In his interesting piece on how communications have speeded up (November 19), Adam Trimingham pondered whether it was the Battle of Waterloo or the earlier escape from Elba that provided the old Brighton and Hove Herald with its famous scoop.

Apparently during the Napoleonic wars the only communication with France was through Brighton and Dieppe, with intelligence of what was happening being brought secretly, often by smugglers. An agent of the Comte de Provence, later Louis XVIII, resided in Brighton expressly to intercept such tidings.

According to JG Bishop, a later proprietor of the Herald, Wellesley’s dispatches relating news of the battle of Talavera in 1809 were delivered to the Prince Regent at the Royal Pavilion and ‘read aloud amidst the loud cheers of a distinguished company’.

The paper’s then owner, William Fleet, was present and thus gained the exclusive. Napoleon’s proclamations to the French army after his escape from Elba in 1815 also arrived via Brighton, and were translated by the Herald ‘with a spirit and correctness which ensured their adoption by the metropolitan press.’ The Herald subsequently scooped news of the French revolution of 1830, and of the arrival at Newhaven of the deposed Louis-Philippe following the revolution of 1848.

Bishop does not mention Waterloo.

Graham Chainey, Marine Parade, Brighton