-odd London newspapers sent a journalist to Belgium with a brief to send home timely reports of what happened. So when Napoleon suffered his crushing defeat on 18 June, not a single British newspaper representative was on the battlefield, or even at the allied headquarters in Brussels.

    What were the editors thinking? Looking back across the centuries, it is hard to conceive of a world in which newspapers operating in a competitive market could fail to do something so obvious. In fact, so closely do we associate the business of reporting events – bearing witness – with the very idea of journalism that it seems a dereliction of duty when journalists don’t do it.

    What happened in 1815, however, reminds us that journalism and news reporting have not always been so intimately connected. And it is a useful reminder, because in the 21st century the link is once again weakening.

    Looking back, there were two principal reasons why editors did not send reporters to Belgium. The first was that the government did all it could to prevent such initiatives. Newspapers were small enterprises and they carried a heavy burden of taxes explicitly designed to price dangerous information and ideas out of the reach of the masses. It is likely that few papers were more than marginally profitable, so most editors would not have been able to afford to keep a reporter overseas for any length of time.

    And official interference did not stop with taxes. In the absence of foreign correspondents, the principal source of news from abroad was imported foreign newspapers, and by law every newspaper entering the country had to go first to Post Office headquarters in London. There they passed into a kind of bureaucratic quarantine. Government ministers enjoyed the right to see them before editors, as did friendly foreign diplomats. And even after this, Post Office officials were in no hurry to deliver them, for they had found a way to turn this business to profit.

    While the foreign papers were impounded, often for several days, Post Office staff were able to pick over them for the most interesting items, which they compiled into a short digest offered at a guinea a time. News-hungry editors gratefully paid up, but the consequence was that foreign news often made its first appearance in all of the papers at the same time and in exactly the same words – and it was coordinated, written and approved by government officials.

    Efforts to bypass all this were strongly discouraged. Even letters from the continent were interfered with. Just days before Waterloo, in fact, customs officers received a stern reminder to search all vessels arriving in British ports and confiscate any letters “carried illegally to and from Ostend” – the principal port of access to Belgium.

    [​IMG]
    The charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo, 18 June 1815. After the painting by Lady Butler.
    Photograph: Universal History Archive/Un/REX

    This was censorship, albeit by devious means. And yet if you had asked an editor in spring 1815 why he had not sent a reporter to Belgium, it is unlikely that he would have blamed the government. Instead he would probably have expressed bewilderment, because the idea would never have crossed his mind.

    There is a story told in many press histories of a Times journalist who visited Spain during the Peninsular war. He happened to be in the port city of A Coruña in 1809 when a British army fought a battle against the French, and he wandered out to see what was happening. Instead of remaining to learn the outcome, however, he went back into town, boarded a ship and sailed for England. He thus missed at least three big news stories: a British victory; the successful evacuation of the army by sea; and the death from his wounds of General Sir John Moore (an event it would be left to poetry to immortalise).

    Yet no one seems to have raised an eyebrow at the time: it was not considered part of a journalist’s job to bear witness personally to events. So how, you may wonder, did press get hold of news? The answer, to use a modern term, is that they aggregated it. For the most part, the slim papers of Regency England gathered content that had already been published elsewhere – lists of bankruptcies and military dispatches from the official London Gazette; basic trial summaries compiled by court clerks; the court circular; snippets from rival or out-of-town newspapers; those Post Office summaries of foreign newspapers, or longer extracts once the papers themselves were released.

    [hr]
    "Newspapers carried a heavy burden of taxes designed to price dangerous information out of the reach of the masses."
    [hr]

    Debates in parliament, which were regarded as the principal fare of the press, were delivered verbatim or in summary (we would probably call this data rather than news), and very rarely in the form of news reports. The job of the journalist or editor was to track these items down, choose the most interesting and hand them to the printers. After that, their remaining involvement with the news – an important one – was to supply commentary, usually in the form of the leading article, which was given special prominence.

    In short, journalists did not rush about with notebooks, finding news, asking sceptical questions and digesting what they found into dedicated, factual reports. News and journalism were distinct, and they would merge only gradually in the decades that followed.

    The public of 1815 paid a price for this. In the absence of a well-organised journalistic pathway for news from the battlefield, they had to rely either on improvised unofficial news sources or on the official dispatches of the Duke of Wellington. In different ways, both of these let them down. The Duke was in no hurry to report to London and his messenger made almost comically slow progress, with the result that the city’s population had to wait more than three days for official word. It was, as the Observer put it the following Sunday, “an interval of painful susspence”, and in that interval unofficial reports caused all sorts of confusion and anxiety.

    One false report fooled government ministers. Another, read aloud from the stage at Covent Garden, fooled an entire theatre audience. Such was the desperation to know what had really happened that for two nights running the city centre streets were thronged with crowds hoping to see the dispatch arrive. And – a further complication – when it arrived, the official account was seized on almost as a biblical text. People even learned it by heart, all 2,400 words. Yet as two centuries of military history confirm, Wellington’s was not the only or the most accurate perspective.

