‘we are in sight of each other’: The Social Networks of Veterans

Abstract

In 1809, Edward Close and Val Blomfield were both commissioned into the 48th, or Northamptonshire, Regiment of the British army. Together, they saw action at five of the major battles of the Peninsular War: Busaco, Albuera, Vittoria, Orthes and Toulouse. Close was also present at the crossing of the Douro and at the battles of Talavera and Nivelle, and Blomfield at Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Salamanca. Between them, they were in all of the major engagements of that decisive war, and both were awarded the Military General Service Medal: Blomfield with eight clasps and Close with seven. Both arrived in Sydney with the 48th Regiment in 1817, married within a year of each other, and sold their commissions. Captain Francis Allman, another of the 48th’s men, joined them in New South Wales the following year. These three officers, all from the same regiment, decided to sell out and settle in New South Wales, with another officer of the 3rd Regiment (the Buffs) who had also been at Busaco, Albuera and those latter battles in the Pyrenees, Captain Samuel Wright. Deliberately they chose grants of land in the same place, the Hunter Valley. Blomfield wrote to his sister in 1829: I am now my own master and intend to keep so, and have very little to do with any person. I have a few intimate friends, two of which are my old brother officers, Close and Captain Allman. The former lives about seven miles from me and the latter two. We are in sight of each other, a large sheet of water, near two miles across, between us; I can see them with my glass almost as well as I were there.1