The seventh Duke of Wellington is an unstuffy former diplomat and minor architect, onetime Surveyor of the King's Works of Art (1936-43) and a man who likes to keep the records straight about his most famous ancestor. As a close student of his tough, gunpowdery great-grandfather, he came to doubt that the first Duke ever uttered the sonorous bit of snobbery so dear to generations of British orators: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." So last month he did what any Englishman would do under the circumstances: he wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. In it, he offered to pay £50 to the National Playing Fields Association if anyone could prove when and by whom the words were first said.
The best answer came from Eton's headmaster, Robert Birley, who traced the words back to Montalembert's De l'Avenir Politique de I'Angleterre, published in 1855. According to Count Montalembert, the Duke of Wellington, returning to Eton in his old age, exclaimed: "It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won." Obviously the playing fields had been tucked in later. Triumphantly, the seventh Duke wrote another letter to the Times last week: "The only authority for attributing the phrase to Wellington is a Frenchman writing three years after the Duke's death . . . Wellington's career at Eton was short and inglorious and . . . he had no particular affection for the place." As for the words themselves, "to any one who knows his turn of phrase, they ring entirely false. It is therefore much to be hoped that speakers will discontinue using them either, as is generally the case, in order to point out their snobbishness ... or else to show that Wellington was in favor of organized games, an assumption which is entirely unwarranted."