Last month, I visited a British Army base in the south-west of England to witness the training of Ukrainian soldiers. Delivered by the UK and twelve partner nations, including Canada, the initiative provides basic infantry skills to new recruits as well as command and instructor courses for more experienced personnel. With more than 50,000 Ukrainians trained so far, the operation is a testament to international solidarity in the face of Putin’s aggression.
Together with defence experts and fellow military historians, I observed Ukrainian troops engage in a range of exercises, from urban combat to trench warfare scenarios, while receiving detailed briefings from British soldiers overseeing the operation.
Meeting Ukrainians who were fighting for their country was a sobering experience. Veterans shared harrowing first-hand stories of combat, including attacks by Russian drones equipped with thermal cameras. Technologies that until recently smacked of science fiction now play a grim and decisive role in the ongoing conflict. On the other hand, it was striking to watch Ukrainian troops being put through their paces in entrenchments that would have been immediately familiar to soldiers of the First World War. The juxtaposition served as a powerful reminder that while the face of battle evolves, the brutality of combat — and the resilience it demands — remains balefully perennial.
An article of mine, entitled ‘British Military Music and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars’, has just been published in The Historical Journal. Drawing on newspapers, memoirs, and regimental records, it examines the implications of wartime military mobilization for British and Irish musical life in the decades after 1815. One part of the article discusses the origins of brass bands, revealing that the first such ensembles in Britain were organised by military regiments after the Napoleonic Wars.
The implications of my research for brass band history received extensive media coverage in Britain earlier this week, including an excellent BBC News feature and articles in newspapers such as The Times. ITV News dreamt up an unbeatable strapline: ‘”War – what is it good for?” – brass bands, according to a Cambridge historian.’ The University’s press team, spearheaded by Tom Almeroth-Williams and Jonny Settle, also crafted an engaging web story (‘Bold as Brass’) and a short film summarising some of my key findings. I am grateful to the Harrogate Band, featured in the video below, for allowing us to record them playing several pieces of music relevant to the research.
Abstract Historians have increasingly stressed the impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Britain and Ireland. Less attention, however, has been paid to the legacies of martial mobilization after 1815. Drawing on hitherto unused press and archival sources, this article assesses the implications of wartime military expansion for the music profession, and musical culture more generally, in the decades after Waterloo. It demonstrates that men and boys who honed their instrumental skills in uniform embarked on a variety of civilian musical careers, becoming instructors, wind performers, composers, and even opera singers. The article traces the post-war circulation of regimental instruments and reveals that a multitude of militia and volunteer bands remained active long after demobilization. The wartime proliferation of military bands, moreover, encouraged the subsequent spread of quasi-martial wind ensembles in wider society. Finally, the article proves that brass bands were first introduced to Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. The influence of the military on musical culture after 1815, in short, was palpable and often profound, and manifested itself in numerous ways and settings.
The brass band of the Worcestershire Yeomanry performs at an 1838 review. ‘The Review of the Queen’s Own Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry, on Kempsey Ham’, engraving by H. Papprill after W. J. Pringle, 1839. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
View of the Taking of Quebec, 13 September 1759 (National Army Museum, 1971-02-33-314-1)
This week I gave a speech in London at a dinner commemorating the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. I have decided to share an edited version of my remarks, which were delivered in my capacity as a National Army Museum research fellow, to mark the 265th anniversary of the battle. I have also included a brief list of books at the end of the post for readers wishing to learn more. – Eamonn O’Keeffe
The 1759 siege of Quebec, of course, commands particular prominence as a turning point in Canada’s past. But it also remains a storied episode in military history on both sides of the Atlantic. This should come as no surprise, for quite apart from its profound repercussions, as C.P. Stacey observed long ago, the truth of the campaign’s climax seems almost stranger than fiction. There’s the hushed, suspenseful transit across the St Lawrence River; the nocturnal clambering up the cliffs; and the mortal injury of both commanders in a brisk showdown before the city walls. It all feels like a scriptwriter’s flight of fancy – the somewhat rushed wrapping up of a television series.
