It was a great opportunity to apply the historical skills I’ve learned in both a theoretical and a practical sense. It was very easy to work in such evocative surroundings - there were so many equivalents with the experiences described in period memoirs it was often not very hard to glance away from the camera and forget the internal combustion engine and look at the soldiers, the camps, the horse-lines, the artillery-park and the wagon-train and imagine yourself back in Portugal or Spain during the years of The Peninsula War : I enjoyed it all so much I took to staying out overnight on location and conducted my own experiments in ‘living out of my kit’ to find out if it really worked as it was designed to do

(and the results of those experiments you can now read about too).

*Of particular interest here to Sharpe fans, ‘Rifleman Moore’ on behalf of Carlton UK TV both invited His Grace to the event as ‘Guest of Honour’ and arranged for him to be greeted on arrival by a correctly-uniformed (and armed) Honour-Guard of The 42nd Highlanders (Black Watch) circa Waterloo 1815 … and fans might also note that in the background here are The Regimental Colours of the 2nd Battalion ‘The South Essex Regiment’.

Since conception, Sharpe has employed 4000 extras to serve in seven separate television series including in 1994 after a suggestion by the author, a hundred and twenty uniformed members of the re-enactment society The Napoleonic Association for the many scenes in Sharpe’s Regiment. Most of them can be seen here at one of the filming locations - Tilbury Fort in Essex - for a ‘Regimental Souvenir Photograph’. The visual effect of this episode were described in the press as ‘the finest period drill sequences of the British Army in the Napoleonic period ever seen on television.’

On April 9th 1997 at The Press Screening of Sharpe’s Waterloo at The Royal Society of Arts in London what was described later as a ‘singular event’ occurred which some saw as a logical conclusion : ‘Rifleman Moore’ met His Grace The Duke of Wellington. 

Adventures … ? Hundreds. 

Excitement … ? Yes : that’s what Sharpe is all about. 

Spectacle … ? We’ve filmed in some of the most spectacular scenery you will ever see on television.

Hard work …. ? Most Definitely … but it was worth it (especially if you read the response from fans, many of whom have followed us for years now and a few have been able to be invited by me to come and join us).

We have all had some wonderful adventures together on Sharpe - but there was also what Sir Winston Churchill described as ‘sweat, blood and tears’ in being under constant pressure in striving towards a difficult objective … but as one senior British officer said in 1813 in reply to a rather difficult question from Lord Wellington himself : “My Lord - you must appreciate that in military operations of this sort, some degree of irregularity is bound to occur.”

The Grenadier Company of ‘The Prince of Wales Own Volunteers’ come under French artillery shell-fire in Sharpe’s Waterloo. This scene reminded many of our ‘old hands’ of the ‘battle’ in Sharpe’s Eagle for the sheer noise and scale of the applied bombardment … it rattled many of our Turkish extras in terms of ‘reality’ which any viewer can see does come over on camera in these scenes.

Rifleman Moore has presented all the aspects of The History of the 95th Rifles several times, including serving as a historical interpreter for English Heritage. Having been kindly invited to lunch by Eley, the world-famous manufacturer of ammunition he is seen here explaining the design and use of his Baker rifle to the chairman.