Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 27

little for the officers to do except talk and drink. Wainewright wrote eight years later of his time at Fermoy: “the noisy audacity of military conversation, united to the fragrant fumes of whisky-punch (ten tumblers every evening without acid!)* obscured my recollection of Michel Angelo (sic) as in a dun fog”. (It’s not clear what he meant by acid; whisky punch is usually made by adding lemons and sugar).

But if the drink and the talk failed, Fermoy itself had a few distractions to offer. There was a circulating library, a newsroom and billiard room at the biggest hotel. “The necessities and luxuries of life are found here in as great profusion as in any of the larger towns in Ireland” declared Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland.

The highlight of the year came in September; a week’s racing on a course north of the town which was also used for military exercises. Even with all these small distractions, life in an empty regimental depot was very dull, as the Monthly Returns show. Most months there were no orders from London or Dublin. When letters did arrive they usually dealt with minor matters, such as ammunition or provisioning.

Or perhaps Captain Galloway was so bemused by whisky punch that he forgot to enter in the Returns all that he should have done; a tart note from the Adjutant-General in Dublin that September directed him to “be particular in examining them.”

The boredom of Ireland was soon to end. By January 1815 this rump of the regiment had moved to Hilsea barracks at Portsmouth and by the following month to nearby Tipnor, the magazine and gunpowder works. Wainewright was granted

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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