    With its post-chaises, turnpikes and brig-sloops, the story of the news from Waterloo predates not only electrical communications but also the age of steamships and steam railways, so it may all seem remote and irrelevant. It is not. It shows us that the relationship between news and journalism has not always been as we understand it now. In Britain, they entered into a kind of marriage towards the middle of the 19th century, but though the bond has been an extremely close one, we would be wrong to assume things were always this way.

    Today there are strong forces pulling them apart. Aggregation is back, with Google and others supplying “news” to their users by pulling together on one screen lots of items freshly produced by other organisations and people, for other purposes.

    It is now a commonplace, moreover, to observe that a lot of news travels between its originators – governments, companies and military commanders, but also individuals – and its consumers without the involvement of reporters or journalists. If we want to know the England lineup in a football international or the quarterly results of Unilever, we can access the data more or less directly through our phones and laptops. If a fire breaks out in central London, we may well learn of it first from a passerby who tweets. Of course we still need journalists who report, who ask questions and who dig out the information people don’t want us to read. And we also need journalists who analyse, interpret and explain. But we should recognise that the bond between journalism and news is not what it was.

    • Brian Cathcart’s The News from Waterloo is published by Faber.
     
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  15. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

    Unseen Waterloo: The Conflict Revisited
    An exhibition of photographs on the battlefield

    12 June - 31 August 2015
    Free admission

    Imaginary portraits of the soldiers who served at Waterloo, photographed on the field by Sam Faulkner in commemoration of the Battle’s bicentenary

    Opening for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, Somerset House will present Unseen Waterloo: The Conflict Revisited, a series of portraits by photographer Sam Faulkner exploring how we remember the fallen from a time before photography was invented.


    Dates: 12 June – 31 August 2015
    Opening Hours: Daily, 10.00 – 18.00. Times are sometimes subject to change, please check the website for full details in advance of visits.
    Address: Terrace Rooms, Somerset House, London, WC2R 1LA
    Admission: Free
    Transport: Temple, Embankment Charing Cross, Waterloo
    Somerset House public enquiries: 020 7845 4600 | www.somersethouse.org.uk
    Somerset House Facebook: www.facebook.com/SomersetHouse
    Somerset House Twitter: @SomersetHouse
    Exhibition Hashtag: #unseenwaterloo
    Unseen Waterloo Website: http://www.unseenwaterloo.co.uk

    http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/about/press/press-releases/Unseen-Waterloo-the-conflict-revisited
     
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  16. dbf

    dbf Moderatrix MOD

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-33080914
    [​IMG]
    Relatives of soldiers killed in the battle were among those attending.

    Britain's first memorial remembering soldiers who died fighting the Battle of Waterloo has been unveiled at the central London station.

    It marks the 200th anniversary of the battle which saw allied forces conquer the French emperor Napoleon.

    The 9th Duke of Wellington, a descendant of the British military leader who won the battle, unveiled the enlarged campaign medal memorial.

    Relatives of soldiers killed in the battle were among those attending.

    In total, 24,000 troops died on 18 June 1815, in a fight which ended two decades of war.

    'Important battle'
    London's memorial is a scaled-up replica of the Waterloo campaign medal, the first to be given to every soldier present at the battle, irrespective of their rank.

    Amanda Townshend, 57, from Sussex, was at the unveiling. Her great-great-great grandfather, Captain Purefoy Lockwood, had part of his head blown off by a musket ball during the fight.

    He later had a silver plate with the word "bombproof" written on it placed over the wound.

    "I think it is marvellous to be able to honour soldiers who, as they do now, give their lives for their country," she said.

    "And this was such an important battle."



    [hr]
    http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/8312

    audio in link

    Duke of Wellington unveils Battle of Waterloo memorial at station

    The ninth Duke of Wellington has unveiled a new memorial to the allied soliders killed in the Battle of Waterloo 200 years ago.
    [​IMG]
     
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  17. Legion Etrangère

    Legion Etrangère Active Member

    http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/news/rare-sight-of-flags-scots-died-for-at-waterloo-1-3732217


    Rare sight of flags Scots died for at Waterloo

    BRIAN FERGUSON

    00:00 Sunday 29 March 2015

    PRECIOUS regimental colours will go on public display in Scotland this summer – exactly 200 years after five soldiers died trying to protect them at the Battle of Waterloo.

    The two fragile flags will be taken out of storage for the first time in more than 80 years and given pride of place at Edinburgh Castle to co­incide with the 200th anniversary of the famous defeat of Napoleon.

    They will be going on display in the castle’s great hall bet­ween May and August, before being archived forever to ensure they can be properly preserved.

    Their display, in specially created glass-covered cases, will celebrate the bravery of the four officers and regimental sergeant-major who were killed trying to prevent them being captured by the French.

