Major William Norman Ramsay

Royal Horse Artillery

Described as “the most brilliant artillery officer in the Peninsular army”. Born 1782, eldest son of a retired Scottish Naval officer, William Norman Ramsay was commissioned, aged 16, into the Royal Artillery in 1798. Served with great distinction during the Peninsular War, most famously at the Battle of Fuentes D'Onoro. Here he found the two guns under his command cut off and surrounded by the French. Wellington had never lost a single gun to the French in the Peninsular and Ramsay knew this. Besides it was a question of honour. He considered surrender of his men and guns to be out of the question. For an artillery officer to lose his guns to the enemy was a matter of the highest ignominy equivalent to losing the Regiment’s colours. Better to die trying to extricate them that to suffer the shame of surrender. So he ordered his men to limber up and they then charged out from the midst of the enemy to safety and away to safety. It was an extraordinary feat of arms and it made Ramsay the toast of society.

 

Ramsay was killed at 4 o’clock in the afternoon at Waterloo by a bullet which entered his heart, having passed through his snuff box. He was buried on the battlefield, but later the body was exhumed and a Royal Horse Artillery sergeant named James Livsey arranged for the body to be repatriated.

 

Livsey had served under Ramsay, then a Captain, during the Peninsular War in Major Robert Bull’s Troop. He was probably one of Ramsay’s Fuentes D’Onor men, but there is no documentary confirmation of this. He arranged for the body to be sent to Ramsay’s home at Inveresk. The crate in which it was placed was labelled “soap” to avoid problems with superstitious seamen who would probably have refused to take a dead body on board. Livsey clearly thought a great deal of his former commander as he named his son Norman after him.

 

The Ramsays were a tragic family. All four of the male heirs suffered premature deaths, three of them on active service within a seven months period in 1815 and Major Ramsay’s wife had died in 1810.

 

 

Ramsay saving his guns at Fuentes D’Onoro is one of the most often illustrated incidents in military history. Here are a few of those pictures. The incident was pictured on the cover of the book Sharpe’s Havoc.

The medals of Major Ramsey

 

Posthumous Waterloo Medal

Small Army Gold Medal for VITTORIA with clasp NIVE

 

Courtesy Mr. Robert Gottlieb

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