Recently I was asked by the Hartley Library Archives to nominate a favourite document from the Wellington Papers in honour of the 40th anniversary of their arrival at the University of Southampton.

The document I selected dates from 5 December 1828 during Wellington’s first tenure as prime minister. In the letter, Wellington discusses reductions to the permanent staff of militia regiments, which had been retained following the Napoleonic Wars to expedite training and reorganisation in the event of future conflict or civil disorder. I chose this item because of its connection to my research on military music, encapsulated in what might at first seem a curious aside: ‘It is desireable [sic] not to deprive the colonels of their bands.’

Wellington’s wish to safeguard military musicians amid cost-cutting measures illustrates not only his unwillingness to offend the militia colonels – politically influential figures who often sat in parliament – but also the importance that these commanders placed on regimental bands. This predilection did not go unnoticed by critics, with one radical MP complaining in 1822 that  ‘one-half of the money appropriated for maintaining [the post-war militia] was spent in drums, fifes, and music’. While this figure appears to be an exaggeration, it was not unusual for one-third of militia cadres to be employed as drummers and band musicians. These regimental performers remained acutely audible in civilian settings in the decades after Waterloo. Besides enlivening the country houses of their colonels, they staged free open-air concerts for socially diverse audiences and appeared at elections, balls, fairs, and other public events in a constellation of county towns. Recalling his youth in Richmond, North Yorkshire in the 1820s and 1830s, Matthew Bell described the expert militia band as a ‘very popular’ source of free entertainment for poorer townspeople and claimed it aroused ‘a slumbering talent for music in some of those who heard its martial and inspiring strains.’

A preoccupation with regimental bands was not solely the preserve of a largely inactive force like the post-1815 militia. Indeed, the wartime military’s keen cultivation of music was also widely acknowledged. A former inspector of army hospitals, for example, observed in 1804 that martial music ‘occupies much of the attention of military persons’, with ‘trumpets, clarinets, serpents, tambours, tambourines, &c. bearing, in some corps, a high proportion to the firelocks’. Wellington himself, the son of a composer, was known to be a musical aficionado, while many other army officers invested heavily in their regimental ensembles, regarding them as valuable social amenities, sources of unit prestige, and essential to military morale. Officers also commonly learned to play instruments such as the violin or flute as a genteel accomplishment. There were, however, some limits to the Iron Duke’s musical patronage. On taking charge of the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) in 1813, he decided to downsize the regimental band. The musicians were popular with the corps and Princess Charlotte but cost more than £900 a year – an eye-watering sum which had largely been borne by Wellington’s predecessor, the Duke of Northumberland.

WP1/974/9: Copy of a letter from Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, to Robert Peel approving the letter on the reduction of the staff of the militia, 5 December 1828: contemporary copy

Copy, in the hand of a secretary, of a letter from Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, Stratfield Saye, Hampshire, to Robert Peel, [Secretary of State for Home Affairs]: the Duke agrees with the expediency of sending the letter on the reduction of staff in the militia. The number of drummers fixed by Hardinge was one for every company. “It is desireable not to deprive the colonels of their bands.’

I will be presenting at the Institute for Historical Research’s Long Eighteenth Century seminar on Wednesday, 11 January 2023. The talk, entitled ‘Military Music and Society during the French Wars, 1793-1815’, will take place in Room C3.09 of University College London’s Institute of Education (20 Bedford Way) at 5.30pm. All are welcome to attend in person or register to watch remotely on Zoom via the IHR website (click here).

Synopsis: ‘The French Wars were experienced by the ears as much as the eyes, yet the aural dimensions of these conflicts have received relatively limited attention from historians. This paper interrogates the reach and reception of military music in wartime Britain and Ireland by drawing on a wealth of evidence from memoirs, diaries, press reports, and archival research. It demonstrates that regimental bands provided sought-after entertainment in provincial and garrison towns, playing not only at military parades but at myriad public events including balls and dinners, civic processions, concerts, and church services. Martial music-making, moreover, was regarded as a potent form of cultural propaganda: a means of inculcating patriotism, intimidating political dissenters, and asserting the sonic supremacy of the established order in a revolutionary age. The performances of drummers and regimental bandsmen certainly enjoyed considerable popularity across society and evoked a variety of affective responses, including national pride and fond feelings towards the military. Yet martial music also provoked irritation, controversy, and distress, not least by generating noise complaints, violating the sanctity of the Sabbath, and exacerbating sectarianism in Ireland through the performance of so-called party tunes. The paper concludes by considering the role of military music in overseas colonies and foreign theatres, arguing that it functioned as a form of soft power, helping legitimise imperial authority, aiding diplomacy, and easing relations with local inhabitants. An intrusive symptom of large-scale military mobilisation, martial music shaped civilian attitudes and soundscapes while profoundly influencing the development of wider musical culture.’