And the news certainly felt incredible to observers at the time, not least because tidings of victory arrived in England hot on the heels of an earlier, despairing despatch from Major-General James Wolfe, which seemed to foreshadow a humiliating withdrawal.
In June of 1759, Wolfe had cruised down the St Lawrence aboard a flotilla of forty-nine warships and one hundred and nineteen transport and supply vessels. Aged thirty-two and entrusted with his first independent command, the general arrived with great hopes of success. But the end of August found Wolfe no closer to conquest, his many plans frustrated by the forbidding geography of the capital of New France and the resolve of its garrison. The defenders – comprised of French soldiers, indigenous warriors, and Canadian militia, headed by the Marquis de Montcalm – outnumbered his own army. They were well-entrenched on the Beauport shore downstream from the city: an attempt to land grenadiers and storm Montcalm’s lines at Montmorency on the 31st of July proved a bloody fiasco. Wolfe was reduced to launching desultory raids, bombarding the city, and laying waste to farms and villages in an impotent attempt to draw Montcalm out into open battle.
Time was running out, for the fleet would soon need to sail away to avoid being trapped by winter ice. Wolfe had already resolved to leave the army after this campaign; now he reckoned with the likelihood of defeat and disgrace. Only two years earlier, the Royal Navy had executed an admiral for failing to do his utmost – this was an age when performance reviews had teeth.
Wolfe was ill and often bed-ridden, plagued by dysentery, bladder stones, and fever. His relationship with the brigadiers, his senior subordinates, was just as dire. As one of them complained: ‘General Wolf[e]’s health is but very bad. His generalship…is not a bit better.’
But by early September, Wolfe had regained his nerve. He took the brigadiers’ advice to bypass the strong downriver defences and strike upstream of the city instead, in the hope of severing Montcalm’s supply lines. Yet almost at the last moment, Wolfe modified the plan. Rather than disembarking troops more than twelve miles upriver, he would target the Foulon cove, a place he had identified as a landing site of last resort weeks before. Though at the base of a fifty-three-metre escarpment, the cove was within two miles of the city and appeared, at least from a distance, to be lightly defended. Wolfe insisted on the change over the objections of his brigadiers and even the naval officer overseeing the amphibious operation. The gambit was a daring one, but it worked. Just after four in the morning on the 13th of September, Wolfe’s army began splashing ashore. They made their way up the slope and formed on the Plains of Abraham in the morning light.
It’s been said that celebrities who die young are given the benefit of many doubts, but historians – ever a disputatious bunch – are not so magnanimous.[1] Once lionised as a military genius, Wolfe has more recently been cast as a commander who was out of his depth and owed his victory more to luck than skill. He has been robustly criticised for his months of apparent indecision, his choice of terrain on which to fight, and his preference for the Foulon cove over supposedly less risky options farther upstream. Some scholars have even claimed that Wolfe had a death wish, and did not really expect the landings to succeed at all.
The debate has been lively and stimulating, but I think that many – though not all – of these arguments are overdrawn. As one of Wolfe’s more sympathetic biographers has trenchantly remarked, few generals have endured so much criticism for actually winning a battle.
Wolfe himself observed that ‘in war something must be allowed to chance and fortune’, and luck certainly played an important role in the campaign’s outcome. The French placed too much faith in the natural impregnability of the cove, neglecting to defend it sufficiently and failing to respond rapidly to the British incursion. Wolfe’s fortunes were also aided by the fact that sentries ashore initially mistook the landing craft for a friendly supply convoy they had been expecting – a misapprehension which was reinforced by the fluent French of a quick-thinking Scotsman in the British boats.
But to focus unduly on chance, and the mistakes of an opponent, risks obscuring the real achievements and professionalism of the armed services which made success possible two hundred and sixty-five years ago.