    A particular focus will be on James Grant Kennedy, the 16-year-old son of an Inverness physician, who is reputed to have had such a tight grip on the “pike” of the Union Jack colour that a sergeant who tried to retrieve it had to carry both the soldier and the flag over his shoulder.

    A French commander was said to have been so impressed by this act of gallantry that he ordered his troops to hold fire temporarily. But when the colour was passed to another sergeant he was “shot through the heart”.

    They are three times the size of those carried on par­ade today

    The 6ft by 6ft colours of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Scots – Britain’s oldest army regiment until its controversial demise in 2006 – are in such a fragile state that they have not been seen since they were taken off public display at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in 1934.

    A spokesman for Historic Scotland said: “These colours have survived many battles. But the centuries-old silk is now so fragile that this will be the final time that they will be on public display, marking the bicentenary of Waterloo.”

    The oldest infantry regiment in the British Army can be traced back to the origins of the Royal Scots in 1633, when Sir John Hepburn, under a royal warrant granted by King Charles I, raised a body of men in Scotland for service in France. By 1635 he commanded a force of more than 8,000 troops.

    The colours, one King’s and one Regimental, which are going on display at Edinburgh Castle from 2 May until the end of August, are believed to date back to around 1805, the year after the 3rd battalion was raised at Hamilton, in Lanarkshire.

    They are thought to have been carried into battle at Cor­unna, Salamanca, Vittoria St Sebastian and Quatre Bras, the latter of which was fought just two days before the 67,000 allied forces led by the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon’s French army at Waterloo. The final two battles cost the Royal Scots battalion 363 casualties out of 624 troops.

    Colonel Robert Watson, chair of the Royal Scots Regimental Museum at the castle, said: “There can be few, if any, colours still in existence which saw or reflect so much action in such important campaigns and battles over such a key period in Europe’s history.

    “The colours are three times the size of those carried on par­ade today.

    “You cannot but admire how the average, mostly teenage and much smaller, junior officers of those days carried them, and were often killed while doing so, through the heat, shot, shell and sheer terror of the battles, often lasting a full day.”

    Hugh Morrison, collections registrar at Historic Scotland, said: “It’s a very rare opportunity indeed to see them bec­ause of their fragility and size.”
     

    Attached Files:

  18. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

  19. papiermache

    papiermache Well-Known Member

    I went with my wife and an old friend to “Beating The Retreat” last Wednesday, 10th June, with Waterloo themed scenarios. Lots of security, loads of really pleasant police and guardsmen helping you through to your place in the stands, having their pictures taken standing with tourists.

    Very noisy cannon and small arms firing, lots of fire and smoke, as good as the fireworks display. Choirs and bands. Much impressed by a mounted bandsman who controlled his horse, spooked by the high winds. Managed to do a twirl then regain his place. Freezing cold last Wednesday, complete opposite weather at Thursday’s performance, when London was hot and muggy, but that was sold out when I got tickets from the Guards Museum on Birdcage Walk in mid-May.

    We stood for the German national anthem, then a rather good version of our national anthem, because the German Ambassador took the salute.

    ( By the way, the German Embassy website has links to resources for the First World War.)


    http://www.london.diplo.de/Vertretung/london/en/__pr/Latest__News/06/Beating-Retreat.html

    Edited version from the above link.

    “Ambassador Ammon takes salute at Beating Retreat

    11 June 2015
    Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, London’s Horse Guards Parade was a place of music, gunfire and fireworks when Beating Retreat took place last night. Ambassador Peter Ammon took the salute on an evening that also saw the Concert Band of the German Armed Forces, the Musikkorps der Bundeswehr, performing.

    The Bands of the Household Division and many other military bands performed a programme of military and contemporary music. During Beating Retreat the performers offered a spectacular evening pageant of music and military precision drill including horses and cannon in front of the beautiful backdrop of St James’s Park.

    With the Musikkorps der Bundeswehr performing, a German military band was present for the first time ever at this event, reinforcing the strong links between the United Kingdom and Germany.

    Observing the ceremony: Ambassador Peter Ammon and Major General Smyth-Osbourne, General Officer Commanding London District and Major General Household Division.

    Ambassador Ammon acted as the salute taker on Wednesday evening. Tonight this honour will go to HRH The Duchess of Cornwall.

    After the ceremony, he tweeted that it was an honour to have taken the salute.

    Beating Retreat stems back from the early days of organised warfare when the beating of the drum was used to order troops to halt fighting and return to the safety of the camp at nightfall. It signalised that the camp gates were to be closed and flags to be lowered at the end of the day.

    An order from William III in 1694 says:

    "The Drum Major and Drummers of the Regiment which gives a Captain of the Main Guard are to beat the Retreat through the large street, or as may be ordered. They are to be answered by all the Drummers of the guards, and by four Drummers of each Regiment in their respective Quarters".

    Today, a Beating Retreat is hold in the evening as a military concert with a marching display and designates, at sunset, the lowering of the Regimental flag.”
     
  20. von Poop

    von Poop Adaministrator Admin

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