I look forward to charing a panel discussion on the impact of war on Britain and Ireland between 1688 and 1815 on Monday 12 December at 5pm GMT. This free online event is sponsored by the National Army Museum and the Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics.

Register online via the following link: https://www.cfg.polis.cam.ac.uk/events/army-and-union-long-eighteenth-century

The discussion will be also recorded and subsequently shared online for those unable to join live.

Event Summary:

The long eighteenth century was in many respects defined by war. Britain and Ireland were involved in major armed conflicts for nearly half the era; a preponderance of state spending was devoted to preparing for and prosecuting hostilities. This event brings together leading historians to consider the impact of armed conflict and military service on politics, government, and society in light of the latest research. How were the lives of soldiers and civilians altered and disrupted by conflict? What role did the army play in political debates and social change? Did soldiering and the demands of war forge a sense of shared patriotism or exacerbate tensions between disparate communities? Encompassing the Revolution of 1688 to the Napoleonic Wars, the discussion will consider the deployment and duties of soldiers across Britain and Ireland and examine differing attitudes to their presence. The panelists will also examine whether the nature of war and the army’s reputation evolved over time and reflect on the legacies of eighteenth-century wars in the present.

Panel:

Professor Stephen Conway (University College London) is a historian of eighteenth-century war and society. His books include The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000) and War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2006).

Dr Catriona Kennedy, a senior lecturer at the University of York, researches the cultural history of war, politics, gender and national identity. Her publications include Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2013).

Dr Hannah Smith, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, works on the history of political culture and gender. She has recently published Armies and Political Change in Britain, 1660-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Chair: Eamonn O’Keeffe, the National Army Museum Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

UPDATE: A recording of the event is now available online.

This past week I started work at the University of Cambridge (Queens’ College) as a Junior Research Fellow in the History of the British Army. I am affiliated with the Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics and the National Army Museum, which has generously sponsored my three-year fellowship.

Last month I submitted my DPhil thesis on military music during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and look forward to the viva (oral examination) later this year.

In my new role, I plan on working towards the publication of my thesis while also pursuing a number of other research projects, including an examination of attitudes towards duelling and honour among army officers. I look forward to contributing to the public programming of the Centre for Geopolitics and the National Army Museum, thereby helping deepen understanding of the relationship between the military and society in the long eighteenth century.

I am in the final weeks of drafting and revising my DPhil thesis before submission here in Oxford – an exciting but at times gruelling experience! I am very much looking forward to completing this project and moving on to a new job in the autumn.

In late July I presented remotely at the biennial conference of the North American British Music Studies Association in Illinois. I was pleased to learn recently that I was recognised as runner-up for the Nicholas Temperley Student Paper Prize.

The judges made the following kind comments about my presentation, which was entitled ‘Diligence, Discipline, and Time: Training Military Musicians during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’ and was based on material from one of my thesis chapters.

“Eamonn’s paper was an impressive piece of historical research. He consulted memoirs, newspaper write-ups, and extensive archival research to develop and support an argument that essentially turns previous research on its head, challenging the established view of the Georgian military’s instrumental instruction as disorganized and incompetent. He argues cogently that this characterization is far from accurate, and that not only were the military’s efforts efficient and comprehensive, but in several respects they anticipated curricular developments in the civilian music professions.”

I’m pleased to learn of the publication of Death & Lighthouses on the Great Lakes by Michigan historian Dianna Higgs Stampfler later this month. The first chapter discusses my research into the 1815 murder of Toronto lighthouse keeper John Paul Radelmüller, allegedly by soldiers of the garrison.

Stephen Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman 1750–1850 (Woodbridge, 2010).

Review by Eamonn O’Keeffe

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on duelling. It provides a helpful synopsis of the origins of the practice, stretching back to Renaissance Italy. The volume also examines the diverse motivations and actions of duellists through analysis of a wide array of case studies, a selection of which are helpfully summarized in an appendix.

