Word: etonisms
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...battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (as it probably was) [TIME, Sept. 17], then Iwo Jima and the Bulge were won on thousands of football fields in the U.S., where hundreds of thousands of stout-hearted young men have played their hearts out for the kind of honor that is not vitiated by the artificial codes of caste-conscious military gentlemen. RUDOLPH FIEHLER Magnolia...
...Having been a sometime resident of Eton and Windsor, and having come to own an affection for the legend and tradition which abound on both the Eton and Windsor sides of the Thames . . . I resent, sir, the present Duke of Wellington's contention that his forebear did not remark that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton" [TIME...
...seventh Duke of Wellington denies the validity of the Eton-Waterloo epigrammatic statement attributed to his famous ancestor and is willing to spend his money to prove his point, what might he not be willing to do in the case of the story which is quoted from the Irish Digest...
...straight about his most famous ancestor. As a close student of his tough, gunpowdery great-grandfather, he came to doubt that the first Duke ever uttered the sonorous bit of snobbery so dear to generations of British orators: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." So last month he did what any Englishman would do under the circumstances: he wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. In it, he offered to pay ?50 to the National Playing Fields Association if anyone could prove when and by whom the words were first said...
...best answer came from Eton's headmaster, Robert Birley, who traced the words back to Montalembert's De l'Avenir Politique de I'Angleterre, published in 1855. According to Count Montalembert, the Duke of Wellington, returning to Eton in his old age, exclaimed: "It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won." Obviously the playing fields had been tucked in later. Triumphantly, the seventh Duke wrote another letter to the Times last week: "The only authority for attributing the phrase to Wellington is a Frenchman writing three years after the Duke's death . . . Wellington...