Mary 9 February 1869[2] Edmund 1869–1947[3] Charles Foskett 1872–1930 Henry Ramsey 1874–1949 Ramsay Weston Phipps (10 April 1838 – 24 June 1923) was an Irish-born military historian and officer in Queen Victoria's Royal Artillery.
Phipps served in the Crimean War, had a stint of duty at Malta, and helped to repress the Fenian uprising in Canada in 1866.
Phipps is known for his study of The Armies of the First French Republic and the Rise of the Marshals of Napoleon I, a five-volume set published posthumously from 1926–1939 by Oxford University Press.
[8] Only after the Treaty of Campo Formio could the children return to England, arriving on 2 October 1798, all of them fluent in French; Pownoll Phipps reportedly spoke with French-accented English for the rest of his life.
By the end of October, Pownoll had a commission as a lieutenant and joined the Bengal Army of the East India Company.
Phipps married Henrietta Beaunpaire; orphaned by the French Revolution, she had taken refuge with him and his siblings at the Hotel d'Harcourt, on 10 August 1802, in Calcutta.
A well-versed, informed and articulate speaker and storyteller, Phipps was a gallant gentleman, readily at ease in all society, and very friendly: "a tall, stout, officer-like person, about 60-years of age, with white hair, short, sharp features, and a pleasant cast of countenance.
In 1857, a year before his death, he wrote a letter to the Editor of The Times, in which he asserted his belief in the good character and quality of the Sepoys, despite the popular outrage against them during the Indian Mutiny.
[15] Pownoll Phipps developed bronchitis after presiding over the closing of an art exhibit in Clonmel, Ireland; he died in November 1858.
Assigned to the Matthew Dixon's 5th Company, 9th Battalion, he was part of the right siege train, and his chief occupation was blowing up the Sevastapol docks.
The siege work was difficult and the living conditions were brutal; he recounted to his brother that the soldiers were plagued not only by the Russian fire, but by dysentery, bad food, and wintering in tents.
[30] With a few exceptions, most of Phipps' posts included garrison duty in southern England in the vicinity of the Royal Artillery barracks at Woolwich.
Phipps traveled to the United States, arriving in Boston on 30 April 1866;[31] he went to Canada to participate in operations against the Fenian uprising.
In 1887, shortly after his retirement, he wrote a letter to the editor of The Times addressing some of the highly publicized problems of desertions from the ranks.
In 1916, he was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath, followed by a knighthood in 1917; he served in the Ministry of Munitions during the latter part of World War I.
He capitalized on the growing interest of both Britons and the French in the Napoleonic period by purchasing, as they came out, the many personal memoirs published by the descendants of the participants.
There was no room for the books at his son's house, so Phipps gave them to All Souls College, Oxford;[45] the majority of them were placed in the Codrington Library.
[52] He selected All Souls for its established reputation in military history, and for the Codrington's collection left to it by Sir Foster Cunliffe, who had been killed in action in 1916.
[56] Phipps wrote both an introduction to his work and a summary of the histories of the armies of the Republic and the Consulate, from 1791 to 1804, and at certain points in his narrative, he paused to review the positions of the various future marshals and other well-known generals.
"[60] In the first volume, Phipps' analysis covers a categorization of the marshals, although the narrative itself is largely confined to the Armée du Nord.
"[62] As the integration of the so-called volunteers—the revolutionary conscripts—into the units of regular troops undermined morale, discipline, and conditions, the army's cohesion fell apart.
[60] However, by limiting his sources to only those in English or French, in which he also was fluent, Phipps necessarily restricted his details, ignoring the actions of the Austrians and the Russians.
"[65] Some of Phipps' own eccentricities also appear in volume two; he frequently lapses into sarcasm, revealing his disdain for civilian administration of military affairs, and there are points at which he fails to follow through fully on his criticism; for example, he holds back on his critique of Jean Victor Moreau despite his assertion that he wanted to demolish once and for all the myth that Moreau was as great a soldier as Napoleon.
Phipps adeptly describes the game of cat and mouse that Moreau, Jean Baptiste Jourdan, and the Archduke Charles played with one another in the summer of 1796 as their armies criss-crossed south-western Germany; neither general came to grips with the other until October, and even then, after the Battle of Schliengen, Charles was content to chase Moreau and Jourdan over the Rhine, not to demolish the French army.
Despite his reading of newly published works, Phipps' idea of what constituted new material included the publications of memoirs and journals of the participants, not the extensive secondary literature and array of historiographical material in the periodic literature written by professional historians seeking to understand the French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
[64] Despite his amateur standing, Phipps plowed through an alarmingly confusing mass of material, especially that covering the 1796–1797 campaigns in Ireland and the Pyrenees.
This feat in itself made volume three a useful tool; furthermore, Phipps offered an even-handed treatment of the suppression of Lyon and Toulon, two French cities whose revolts alarmed the Revolutionary government.
[64] Reviewers also gave credit to Elizabeth Sanders, Phipps' granddaughter and literary executor, for her skillful handling of the last two volumes.
It "will always be regarded as a valuable source", well-known to students of the Napoleonic era, and the last volume, critics maintained, was "as interesting as its predecessors.
There are also images from Shoeburyness, Plymouth, Chalfont St Giles, Charterhouse and Canterbury Cathedral, as well as family photographs from England and abroad.