Refreshingly, Banks takes duelling seriously as a phenomenon. Rather than caricaturing the institution as a bloodthirsty anachronism, he looks past the rhetoric of the Victorian anti-duelling movement to explore the culture of honour that drove men to risk death over seemingly minor slights.

Although he concedes that duelling was relatively rare and confined to an exclusive stratum of society, Banks convincingly argues that the study of this practice provides useful insight into elite social structures and values during a period of significant social and political change. Even though only a small minority of gentlemen duelled, the institution nonetheless played an important part in constructing elite conceptions of masculinity, serving as a social marker differentiating the high-born from the commoner.

Drawing on a database of almost eight hundred duels reported in The Times, along with further encounters documented in selected provincial newspapers, Banks analyzes the incidence of duelling, the social backgrounds of duellists and the geographical spread of these affrays. For instance, he demonstrates that over half of known English duels took place in or around London, with very few occurring in the countryside or in growing industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham. Interestingly, the bulk of English duels outside the metropolis took place in port cities where army and naval officers – an occupational class especially prone to duelling – were most likely to be stationed.

Banks provides fascinating insight into the hitherto under-researched responsibilities of the seconds, charting how their role evolved over the course of the eighteenth century from that of retainers who often joined in the fight themselves to intermediaries who tried to resolve disputes amicably. Banks also convincingly demonstrates the divergence between the de jure and de facto treatment of duelling under the law. While duelling had always been illegal, most duellists who killed their opponents could expect leniency in court. Many (though not all) judges were complicit in the tacit societal acceptance of this often-deadly institution. Juries typically acquitted defendants as long as the duel was deemed to have been conducted fairly according to the prevailing code of honour.

With the exception of brief forays to British colonies, Banks primarily focuses on England, paying scant attention to Ireland and Scotland. However, he does provide instructive comparisons to duelling in France and Germany, arguing that the nineteenth-century bourgeois embrace of duelling on the Continent gave new life to the institution. This stands in pointed contrast to Antony Simpson’s argument that the increasing participation of the middle classes in duelling and honour culture in England undermined and devalued this time-honoured ritual in the eyes of the aristocracy, precipitating duelling’s Victorian-era demise.

Indeed, Banks challenges Simpson’s influential thesis, contending based on his dataset of known affrays that the social status of duellists did not decline significantly during the nineteenth century. The temporary flirtations of socially aspirant surgeons and lawyers excepted, Banks suggests that the middle classes in England never embraced duelling. He further argues that Victorian public discourse contains little evidence of any widespread concern that the ‘aristocratic’ institution of duelling was being subverted by bourgeois parvenus.

Banks charts the increasing condemnation and public ridicule of duellists in the nineteenth century, but refuses to attribute the practice’s demise to any single factor. The evangelical revival and the rise of middle class values emphasizing self-restraint over public displays of courage may indeed have turned gentlemen against duelling. Further, Banks suggests that an invigorated culture of professionalism in the armed forces, prioritizing discipline and collective military aims over individual honour, may have helped discourage the practice amongst military men. He also asserts in the closing pages of the book that a crisis of confidence amongst the English elite, shaken by the French Revolution and social unrest, hastened the demise of duelling. This argument seems plausible and may well have merit, but would have been more convincing had Banks marshalled more direct evidence.

While his research is unquestionably impressive, Banks could have done more to document duelling in the armed forces – widely acknowledged as the strongest bastions of the custom by the early nineteenth century. Banks draws on the diary of Colonel Bayley of the 12th Foot, a helpful source with several relevant examples, but unfortunately did not cast his net much wider even though scores of Napoleonic-era military memoirs, sprinkled with discussions of duelling, are now readily available online. Looking beyond often terse newspaper reports, he also might have consulted the courts-martial records for duelling officers held in the UK National Archives to enhance his analysis of encounters between military men. That said, given the state of the field, this book probably offers the best account of British military duelling published to date, and Banks’ analysis of the military’s honour culture is always astute.

In sum, Stephen Banks’ monograph is a commendable and insightful study – the most comprehensive analysis of English duelling published to date.

In the summer of 2019, I visited Chetham’s Library in Manchester and consulted the manuscript memoirs of James Weatherley, a local bookseller. Among other useful references, I was delighted to encounter a grotesque story about a drummer and Waterloo veteran.

