Product Description

William Siborne, a lieutenant in the British army and expert in topography, was commissioned to make a vast scale model of Waterloo, incorporating 75, 000 tin-lead soldiers and stretching over 400 square feet. But why - at a time when celebrations of England's finest hour at Waterloo were so in vogue, and Wellington's fame was at its peak - did this exquisite model gain Siborne the enmity of the Duke and ultimately lead to his own ruin? Peter Hofschroer tells the extraordinary and tragic tale of one man's obsession to build the greatest model of the greatest battle of all time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #304943 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 324 pages

From the Author
The sub-title of this book is ‘The Story of Captain William Siborne & The Great Waterloo Model’. It was inspired mainly by the wish to put the record straight regarding Siborne, who has suffered a bad press for no good reason. To do this, I have located every known document on my subject, travelling to Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, London and Berlin for my research. Using this material, Siborne’s ‘Waterloo Correspondence’ held in the British Library and all known published accounts than mention Siborne, I have been able to put together the story of the construction of his two Waterloo Models, how they were financed and how he went about writing his classic History of the Waterloo Campaign. I show how totally flawed previous accounts have been.

The second strand in this book is the relationship between Siborne and Wellington. The Large Model was intended to be a great monument to the greatest achievement of the Great Duke, but the two men ended up in a bitter dispute over it and other issues, a dispute that dragged on until Siborne’s premature death in 1849. This story is the classic issue of the junior officer asking questions in the wrong places and suffering the consequences. These revelations about Wellington and the role of the Prussians in the Waterloo Campaign will cause a storm of controversy, as I demonstrate exactly how the Great Duke went about having history rewritten. Since then, historians have copied historians…

About the Author
Peter Hofschröer has a BA (Hons) in German and History from King’s College London. He specialised in Napoleonic history some years ago and has written on the Prussian and Hanoverian armies in the Osprey Men-at-Arms series as well as on Leipzig and Lützen & Bautzen in 1813 in the Campaign series. He has contributed numerous articles to magazines and journals such as "War in History", the "Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research", "Age of Napoleon" and "First Empire" and the "Osprey Military Journal". He has also contributed to the BBC History Website and is a historical advisor to various TV companies. He was also involved in the production of the computer game based on the Waterloo Campaign "Fields of Glory", published by MicroProse. His much acclaimed "1815 – The Waterloo Campaign", a two-volume study of Waterloo, was published in 1998 and 1999 by Greenhill Books. For this work, he was awarded the 1999 Literary Award of the Napoleonic Society of America. He has contributed to "Napoleon’s Marshals", edited by Dr. David Chandler and will be a contributor to the forthcoming "New Dictionary of National Biography", to be published by Oxford University Press. He has been awarded a Fellowship of the International Napoleonic Society and has twice received the Memorial Medal of the League of Bismarck, once in bronze, once in silver. He regularly presents papers at gatherings such as the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, the Wellington Congress, at the NAM, RUSI, etc.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating, but ...
Very heavily padded. The first half of the back is basically a dismal (very poor, given that it's written by Hofschroer), account of Waterloo. That can be discarded. The second half, relating to the actual model and the skulduggery that surrounded it, is fascinating. The author shows that Wellington was not quite the morally upstanding military genius that the establishment would have us believe (also recommended, and in similar vein, is "The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes" by Mark Urban). It's worth buying.

One truely unsung hero from Britain's colonial zenith!
This is a well written and highly entertaining novel that chronicles the life of William Sibourne, a man who spent the better half of his years, constructing, exhibiting and finally trying to sell, the most complete and histroically accurate model of the battle of Waterloo. Unfortunately this fascinating narrative is let down by, what I feel is, the authors personal bias against Wellington, who is supposed to have enacted a conspiracy against his Prussian allies in order to steel all the glory of Europe's most bloodiest conflict to date. Not only is the "proof" of this conspiracy circumstanial at best but overlooks the fact that a man who spent his whole life serving the state as an unscrupulously honest and dedicated individual would wantonly sacrifice his honour for personal gain at the height of a crisis. Yes the man was human and undoubtly made mistakes at Waterloo but to suggest a coverup involving the top military brass of the time smacks of JFK paranoia. As a result the author forgets his actual subject matter and overlooks critical moments in the model's construction. Anyone interested in cartography, map making and model building will find this book enjoyable on a general level but try not to dwell to much on the supposed conspiracies.

Wellington's Boot
An investigation of the Duke of Wellington's clash with a model maker over a diorama of the battle of Waterloo may seem to involve a very minor footnote to history.

However, Hofschroer manages to use this neglected episode to cast some sharp light onto the Iron Duke and the accepted version of his greatest battle.

In his afterword, the author explains he found the story of William Siborne while researching a general history of the Waterloo campaign, quite rightly he has identified that there is a human interest story here, deserving of a book of its own.

This is in no way a populist work, in fact it is very scholarly, with scrupulous acknowledgements and a wealth of primary sources used. Personally, I could have been happy with rather less reguritation of facts, it is not that fascinating to hear of every detail of the financing of the two models Siborne produced, and more speculation from Hofschroder. When he does allow himself to speculate on the motivations of the various characters involved, e.g. the Duke himself, these interpretations are interesting and well balanced.

More pictures of the models would also have been welcome, but overall this is a fair and very readable account of a forgotten chapter of Wellington's life, that resists the temptation of putting the boot in of the great man, but nevertheless shows him in a far from flattering light.