Duke of Wellington: One for the Kiddies

Talking of the Duke of Wellington yesterday (link) made remember another favorite Wellington anecdote—this from Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, one of the truly great neglected classics of British fiction:

Rosamund…went back to the drawings Richard Quin was showing her. These were quite good, especially the ones of the ghost of Napoleon laughing at the Duke of Wellington, when the mob broke the windows on the anniversary of Waterloo, because he wanted them not to have votes. It was funny, Richard Quin was old enough to hve understood most of what Papa told us about the Duke of Wellington, but he was so excited about gasometers that he had drawn one in the window of the room in which Napoleon’s ghost was appearing.

“It must have happened,” said Richard Quin. “It was so natural for it to happen. Napoleon’s ghost must have felt like that, it must have happened, I wonder if anybody else knows about it.”

--Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows 176 (NYRB Classic 2003)

From other evidence, I gather that Richard Quin is, oh, maybe seven years old. Query, did other British seven-year-olds draw pictures of Wellington on his deathbed? Do they now? Do American children draw pictures of, oh, maybe the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, with Barry Goldwater’s shadow chuckling in the background?

[It’s a wonderful novel, though, of which I hope to say more later. Not too long on plot but some of the best characterization anywhere. Including Richard Quin.]

"On the Contrary, Madam..."

One of the last things I still read on paper is the The “Quote…Unquote” Newsletter,” edited by Nigel Rees, who hosts the estimable BBC radio show of the same name. Where else could I expect to learn what the Duke of Wellington meant when he ended discussion by saying “Damn it man! The rat is in the bottle!” Rees finds the answer in a footnote to a diary—the diary kept by the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, commissioned to paint a portrait of the great man:

This not very intelligible expression may refer to an anecdote I have heard of the Duke’s once telling in his later days how the musk rats in India got into bottles, which ever after retained the odour of musk. “Either the rats must be very small,” said a lady, who heard him, “or the bottles very large.” “On the contrary, madam,” was the Duke’s reply, “very small bottles, very large rats.” “That is the style of logic we have to deal with at the War Office,” whispered Lord----“

Brings to mind my favorite Wellington one-liner, which I quote from memory. A proper lady encountered Wellingon the company of a female (sic?) not his wife:

--My Lord the Duke, I am surprised!

--On the contrary, madam, I am surprised. You are astonished.

For more on Rees’ newsletter, including a subscription blank, go here.