The British Army, which had so often come to grief in the early years of the Seven Years War, demonstrated its ability to improve and adapt. The redcoats became more inured to skirmishing in the North American wilderness, forming skilled marksmen into specially equipped light infantry corps. It was the light infantry which led the landings at the Foulon cove, dashed up the heights to overwhelm the French picket, and helped cover the army’s flanks during the ensuing battle. The redcoats had also learned to deliver disciplined firepower in the linear warfare which ultimately decided the day. They adopted the simplified firing protocol favoured by Wolfe and honed their aim through regular target practice. On the plains, British soldiers loaded two balls in their muskets and delivered devastating short-range volleys, routing Montcalm’s impetuous and ill-coordinated attack in a matter of minutes. Finally, lessons learned the hard way early in the war resulted in major improvements to amphibious operations. Sailors rowed soldiers ashore in flat-bottom boats purpose-built for use in shallow water; while shoals and strong currents still posed dangers, assiduous training and the use of signals and staging areas mitigated the risk of confusion and calamity. The Foulon landings, carried out in silence and under the cover of darkness, are rightly remembered as an exemplar of combined operations.
Model of a flat-bottomed landing craft, circa 1758 (National Army Museum, 1961-07-180-1)
As the importance of amphibious capabilities suggests, it was the support of the fleet, under the competent command of Vice-Admiral Charles Saunders, which enabled Wolfe to strike at the heart of New France in the first place. Navigators such as James Cook, the future explorer, took soundings and drafted the charts necessary to allow the navy to ascend the hazardous St. Lawrence. Besides providing vital strategic mobility, sailors also helped distract from the Foulon operation by rowing noisily about in the darkness to deceive the French into thinking that the main British blow would land elsewhere. And, in the days after the battle, naval crews hauled over one hundred mortars and cannon up the heights to help besiege Quebec. Saunders even managed to raise more than £3,000 from his own officers as a loan to the army, which after accepting the city’s surrender found itself embarrassingly short of funds. This was a sterling example of interservice cooperation – I just hope the naval officers were paid back.
And more generally, it was the navy’s hard-won supremacy at sea which ensured that the conquest would stick. By the spring of 1760 the tables had turned: now a French force from Montreal was besieging the half-starved and sickly remnants of Wolfe’s army inside Quebec. Both sides turned their eyes to the river, knowing that success would come to whichever received fresh supplies and reinforcements. British ships began to arrive in May, and the Royal Navy destroyed an enemy convoy soon after, shattering hopes of a French recovery. Had the first vessels sighted borne Bourbon colours, Wolfe’s victory might well have been reduced to a historical footnote.
But as it turned out, the Quebec campaign marked a momentous milestone in Britain’s emergence as a global and imperial power. French Canadians are proud of the resilience and vibrancy of their Francophone culture, but the events of 1759 meant that English would become North America’s most spoken tongue. They also paved the way for the creation of the United States. With the Atlantic colonies no longer fearful of French neighbours, independence became a more feasible prospect; British efforts to reform, tax, and garrison their dramatically expanded domains gave rise to disagreements that sparked revolution.
Anniversaries offer us opportunities to reflect and remember – Je me souviens, to use the Québécois phrase. To remember James Wolfe certainly, but also Saunders and his sailors and marines. To think of the French soldiers fighting for their country; the Canadians and indigenous warriors who were defending their land and homes; and the inhabitants who suffered grievously during the siege. Nor should we forget the officers and men of the British army: the Highlanders of the 78th Foot, who charged with their broadswords at the end of the battle, scarcely a generation after their kinsmen had rallied to the Jacobite cause; the North American subjects of the Crown, who comprised fully one-third of Wolfe’s besieging army; and private soldiers such as John Bell, a weaver from Antrim, and Thomas Clyma, a Cornish tinner, who fought and died outside Quebec’s walls. We are still living in a world they helped forge.
The Death of General Wolfe by Edward Penny c.1763–1764 (Fort Ligonier via Wikimedia)
Further Reading: Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2001) Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-1763 (2002) Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (2006) Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective (2012), including Stephen Brumwell’s chapter on Wolfe’s generalship at Quebec D. Peter MacLeod, Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham (2008) C.P. Stacey, Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle (1959 and subsequent edns) – a classic account
[1] Ian K. Steele, review of Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe by Stephen Brumwell in The International History Review, vol. 30, no. 1 (March 2008), pp. 127-129.