On his first visit to London in November 1821, Weatherley attended a public hanging of eight convicts at the Old Bailey. As he relates, ‘I stood there some time after the drop fell…Old Jack Ketch [the executioner] came on the scaffold bringing a man and woman with him. The woman pulled of[f] her shawl and stood close to one of the bodys. Jack Ketch took hold of one of the dead man’s hands and rubbed the woman’s neck with it up and down several times. She then put on her shawl and turning round to go, I saw both of their faces. I was quite surprised to see two of the Manchester market stall keepers, old neighbours of mine in the market. It was Jem Hallewell and his wife. They had a stall opposite the Exchange. Mary his wife had a large wen [boil or other swelling on the skin] on her neck and they had been advised to go to London to have her neck rubbed with a man’s hand that had been hung, it was to take it away by a charm. They were both very superstitious but they might as well have rubbed it with a duck’s foot in Manchester. Jem told me they had given Jack Ketch 10/- [10 shillings] for the job. Jem had been a drummer in the 33rd Foot and was at Waterloo…Jem had lost one hand and three fingers of the other. He was druming [sic] when a shot took his hands. He said that he kept druming [sic] a minute or two after his hands and drum sticks were gone, he was not aware of his loss for a short time there was such a noise and the shock so sudden.’

Recourse to digitized military discharge records on FindMyPast reveals that James Hallowell or Hallewell, a Lancashire native and a weaver by trade, had served in the 33rd Foot from October 1810 to February 1816. He spent 2 years and 227 days as drummer, ranking as a private for the remainder. The records broadly corroborate Weatherley’s account of his battlefield injuries: Hallewell was discharged aged nineteen or twenty due to the ‘loss of left hand, & thumb of right hand, occasioned by a gun shot wound received at Waterloo’ on 18 June 1815. Described as ‘a very bad case’ on account of his injuries, Hallewell was awarded a large pension of two shillings and six pence a day.

The behaviour of Hallewell and his wife on the scaffold may seem more in keeping with ancient or medieval superstition but in fact reflected a folk medical practice that remained popular in the Georgian era. As Owen Davies and Francesca Matteoni wrote in a 2015 article for the Social History of Medicine journal: ‘From the eighteenth century through to the abolition of public executions in England in 1868, the touch of a freshly hanged man’s hand was sought after to cure a variety of swellings, wens in particular.’

Jem Hallewell’s claim that he had been injured while drumming provides rare evidence of British drummers beating at Waterloo, although what he was playing, and in what circumstances, is not specified. While a surgeon of the Life Guards heard ‘the drums of different regiments beating along the line’ on the morning of 18 June before the battle commenced, drummers do not generally seem to have communicated commands under fire, in contrast to light infantry buglers and cavalry trumpeters. One officer present noted that British drummers no longer rolled during charges. Instead, they were tasked with assisting the wounded. Another infantryman wrote that neither drum nor fife ‘mock[ed] us with useless din’ during the battle, adding that gunfire, groans and cheering were the true ‘music of the field’.

Sources
Chetham’s Library, Manuscripts/1/371, ‘Recollections…by James Weatherley’, pp.34-35
UK National Archives, WO97/512/8, discharge of James Hallowell.
J. Anton, Retrospect of a Military Life (Edinburgh, 1841), p.211.
[H. Ross-Lewin], The Life of a Soldier: A Narrative of Twenty-Seven Years’ Service in various parts of the world (3 vols, London, 1834), vol. ii, p.198.
J. Vansittart (ed.), Surgeon James’s Journal (London, 1964), p.31.
O. Davies and F. Matteoni, ‘”A virtue beyond all medicine”: The Hanged Man’s Hand, Gallows Tradition and Healing in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century England’, Social History of Medicine, 28/4 (November 2015), pp.686-705.

Last night I appeared on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, the hit genealogy series on BBC One, speaking with English singer-songwriter Pixie Lott about Victorian military musicians in her family tree. I highlighted the significance of regimental bands as a social amenity in garrison towns and a major employer of professional musicians. An episode synopsis can be found here. Filming was completed at Aldershot Military Museum in June.

The programme is now available to view in the UK on-demand via BBC iPlayer.

I previously appeared on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ in 2019, conversing with Kate Winslet about her ancestor, a drummer in the Grenadier Guards. A clip from that episode has been made available on YouTube.