Word: waterloos
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...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...
...likes to keep the records 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...
...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's career at Eton was short...
Some of Bryant's best pages describe the fighting of Wellington's army in Spain. His account of the battle of Waterloo is a model of brevity, exact and graphic. But it is old England itself which most excites Bryant, its landed wealth, its civilization, its regard for personal liberty, its native good sense. No mere passionless chronicler, Historian Bryant knows what he likes and doesn't like. "True aristocracy, after true religion," he writes, "is the greatest blessing a nation can enjoy." And the older England had enjoyed that blessing, along with several lesser ones-including...
...pollster was available to test the accuracy of Wellington's guess that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but recent surveys tend to show that Britain is not nearly so sports-minded as she thought she was. London's Economist last week reported that for every Briton who plays a game, two sit watching and 20 go to the cinema. Even more disillusioning: of 191 million Britons who watched sporting matches in 1949, only 2.6% chose cricket...