I contributed a feature to the latest issue of the National Army Museum’s Muster magazine (click on the images below). My article identifies two of the figures depicted a painting in the museum’s collection and shares details of their lives gleaned from military memoirs and archival research.
An article of mine in the latest issue of History Ireland magazine (March/April 2024) spotlights a polychromatic band uniform with an equally colourful provenance. The nineteenth-century journalist and antiquarian John G.A. Prim rescued the headdress, coatee and pantaloons of a Kilkenny Militia musician from the ignominious fate of adorning a garden scarecrow. In 1872, he presented the artifacts to the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland; they now take pride of place in the “Soldiers and Chiefs” military history exhibition in Dublin’s Collins Barracks.
Read the article below (or on the History Ireland website) for some reflections on the wider story of military music in late Georgian Ireland.
I’ll be delivering a Friday Insight lunchtime talk at the National Army Museum in London on 9 February 2024. Delving into the roles and reception of British military music during the Napoleonic Wars, the talk will exploring many of the themes addressed in my recent Historical Research article. Book now to attend this free event either in person or online via the NAM website: https://www.nam.ac.uk/whats-on/military-music-and-society-napoleonic-wars
Detail from ‘Changing the Guard at St James’s Palace’, 1792 (NAM)
An article of mine has just been published by the journal Historical Research. Entitled ‘Military Music and Society during the French Wars’, it examines the reach and reception of British martial music between 1793 and 1815. Drawing on a wide range of diaries, memoirs, newspapers and regimental archives, it interprets military music as an intrusive symptom of large-scale mobilization that was central to the civilian experience of war. The performances of regimental bandsmen and drummers proved a sought-after form of public entertainment, a spur to patriotism, and even a cause of traffic accidents and noise complaints. While primarily focused on Britain and Ireland, the article also considers the role of military music overseas, arguing that it functioned as a form of soft power that helped to aid diplomacy and legitimize imperial authority.
A version of this article was presented to the British History in the Long 18th Century seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London in January 2020. It subsequently received the Pollard Prize, awarded annually for the best paper presented at an IHR seminar by a postgraduate student or a researcher within one year of completing a PhD. The judging panel described my work in the following terms:
The paper consisted of a sonic history of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). Whereas previous historians have written social and cultural histories exploring the nature of civil-military relations in Britain during the period, O’Keeffe breaks new ground by considering the role of military music during the French Wars. O’Keeffe persuasively argues that martial music served multiple functions, as propaganda, entertainment, nuisance, and a spur to social conflict. Using a wide range of source material, O’Keeffe reconstructed an aural history of the British Army and the auxiliary forces, in both Britain and in British overseas colonies. The key argument was that, in a time when access to instruments and musical instruction was relatively limited, military bands provided the British state with a potent form of ‘soft power’.
For those interested in learning about this research in a more auditory format, I should mention that I recently delivered a version of this article as a talk for the Society for Army Historical Research. A recording of the lecture has now been posted on YouTube:
Earlier this month I attended the 48th congress of the International Commission for Military History in Istanbul, Turkey. I received the André Corvisier Prize, an annual award for the best PhD thesis in military history, and delivered a plenary address on my research. Besides attending the academic proceedings, I had the chance to explore the ancient city of Istanbul and visit Troy and Gallipoli as part of a post-conference tour. The experience was unforgettable, and I am grateful for the hospitality of the ICMH and the conference’s hosts at the National Defence University of Turkey.
I recently enjoyed reading The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. Through a thought-provoking blend of history, science, and philosophy, BBC journalist Richard Fisher advocates for the benefits of long-term thinking by reflecting on the ways that our ancestors perceived time. I’ll be interviewing the author at the annual Chelsea History Festival at the National Army Museum on Friday, 29 September at 2pm. Tickets are still available on the Chelsea History Festival website: https://chelseahistoryfestival.com/events/long-view/
R. Livesay, ‘The Worcestershire Regiment [of Militia], commanded by Colonel Newport, being reviewed by Major-General Whitelocke on Southsea Common, October 14th, 1800’ (Portsmouth Museums)
The Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery is home to a fine depiction of a review of the Worcestershire Militia by Richard Livesay. The painting shows Major-General John Whitelocke, who later led a British army to ignominious defeat in South America, inspecting the corps on Southsea Common in October 1800 during the French Revolutionary War. A rare portrayal of an entire regiment drawn up in line, the artwork is of special interest to me on account of its detailed renderings of drummers and band musicians assembled on parade. Although the Reverend Percy Sumner published a brief description of the painting in the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research in 1946, a recent visit to the museum gave me the opportunity to more closely inspect and photograph the canvas.
