Bulletin No.63 - The Spoils of War

Welcome to the St. George’s Day Bulletin 2024

This time we are excited to offer a number of battlefield trophies. Foremost among them is a Paris made entree dish snaffled by a 95th Rifleman during the flight of King Joseph Bonaparte and the French forces in Spain in 1813. Wellington was so appalled by the gross abandonment of discipline on this occasion that he famously wrote in a dispatch to Earl Bathurst, ‘We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers’. Little did he know that the procruer of this particular piece of loot was a son of the Duke of Marlborough serving with one of Peninsula Army’s corps d’elite.

Not all treasures glitter. Other pieces this time around include a long preserved, if humble, Waterloo farmhouse brick made exceptional by the musket ball embedded therein during the fighting at Ferme de la Papelotte between Nassau infantry, French skirmishers and hastily arrived Prussians. Other relics include light infantry insignia from the collection of the renowned Waterloo veteran and battlefield guide Sergeant Cotton, late of the 7th Hussars; Souvenirs snatched at the storming of the Redan and the Fall of Sebastopol in the Crimea. Other relics hail from South Africa and even from HMS Victory with a direct link to Trafalgar. Even the ‘tools of the trade’ can become beautiful and poignant reminders of the past, such as our superb French light cavalry officers sabre, thoughtfully and beautifully preserved along with memories of epoch making battles engraved on its scabbard.

We hope you will find something to add to your own collection from among the 140 or so new pieces just added to the site, so please do click through to see all on offer.

All the best,

James, Toby and George