The Nelson touch First published in Let's Talk! Suffolk, September 2005 More books have been written about him than any other Englishman except Shakespeare. A nation which no longer tends to put military leaders on a pedestal still has a special place in its heart for him 200 years after his death. Aidan Semmens seeks out the origins of the most famous of all East Anglians, Horatio Nelson. Tucked a little way out of what is in any case a rather straggling village, All Saints church at Burnham Thorpe stands quiet and serene in its neat little churchyard, its tower peering shyly over the treetops towards the children's play area and the village green. It is an unassuming church, of late medieval foundation but heavily Victorianised; pleasant enough, but frankly less interesting or delightful than hundreds of less-visited Norfolk country churches. The nearby Burnham Overy is far more extraordinary; Burnham Norton more beautiful, better sited and in itself much more historic. But it is at Burnham Thorpe that the car park is always busy and new pages are constantly being filled in the visitors' book.
The reason can be seen half a mile before you even reach the village, if you approach it along the narrow lanes from the south. For here an old wooden sign reads, "To the site of Nelson's birthplace". Not, you will note, "to the birthplace", but merely to its site. Unless you are on foot, you are apt to miss the plaque attached to a nearby garden wall, "The birthplace of Admiral Lord Nelson. The old rectory in which the admiral was born stood twenty yards back from this wall. It was pulled down in 1803." This must be a disappointment to the thousands of visitors each year who go to some lengths to find the little village where England 's greatest military man was born. There is no birthplace and no Nelson museum (for that, the visitor must travel to the farthest-away point of the county, Great Yarmouth). In the church, though, is a small but well designed Nelson display, with a few pamphlets and even little flags you can buy. There is a bust of the great admiral just below his father's monument, though close inspection reveals that it was only put up in 1905, to mark the centenary of his death.
The connection of the church to Nelson is strong, though, for his father Edmund was rector there for 46 years - for almost all the warrior's life, in fact. As a young man, Edmund Nelson was a curate in Beccles, which is where he met and married Catherine Suckling. Catherine, decidedly Edmund's social superior, also came from a church family. Her father was the long-time rector of Holy Trinity church in the Suffolk village of Barsham , near Beccles. The Sucklings had a long and imposing pedigree in the village and beyond. They were closely related to Robert Walpole, who had been Britain 's first prime minister and later the first Earl of Orford. Catherine's brothers also rose to national positions - William became chief of the Customs and Maurice one of the heads of the Royal Navy. The future Admiral Nelson's mother and uncles were born in Barsham rectory, a beautiful old house that still stands alongside the otherwise isolated church. After their father's death, however, in 1730, they moved to Beccles. On marrying Edmund Nelson, Catherine moved with him first to Hilborough, near Swaffham, and then to Burnham Thorpe, where Horatio - the third of their five sons - was born on September 29, 1758. Young Horace, as he was known to family and friends, is thought to have been a sickly child. Nevertheless, he was educated at Downham Market, at the Royal Grammar School in the Cathedral Close at Norwich , and finally at Sir William Paston's School at North Walsham. He was just nine years old when his mother died suddenly on Boxing Day 1767, leaving the Reverend Edmund Nelson with eight children aged from 14 to a few months. Not unnaturally, the bereaved parson asked his wife's relatives for help, and Maurice Suckling, by now a ship's captain, offered to take one of his nephews into the Navy. Presumably he expected the offer to be taken up by the elder Maurice or William, for he wrote, "What has poor Horace done, who is so weak that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come; and the first time we go into action a cannonball may knock off his head and provide for him at once!" Poor weak Horace was just 12 years old when he made his first appearance on a naval register on January 1, 1771, as a midshipman on his uncle Maurice's ship the HMS Raisonnable.