Livesay’s work neatly illustrates the visibility (to say nothing of the audibility) of regimental instrumentalists on parade. Although Dundas’s Rules and Regulations dictated that drummers and band musicians should form in the rear of infantry battalions when in close order, in open order the band was to be conspicuously positioned in front of the centre of the line, just behind the colours. The drummers were arrayed on both flanks ‘in order to make more show’, as the regulations put it. Livesay depicts just such a deployment, showing four fifers, four drummers and a drum-major on the extreme right of the line, flanked by axe-wielding pioneers on one side and the grenadier company on the other. Other drummers and fifers are deployed on the far left, although these far-away figures are harder to make out. The band in the centre appears to comprise some twenty performers – well in excess of the number officially permitted – and includes instruments such as bassoons, horns and the S-shaped serpent, not to mention a kettle drum and a bass drum. The painter depicts the band and the corps of drums playing and beating while officers and men salute the reviewing officer with their swords and muskets.
The Worcestershire Militia band (detail)
Drummers and band musicians were set apart from other soldiers not just by their functions and position on parade but also by their dress, which was especially splendid and typically of a different hue than that of the rank and file. Musicians’ clothing was not officially regulated, yet bandsmen tended to wear white uniforms; infantry drummers generally donned coats of their regiment’s facing colour – yellow, in this case. The drummers in Livesay’s painting, like the elite grenadiers and pioneers, wear large bearskin caps. Their coats are embellished with chevrons of distinctive polychromatic lace on the arms and what appears to be red hussar braid – an affectation normally associated with cavalry rather than infantry – down the front. Nor does the drum-major’s finery disappoint. Clad in a uniform which is buff or white rather than yellow, he bears his customary mace, sports a red cloth baldric (shoulder belt) adorned with silver-tipped drum sticks, and wears what seems to be the most ostentatious hat in the regiment. In view of such magnificent attire, it is hardly surprising that drum-majors were repeatedly mistaken for generals or foreign dignitaries.
Besides providing important visual evidence of the dress and disposition of drummers and bandsmen, the Livesay painting underscores the importance of these musical warriors for military display. The quantity, abilities, and clothing of drummers and bandsmen were preeminent points of unit prestige, regularly remarked upon by officers, newspapers, and civilian observers. By the final decades of the eighteenth century, regimental bands had become all but essential appendages of self-respecting corps. As a cavalry officer serving in Ireland remarked in 1784: ‘There is not a single Reg[iment]t of Infantry now in Ireland, nor any of Horse or Dragoons, who make a figure in the publick eye (which is no small matter toward the reputation of a corps) unprovided of this most necessary and ornamental show, a band’. The musical arms race only intensified as the British military grew to an unprecedented size during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. According to a sceptical Scottish clergyman writing in 1813, the militia regiments of Britain and Ireland ‘seem to have the foolish vanity of vieing with one another in nothing more than in the richness and fantastic dress of their drummers and military band.’ But the impact of such sustained investment in military music-making was not limited to bloated tailoring bills. The late Georgian military created significant new opportunities for musical employment and education while shaping and stimulating public musical taste. The wartime expansion of martial music-making facilitated the growth of the music profession as well as the formation of working-class brass bands. It even influenced popular politics: supporters of parliamentary reform, Irish self-government, and the Orange Order all mimicked military spectacle in the decades after Waterloo with the assistance of musically trained ex-servicemen. Military music, then, was not only prominent on parade but echoed far beyond the barrack gates.
1812 and all that 
