About this Event
Waterloo Association Study Day Winchester
British Amphibious Landings during the Napoleonic Wars
Date: Saturday 11th May 2024
Time: 10.30 – 4.00pm (the museum opens at 10.00)
Venue: The Kincaid Gallery, The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum, Peninsula Barracks, Romsey Road, Winchester, Hants, S023 8TS.
There is car parking on site as well as locally in Winchester. Tea and coffee will be provided on arrival, but delegates must make their own arrangements for lunch. There is a cafeteria next door to the museum.
Booking is via Eventbrite on the Association website. Places are limited to 50. The cost is £5 for members and £10 for non-members. This includes tea and coffee on arrival but not lunch.
Any queries please contact Paul Chamberlain at [email protected]
Speakers:
10.30 Introduction by Paul Chamberlain
10.35 Gareth Glover – ‘A Difference of Opinion’ Naval and Army experiences in combined operations in the West Indies 1793-1801 – the differing views of the two services on how to carry out amphibious landings.
Gareth Glover is an ex Royal Navy officer who has studied the Napoleonic wars for over 40 years and during the last two decades has published over one hundred volumes of memoirs/journals of soldiers who fought during the period. He has used all this new material to rewrite the entire Waterloo campaign in an effort to eradicate the numerous distortions that have taken root over the past two centuries.
11.35 Carole Divall – ‘Practice Makes Perfect' – the landing at Aboukir Bay on the 8th March 1801. General Sir Ralph Abercromby, in command of the expedition to eject the French from Egypt had already experienced a chaotic landing at Den Helder in 1799. This could easily have become a catastrophe if stronger troops had been sent to guard the Dutch coast. At Aboukir the French would offer a more determined opposition. Practice makes perfect, however, as the events leading up to the Aboukir landings would clearly demonstrate.
Carole Divall was for a long-time head of English at a local girls’ high school. Having retired from the classroom, she now works full-time as a writer, lecturer, and researcher. She has a long-standing interest in the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as a time of great social, political, and cultural change, as well as for the military aspects. Her particular interest is the British Army of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, its organization, the campaigns in which it was engaged and the human perspective.
12.40 Lunch
1.45 Jacqueline Reiter - When Things Go (Very) Wrong: The Walcheren Expedition of 1809. The British government sent a ‘Grand Expedition’ of 40,000 men and 600 ships to capture Walcheren and destroy the French fleet and dockyards at Antwerp. The expedition not only failed to achieve its ultimate objective; the rapid onset of what became known as ‘Walcheren Fever’ transformed it into a major human tragedy. The expedition’s spectacular and notorious failure nevertheless obscures the fact that the Walcheren expedition was one of Britain’s most ambitious amphibious enterprises. Three factors doomed the expedition: unrealistic planning; poor timing; and a serious lack of cooperation and communication between Army and Navy.
Jacqueline Reiter received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006 on the role of national defence in British political debate during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Her first book, The Late Lord: the Life of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham (Pen and Sword, 2017), illuminated the political and military career of Pitt the Younger’s elder brother. Her articles have appeared in History Today and the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research and she has written for the History of Parliament. She has co-written a chapter with John Bew on British war aims for the Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. Quicksilver Captain, her biography of Sir Home Popham, is due to be published by Helion & Co. in June 2024.
2.45 Matthew Taylor - Black Redcoats: African Americans & the Chesapeake Bay campaign. This talk will discuss the involvement of formerly enslaved African Americans in the British Chesapeake bay expedition from 1813-1815 and argue that the liberation of American slaves turned the expedition from a nuisance to an existential threat to the United States.
Matthew Taylor is a Civil Servant who has worked for the British House of Lords for over a decade. A history enthusiast with particular focus on little-known stories that confound common historical narratives; his time at the heart of British politics has taught him the value of history in allowing us to better know ourselves today, and work toward a greater future. He is from Middlesbrough, UK. His first book, Black Redcoats: The Corps of Colonial Marines, 1814-1816, has just been published by Pen & Sword.
3.45 Closing remarks
4.00 Museum closes
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum, Romsey Road, Winchester, United Kingdom
GBP 5.00 to GBP 10.00