18 June 2025, 09:23

By Tessa Dunlop

On the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, Tessa Dunlop asks why the nation has seemingly forgotten the seminal moment.

18 June 1815 was a seminal moment, after years of military campaigning here, finally, was a definitive Allied victory over the French, at last the Napoleonic scourge had been expunged. The Duke of Wellington reigned supreme, the Atlantic seaboard was secured and the cunningly appropriated name ‘Waterloo’ (after Wellington’s own headquarters and easily pronounceable for the English,) a new byword for Great British supremacy. Ninety-nine-year-old Phil Robinson nods. He remembers it well, or rather he remembers learning about it.

Phil was born in 1926; his father fought in the 1916 Battle of the Somme (and survived), and Phil served in World War Two, one of Ernest Bevin’s ‘Boys’ forced to mine coal underground.

But ask Phil about history and he can go far further back, returning to his grammar school education on the Wirral, when essays centred on the Royal Navy and their feats of derring-do against Napoleon a hundred years earlier. ‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo were key dates in the curriculum.’

School boy Phil grew up in a world where the German enemy was too new to be baked into the history books; between the........

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