"The Plains of Abraham" by Brian Connell

 The story of the events leading up to Wolfe's attack on Montcalm in Quebec which led to French Canada becoming British ... and eventually to the American War of Independence.

This book is well written and well-illustrated with maps. I was very much in the dark about this period of history: the Seven Year's War, the premiership of Pitt the Elder, and the last years of George II. 

There were some interesting points and, of course, characters of whom I had heard made starring or sometimes walk-on appearances.

• George Washington learned his soldiering fighting for the British against the French and their Indian allies. 
• One of Montcalm's more impoortant subordinates was Bougainville, later to become a famous explorer and to have Bougainvillea named after him.
• On Wolfe's side, with the ships in the Royal Navy force, was a young man called James Cook, later to become an even more important explorer than Bougainville.
• Both Wolfe and Braddock, a British general killed early in the Seven Year's War, fought at Culloden; one of the French leaders at Quebec also fought there, but for the Highlanders.
• Midshipman John Robison, in Wolfe's boat as they rowed under cover of darkness to climb the cliffs leading the the battleground, later became a "professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh" (Ch 10).
• I hadn't realised how useless the American colonists were at mounting their own defence. Then, as perhaps now, they repeatedly refused to volunteer men or raise taxes to help the British put sufficient armies into the field. "The American campaigns alone had cost £60 million ... The colonies themselves had not provided a tithe of this huge sum, although their population was nearly a quarter of the mother country." (Ch 13)
• They would have been easily defeated had it not been for the monstrous corruption of French Canada in which a few men cornered the market in everything and made vast profits while the majority of the Canadian farmers, poor peasants, starved. "Every functionary pilfered, plundered and extorted ... The only reproach from seniors to juniors was of stealing too much for their position." (Ch 5) This was the sort of behaviour which led to the French revolution and which we can see today in British politics.
• Had it not been for the French Canadian collapse, the US would have been restricted to the Eastern seaboard, since the French possessions didn't just flow down the St Laurence and through the Great Lakes but hopped over to what is now Pittsburgh and thence down the Ohio to the Mississippi and down to New Orleans in a great crescent shaped belt which bisected the continent.
• There was the surrender of Fort William Henry to Montcalm and the subsequent massacre by Montcalm's Indian allies of the surrendering men, women and children as they marched away from the fort; a key even in the fictional Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper.

Other great moments:

• "The English aristocracy had re-established itself after the Roundhead upheaval of the previous century. Its scions ran the country entirely in their own interest." (Ch 7)
• "There never was a people collected together so unfit for the business they were sent upon - dilatory, ignorant, irresolute ... and very unsoldierlike or unsailorlike." (Ch 7)
• "We have cheval a la mode, escalope de cheval, filet de cheval, saddle of horse au gratin and horse pate." (Ch 8)
• "He asked the most extraordinary questions, rather like a blind man who has suddenly been given his sight." (Ch 9)

A very interesting read. October 2020; 243 pages

"The Battle of Quiberon Bay 1759" by Nicholas Tracy

Three star: despite the nautical language I really enjoyed this book.

I began life in the little-known town of Sunbury-on-Thames. One of the few historic buildings was Hawke House, where Admiral Sir Edward Hawke had lived and died. I used to drink in the pub opposite, called the Admiral Hawke in his honour. (It had begun life as The Railway although the railway had been built over a mile away due to a last minute diversion; after a hundred years of having the wrong name in the wrong place it changed title; I wonder if it still exists?)

Quiberon Bay is a battle that, like Hawke and like Sunbury, deserves to be better known. It was the culmination of the 'Year of Victories' in which the English, led by William Pitt the Elder, with their allies Prussia, comprehensively defeated the French on land and particularly sea during the Seven Years War. 1759 led directly to the establishment of Canada and to the British Raj in India; the Seven Years War saw the establishment of British Sea Power and the first stirrings of the British Empire. And Quiberon Bay was the equivalent of Trafalgar, a do-or-die battle that prevented a French invasion by decisively smashing the French fleet.

