Annual Wellington Lecture 2025
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Watch the Annual Wellington Lecture 2025, which took place on Tuesday 21 October at our Avenue Campus, University of Southampton.
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About
We are pleased to invite you to join us for The 36th Annual Wellington Lecture on Tuesday 21 October at our Avenue Campus, University of Southampton.
We are honoured to present our guest speaker Dr Catriona Kennedy from the University of York, who will be speaking on the topic of ‘Remembering and Forgetting Wellington’s Irish Soldiers”.
It is estimated that as many as 150,000 Irishmen served in the British army between 1793 and 1815 and Irish soldiers were to the fore in some of the most celebrated episodes of martial heroism in the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns. At the Battle of Barrosa Sergeant Patrick Masterson from Roscommon was the first British army soldier to capture a French imperial eagle, while Sergeant James Graham of Clones, Co. Monaghan would be named by Wellington as ‘the bravest man at Waterloo’. And, in the Irish-born Duke of Wellington, Ireland could lay claim to the most acclaimed military commander of the era. Yet, while the nineteenth-century cult of the Highland soldier would allow a distinctive martial Scottishness to be celebrated within the United Kingdom, an equivalent form of patriotism grounded in Ireland’s military contribution failed to take hold.
This lecture will explore how Wellington’s Irish soldiers were represented and remembered in public memorials, military memoirs, and novels in the decades immediately following Waterloo and will consider why they failed to secure a more enduring place in the Irish national imagination.