‘In the Hour of Victory’ - Review

(This review was first published in Fighting Times.)

The Glorious First of June, 1 June 1794.

Every researcher knows the excitement of opening yet another anonymous looking cardboard box in an archive centre. Will it bring forth great revelations? Or just some forgotten trivia? Yet few can hope for a find to match that of Sam Willis’s when he opened the box contain Add Ms 23207 in the British Library. Inside was a huge and elaborately bound tome comprising the original despatches from the commanders of the key victorious naval battles of the Napoleonic wars. These cover eight battles from The Glorious First of June (1794) to San Domingo (1806). This precious testament to the golden era of the Royal Navy was compiled by the Admiralty in 1859 but, through some later oversight, was removed from the British Museum and has languished for years in the British Library. Known to the cognoscenti, it remained hidden from public view.

In his book ‘In the Hour of Victory’ Willis prints the majority of these despatches, along with an overall introduction, an introduction to each battle and commentaries on each despatch. He cleverly does not describe the battles, so we learn about them through the dribs and drabs of the despatches, just as did the Admiralty at the time. How frustrating some of these despatches must have been. At times the commanders knew so little after battle that it was impossible for the Admiralty to tell whether the reported victory was by a whisker or near annihilation. Gradually, through subsequent despatches, the true extent of each victory becomes clear. The slow revelation of the details of each battle, sometimes months after the event, emphasises the huge difficulties of communicating between the Admiralty and its far-flung fleets.

Few of the commanders were wordsmiths (Nelson being the shining exception here) so most of the despatches make for dry reading and, often, barely informative reading. Willis makes up for this by his sharp commentaries on the style and content of each despatch and his erudite interpretation of  both what the despatches say and what they leave out. And, of course, modern research means that in many cases we now know more about these battles than the commanders did, since they  had no access to enemy despatches and records. There was also the problem of collecting battle reports from the captains of individual ships since both battle and weather could rapidly scatter a fleet.

Willis makes excellent use of statistical information varying from the macabre details of the wounds of each of the 103 injured on the Monarch at the Battle of Camperdown, to the more mundane statistics of killed and wounded at Trafalgar. It is staggering to find that the Colossus suffered 200 killed and wounded  while the crew of the Prince emerged unscathed. These sorts of figures help to emphasise the huge variation in battle commitment between different ships and captains – something that rarely comes out in traditional accounts of battles.

The whole book is magnificently presented with excellent use of headings, marvellously laid out despatches and elegantly presented tables. Overall the book is a triumph of research and a marvel of presentation. It is also a source of profound knowledge and insights into what really happened in these battles.

Richard Freeman

‘In the Hour of Victory’ by Sam Willis is published by Atlantic Books.