Before D-Day, there was Waterloo. Why don’t we recognise it?
18 June 2025, 09:23
On the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, Tessa Dunlop asks why the nation has seemingly forgotten the seminal moment.
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18 June 1815 was a seminal moment, after years of military campaigning here, finally, was a definitive Allied victory over the French, at last the Napoleonic scourge had been expunged. The Duke of Wellington reigned supreme, the Atlantic seaboard was secured and the cunningly appropriated name ‘Waterloo’ (after Wellington’s own headquarters and easily pronounceable for the English,) a new byword for Great British supremacy. Ninety-nine-year-old Phil Robinson nods. He remembers it well, or rather he remembers learning about it.
Phil was born in 1926; his father fought in the 1916 Battle of the Somme (and survived), and Phil served in World War Two, one of Ernest Bevin’s ‘Boys’ forced to mine coal underground.
But ask Phil about history and he can go far further back, returning to his grammar school education on the Wirral, when essays centred on the Royal Navy and their feats of derring-do against Napoleon a hundred years earlier. ‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo were key dates in the curriculum.’
School boy Phil grew up in a world where the German enemy was too new to be baked into the history books; between the wars little boys were only just starting to trade their French lead soldiers for German ones, in a country were muscular commemoration had begun to give way to sombre memorials honouring the Glorious Dead. It was a period of transition.
But yester-year’s heroes, if less well known than they once were, remained immutable. Phallic columns to Horatio Nelson’s glory and Grecian Gods to Wellington’s might studded Britain’s public spaces; writ large across Scotland, England and Ireland, the Napoleonic Wars continued to serve as a byword for national unity. Waterloo Bridge, Waterloo Place, Waterloo station, the name spread like pollen on the wind.
Latterly an unpopular Tory Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, never set foot north of the border, but by 1850 the victor of Waterloo took pride of place upon his beloved steed, Copenhagen, in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. To howls of derision his giant form even topped Wellington Arch (renamed in his honour).
And yet, despite the monumentation, scroll forward to the present day and you would be forgiven for not knowing that 18 June 2025 is the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, when Wellington, aka General Arthur Wellesley, delivered his definitive victory over Napolean Bonaparte, ending a devastating epoch-defining series of campaigns against the French that bent the British economy to the needs of its war machine. (The Corn Laws were just one of many punitive post-war hangovers – infinitely worse than a spot of light rationing in the 1950s.)
School boy Phil caught the tail end of a period when the cornerstone of Britain’s national story was how we fought and won against the French – ‘frog’ a deliberately insulting term for our Gallic foe. By the mid-twentieth century that story was reframed around a very different series of conflicts – the First and Second World Wars, with a different set of monuments and a new enemy – the German ‘Jerry.’
These days, Phil, like many of his generation, worries that the young don’t know enough about the war. Which war? His war, the Second World War. Polls reinforce his concerns. Last year, just before the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Landings, the Daily Telegraph did a spot of pearl clutching, insisting that ‘nearly half of young adults do not know what D-Day is.’ But nearly half did know, learning (as Phil once did) in their history lessons about the seminal battles that helped define the Britain they live in.
Slippage is inevitable. Nothing is as powerful as lived experience. At the unveiling of Wellington’s statue on Princes Street in 1852, the Duke was still alive, and the ceremony was attended by veterans of Waterloo. In 1973 Churchill’s iconic Parliament Square statue was unveiled by his own wife amidst a sea of onlookers who had served under their great war leader just decades earlier. The crowd rippled with emotion. Imagine that. (These days imagine is all we can do).
As for poor old Wellington, in 21st century Glasgow, the cone of his statue’s head is far more famous than the man himself. Even the council has had to admit defeat. Perhaps this is progress of sorts. A reminder that it has been so long since we fought our nearest cross-Channel neighbours, most of us can’t even recall it.
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Tessa Dunlop is the author of the new book Lest We Forget, War and Peace in 100 British Monuments.
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