Rifles - Mark Urban [171]
– ‘Craufurd’s character was … described by one newspaper’: Cobbett’s Political Register, 25 October 1806.
– ‘he would find himself again and again coming back to the memory of Buenos Aires’: this letter from Craufurd to his wife is dated 3 December 1811 and is quoted in a biography of Black Bob written by Michael Spurrier, which drew extensively on family papers. The unpublished typescript was kindly loaned to me by Caroline Craufurd, one of the general’s descendants. The key Craufurd letters remain in the family’s possession.
13 ‘Captain Jonathan Leach, commander of 2nd Company, wrote in his diary’: Leach’s MS Journal, RGJ Archive, this passage is also quoted in Verner.
13 ‘The Standing Orders set out’: I used ‘The Standing Orders of the Light Division’, Dublin, 1844.
15 ‘You have heard how universally General Craufurd was detested’: Leach MS Journal, RGJ Archive. Verner’s typescript of Leach’s journal is not complete (it is missing early 1812) but the great majority of his narrative can be found scattered in many different packets of Box 1 of the RGJ Archive.
– ‘We each had to carry a great weight’: this passage and the preceding comment about filling water bottles, Costello.
– ‘They began at 2 a.m. on the’: details, Leach MS Journal.
18 ‘They had drawn up their forces in two waves’: this passage on the centre at Talavera relies pretty heavily on Sir Charles Oman’s synthesis of eyewitness accounts in Vol. II of A History of the Peninsular War, Oxford, 1903.
21 ‘the last ten miles the road was covered’: John Cox MS Journal. Cox was a lieutenant in the 1st/95th at the time. His handwritten journals reside in Dublin, but Verner copies certain passages and these remain in the RGJ Archive.
– ‘The horrid sights were beyond anything I could have imagined’: Simmons.
22 ‘the feelings which constant hunger produces’: Leach, Rough Sketches.
23 ‘This will perhaps be a subject of joy to you’: Craufurd’s letter to his wife is in the British Library, MSS Add 69441.
THREE Guadiana
24 ‘The diary of one company commander read’: Leach MS Journal.
– ‘Brigadier Craufurd allowed his Light Brigade soldiers to shoot some pigs’: this incident appears in various accounts, including Leach, Rough Sketches.
25 ‘Here we remained a miserable fortnight’: this was William Cox, brother of John, also of the 1st/95th, MS Journal, Verner’s copies in the RGJ Archive.
27 ‘Captain Jonathan Leach wrote in his diary on 27 August’: MS Journal.
– ‘Before Simmons knew it, he’d been collared by Craufurd’: Simmons.
28 ‘Beckwith was a model of self-control’: this picture of Beckwith is a collage drawn from Kincaid, Leach, Simmons, Smith and other Light Division diarists.
29 ‘Not a little disgusted, Beckwith asked him’: this priceless anecdote was evidently related by Barclay to Colborne, a subsequent CO of the 52nd, and is contained in his biography, The Life of John Colborne, Field Marshal Lord Seaton, by G. C. Moore Smith, London, 1903.
– ‘One 95th officer described why it worked so admirably’: this description of the 95th’s system is contained in Recollections and Reflections Relative to the Duties of Troops Composing the Advanced Corps of An Army, by Lieutenant Colonel Leach, London, 1835 – one of Jonathan Leach’s lesser-known works, but full of interesting detail nevertheless.
30 ‘Every corps did harness and march forth to the river in that form except our own’: Leach, Rough Sketches.
– ‘British generals had learned many valuable lessons’: these lessons of America are culled from various sources, but principally General Sir William Howe’s orders of 1 August 1776.
31 ‘Craufurd felt the Army was guilty of forgetting many valuable lessons of the American war’: this point was made by Craufurd in speeches he made as a Member of Parliament in December 1803 and is quoted by Spurrier.
– ‘His Lordship … approves of your expending, for practice’: letter from the Adjutant