Posted in Edinburgh, History at 12:00 on 21 March 2016
This is the Napoleonic Eagle captured at the Battle of Waterloo by Ensign Ewart.
The eagle is usually kept in Edinburgh Castle but I photographed it in its temporary home at the Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh. You can see my faint reflection in the glass of the museum case
Posted in Art, History, War Memorials at 10:00 on 18 June 2015
200 years ago today the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars was fought at Waterloo. Famously remembered as a “close-run thing” (though the quote is apparently “It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,”) it was a bloody nightmare. A total of around 48,000 men were killed inside 10 hours.
Last month I visited Edinburgh Castle. Among the memorials on its esplanade is this one, erected in 1938, to Ensign Charles Ewart, of the Royal North British Dragoons (more commonly known as the Scots Greys,) who captured the Imperial Eagle of the French 45th infantry regiment during the battle.
The Eagle itself is normally on display in the relevant Regimental Museum in the castle grounds but it wasn’t on the day I visited. I think it’s on loan to the National Museum of Scotland at the moment. I did find, though, this Memorial to the men of the Scots Greys who died in the Great War.
Also, inside the Castle’s Great Hall, there is a painting, executed by Richard Ansdell some thirty years or so after the event, of the moment of the Eagle’s capture. Titled “The Fight for the Standard” the picture is huge – 13 ft by 11 ft. It is somewhat triumphal in tone and perhaps ridiculously sentimental given the likely conditions of the actual battle.
Picture from Eric Gaba at Wikimedia Commons.
Perhaps a more famous painting of the Battle of Waterloo is “Scotland Forever!” by Elizabeth Thomson, Lady Butler.
The original is in Leeds Art Gallery but a reproduction is in the Regimental Museum.
Posted in Reading Reviewed, Science Fiction at 12:00 on 20 September 2012
Or: How We Found The Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last
Bantam Books, 1998, 493 p.
I usually like Willis stories – my review of Bellwether is here – but this, the latest in her Oxford Time Travel tales, was something of a struggle to complete. There is a payoff towards the end but that is around 450 pages in so it’s a long time acoming.
The book starts promisingly enough with a scene set in Coventry Cathedral in 1940 during the air raid that destroyed it but too quickly descends into whimsy. Willis’s sympathy with and obvious affection for the material from which she derived her title – Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) – not to mention comic novels and detective fiction of the 1930s, has led her to utilise a series of stock characters none of whom spring to life on the page. There is an omniscient butler, a susceptible vicar, a medium, a convinced spiritualist, an absent minded professor, a put upon maid. The character of Tocelyn (Tossie) is as irritating as her diminutive implies, her initial love interest, Terence, merely a device, his dog Cyril an annoyance. The only character with a whiff of verisimilitude, Elizabeth Bittner, wife of the last bishop of Coventry, barely makes an appearance – though she is essential to the story.
The narrator, Ned Henry, a time traveller from the mid twenty-first century, has been tasked by the overbearing Lady Shrapnell (no prizes for guessing a literary antecedent there) to ascertain whether something called the bishop’s bird stump was present in the cathedral when it was burned down as she wishes to have her replica cathedral, being built in Oxford, correct in every detail. Cue much toing and froing, time-lag induced by too many jumps, incongruities in the time stream, talk of “slippage” on the jumps and various discussions on historical events such as the Battles of Hastings and Waterloo and in particular the first RAF raid on Berlin in 1940.
Willis is renowned for her introductions at award ceremonies where she will be seemingly about to get to the point before making a digression. This is fine at such an occasion provided it does not drag on but she overdoes it here. At novel length it becomes ever more wearing the more the technique is employed.
Willis’s fascination with UK history has been evident since The Doomsday Book but her grasp of British usage is shaky to say the least. To be fair I was reading a US edition so the US spellings and terms such as “railroad” and “ties” for sleepers etc I could go with but when it comes to dialogue surely there is a duty to reflect the setting. Here we have innumerable instances of characters saying “gotten,” a Victorian lady – and a butler – use “momentarily” when they mean “in a moment,” frequent absences of “and” in phrases like “go tell” plus no-one in Britain ever says “all tuckered out.” And surely even in the US those flowers are not known as gladiolas?
Overall the tone of To Say Nothing of the Dog was too uneven, the light-hearted elements not in synch with the more serious elements of the story. It was easy to read though.