Tracy tells this story well. Despite the fact that I really don't understand most of the nautical terms. I can just about construct some sort of, possibly inaccurate, picture from "dropped her best bower anchor, and rounded to in twelve fathoms" but I get confused with leeward, starboard and windward. I am not even certain whether a 'westerly' wind blows towards or away from the west! As for , or 'haul his wind', "line of bearing and wedge" and "warping" ships, I can guess but I guess my guesses are probably wrong.

It might as well be French to me. So Tracy throws in the occasional passage of untranslated French. This, as readers of my blog will know, is a particular 'bete noire' (black beast) for me. Writers are supposed to communicate with their readers. So don't use jargon or, worse, foreign languages without translations!

I can forgive the naval terms. Most of Tracy's readership will be fans of naval history and will understand the sailing expressions. But a glossary would certainly help the general reader.

Having said this, I really enjoyed this book. He writes well so that the bulk of the book which explains the context to the battle and the political aftermath fairly zips along. He opened my eyes to difficulties I had never really considered before. For example, you need speed to either escape from or catch up with your enemy. Besides ship design and sails and seamanship to deploy the right amount of sails for the right winds, your hull needs to be clean or barnacles (this was just before copper sheathing of hulls made they stayed clean longer). Clean hulls equal fast ships. So Hawke was obliged to rotate his ships back to dock for regular cleaning. This, together with the vagaries of poor weather, the difficulty of provision supply, and the fact that Plymouth was not yet a major and Portsmouth was too far away, made his blockade of Brest all but impossible. He was remarkable in that he kept it up for so long. Perhaps the British Empire was founded on Hawke's ability to defeat the barnacle!

One little quibble. I think that on page 32 Professor Tracy meant Robert Walpole, British Prime Minister, rather than Horace (his son who was only 9 at the time and probably incapable of sending a fleet to the West Indies).

Hawke should be better known! January 2014; 189 pages

"All the king's men" by Saul David

This book chronicles "the British redcoat in the era of sword and musket" from the first standing army of Charles II in 1661 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815. It starts with a brilliant prologue describing the (closer than normally accepted) battle of Sedgemoor of 1685 when the irregular rebels of the Duke of Monmouth were defeated by a small royal army that contained the future Duke of Marlborough. It then proceeds through the Glorious Revolution, the anti-Jacobite wars of William of Orange and the War of Spanish Succession culminating in Marlborough's successes at Blenheim etc; the Seven Years War with the Canadian success of James Wolfe; the failures in the American War of Independence; and the triumphs of the Duke of Wellington both in India, the Peninsula, and at Waterloo.

This is an unashamedly 'great man' version of history although there are many moments when the ordinary private is squeezed into the story of the great generals. There are times when David seems uncritical: some of the old stories about Waterloo, for example, are repeated without comment: did Wellington really call Waterloo a 'close-run thing'? But by and large these tactics keep the narrative rattling along; it could easily have been very boring.

I am not really a fan of military histories. I find it incredibly difficult to picture a battlefield and the long descriptions of columns advancing and flanks and wheeling squares leave me hopelessly confused. The maps in this book help little. Some maps of inadequately labelled: I did not realise the idfference between cavalry and infantry on one map until I encountered a better-labelled map later in the book. And I found the campaign maps frustrating: some were on too small a scale so that places mentioned in the text were off the map and others were on too large a scale: one map, for example, showed the entirety of Wellington's Peninsular campaign even though he advanced and retreated over several years.

I always like to pick up trivia. It fascinates me that famous people are often woven in and out of narrative threads that are far apart. Thus the doomed Duke of Monmouth had earlier been exiled for his part in the Rye House plot which had been against his own father. James Wolfe drilled his men in using their bayonets held at the hip rather than the shoulder many years before his martyr's death. William Cobbett 'accidentally' enlisted as a soldier and had to flee England after bringing allegations of corruption against some of his senior officers. The grand old Duke of York who was not much cop as a field commander was a fantastic administrator of the army. And the Duke of Wellington allegedly came up with the name Thomas Atkins (a soldier who had died at Breda against the French in 1794) to go on the specimen page of the Army paybook, thus creating the immortal Tommy.

An enjoyable book with a careful mixture of great men and little. March 2013; 500 pages