A new account of Waterloo: a letter home from Private George Hemingway of the Thirty-third Regiment of Foot

Abstract

• ACCOUNTS by participants of the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo are not numerous and most of those written by British ones were elicited some twenty years after the event by the questionnaire of the enterprising Captain Siborne. Surviving accounts of Waterloo written by private soldiers must be very rare indeed. The Department of Manuscripts has recently acquired a vivid description of the battle, written two months later by George Hemingway of Halifax; the letter (Add. MS. 59892 G) is a gift from Mrs. K. Dibnah of Hollym, Withernsea, a relative of the sender and recipients. George Hemingway was an uncle of Mrs. Dibnah's grandmother and the letter had been in her family since 1815.