This was in 1815. It was not uncommon; one person at the time counted 172 duels fought in England between 1760 and 1821, but the military historian Richard Holmes considers this an underestimate. But the habit persisted for much longer than the legal attempts to tackle the problem. The law was ambiguous on the matter because duelling could in no way be interpreted as manslaughter, but manslaughter had been used as a defence until 1822 when the laws on manslaughter were revised. For these reasons, Colonel Bolton, running away into anonymity from Liverpool after killing Brookes was playing it safe, just in case he ended up in court. The judgement there may well have been wilful murder. But the duels continued until the last one was fought in Englefield Green, near Egham in 1852, with a fatality.

What had Brookes and Bolton argued about? We know that they started the dispute late in 1805 and that it was ‘a matter of business’ as The Gentleman’s Magazine reported. Bolton was the chairman of a business concern in which Brookes had invested his money, and Major Brookes was extremely critical of Bolton’s behaviour in that position. The argument was so fierce that they agreed on fighting a duel but others stepped in to intervene, and they were bound over, under a heavy penalty, to keep the peace for a year. Major Brookes could not let things rest, and he simmered with aggression and hatred until the period elapsed, then presented the challenge again.

They met at five in the morning, 20 December, on the outskirts of Liverpool. The fatal encounter then took place. Clearly, Brookes was not much of a marksman and, as was the custom when a shot missed, he had to stand with amazing courage, and let Bolton take his time to aim at the forehead; at least it was a speedy death. The tale is one of sheer impassioned hatred; a reporter at the time said that their animosity ‘increased daily’ over the penalty period.

Why did this savage custom last for so long? Simply, because there was then no legal redress for ‘debts of honour’ and this happened when the members of the militia were accustomed to living according to rules openly at odds with statute law.

It took several decades more after these events in Liverpool for a change of general attitudes, notions of masculinity had to change, and that was far more difficult to achieve than legislation, as was the case with the abolition of slavery for instance; the letter of the law takes a long time to percolate through to deep mind-sets and entrenched definitions of such things as ‘honour.’