The appalling conditions the young Nelson found onboard that and other ships he sailed on made a profound impression on him - and his reaction to them ultimately made an impression on the whole Navy. His later insistence on taking fresh lemons to sea to protect his crews against scurvy is only the best known of many ways in which Nelson took care to improve conditions for the ordinary sailor. It is arguable that the care he took of his men's welfare, as much as his strategic mind, was a major factor in his many victories as captain and admiral, and so altered the whole course of European history. The caring and brilliant sailor proved to be a prodigy. He became at 19 one of the Navy's youngest ever captains. Later he would become a national hero for his decisive part in the battles of Cape St Vincent in 1797 and Copenhagen in 1801. In both he turned potential disaster into resounding triumph by disobeying orders. It was at Copenhagen that he famously "turned a blind eye" to the order to surrender - having lost the sight in his right eye in action seven years earlier. (It was in a skirmish off the island of Corsica that the young captain was struck in the eye by a large splinter of wood sent flying by a shell. He wrote to his commander Lord Hood, "I got a little hurt this morning.") Arguably Nelson's most decisive victory of all was not his last and most famous - Trafalgar - but the Battle of the Nile in 1798, when his ships destroyed the French fleet and left Napoleon's army stranded in Egypt. It was straight after this fierce fight, for which Nelson was created Baron Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe, that he entered into the other role for which he remains famous - that of the lover. Nelson had married the young widow Frances Nisbet on the West Indian island of Nevis in March 1787. Nine months later he brought her to Burnham Thorpe - and the couple were to live in the old rectory there for five years, with England at peace and Nelson laid off on half pay. During that time he tried to live the life of a gentleman farmer. After the West Indies , Fanny found the draughty rectory and English winters horribly chilling. Nelson's longing for the sea showed itself in a pond which he dug himself in the shape of a man-of-war. In January 1793 the French King Louis XVI was beheaded. For the English George III revolution was coming too close, the French growing too dangerous. In a general remobilisation, Nelson was given command of the HMS Agamemnon. He had a great farewell party in the village pub The Plough - now, inevitably, The Lord Nelson - and sailed for the Mediterranean. He and Fanny never lived together again. After the Nile victory, Nelson's fleet sought harbour at Naples in Italy. There Nelson - who had by now lost an arm and gained the rank of rear admiral - met up with the elderly British ambassador Sir William Hamilton and his young wife Emma. She and Nelson were both already famous - he for his daring naval victories, she for having married a man twice her age. Soon their affair, carried on more or less openly, would make both more famous still. Even in those days so long before tabloids, the power of press gossip brought ridicule on Nelson and orders to come home. Finally, he did, travelling overland across Europe before sailing into Yarmouth in November 1800. There he met Fanny, his long-suffering wife, for the last time. She, of course, had heard the gossip. Now Emma Hamilton was pregnant with Nelson's child. The great admiral whose unconventional approach was so successful in battle was unconventional at home too. Polite society was scandalised, and no doubt titillated, when Nelson bought a country house in Surrey and proceeded to live there - when not at sea - with both the Hamiltons. Fanny had been living since 1798 at Roundwood, a house near Ipswich which she had bought, hoping she and Nelson would share it. In fact, Nelson never set foot there. The parson's son, a lifelong devout Christian who wrote and delivered sermons to his men when at sea, took an unorthodox view of marriage. In March 1801, soon after the birth of their daughter Horatia, he wrote to Emma, calling her "my own dear wife; for such you are in my eyes and in the face of heaven". Legally, he was still married to Fanny and she to Sir William. Hamilton died in April 1803. The next month England was officially at war with France and Nelson was the obvious choice to be named commander-in-chief of forces in the Mediterranean. It was a vital role, especially after Napoleon made an alliance with Spain and began plotting to invade Britain. In 1805 came the final chapter in Napoleon's plan and in Nelson's life. Both came to an end on October 21, in the most famous sea battle ever fought by English ships. Nelson's carefully prepared plan for the Battle of Trafalgar was brave, brilliant and ruthless. It may or may not have been either original or all his own invention, but he certainly pressed it forward with deadly resolve.
Unlike many, he was not a commander who led from the rear, keeping himself in a position of safety. He made his own ship, HMS Victory, the cutting edge of the attacking force, and put himself in very visible positions upon her. Only in one respect did he reserve for himself something he did not allow his men. As the dead fell - and there were enough of them for the decks to be swilling in their blood - they were pushed overboard, where the sea frothed red. The admiral himself, having received a fatal wound from a musket shot, begged that his body be taken back to England. In May 1804, Nelson had written from his cabin on the Victory to the Reverend Dean Allott, "Probably I shall never see dear, dear Burnham again, but I have satisfaction in thinking that my bones will probably be laid with my father's in the village that gave me birth." Nelson's great fame, and the mixture of public emotions that greeted news of Trafalgar - joy at the victory, sorrow at the great man's death - meant that wish was never fulfilled. Nelson's body was laid to rest in January 1806 in the crypt of St Paul 's Cathedral at the climax of the longest and grandest state funeral ever seen in London. When, more than 20 years later, London 's grandest public square came to be laid out, it would be named for his last battle and marked by a 17ft statue of the Norfolk rector's son atop a stone column 185ft high. |
At the village pub in Burnham Thorpe where Horatio Nelson drank, and where he had a great farewell dinner in 1793, licensees David and Penny Thorley are preparing another celebration meal to mark 200 years since the Battle of Trafalgar. 
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