NAVAL hero Horatio Nelson visited Worcester in 1802 and was given a rapturous welcome by its inhabitants, as faithfully reported at the time by Berrow’s Worcester Journal.
The future victor of Trafalgar was – to all intents and purposes – the first celebrity of the modern age.
Born the son of a country parson, he was a commoner who enjoyed a level of adulation normally reserved for royalty.
Staying at the city’s Hop Pole Inn, the great admiral and his lover Lady Hamilton visited Chamberlain’s china factory where he declared that the city produced the finest porcelain in the world.
Nelson was the first allconquering hero who had a keen sense of his own destiny.
The renaming of Cucken Street as Copenhagen Street perhaps went some way to restoring a damaged ego badly dented by the Government’s reluctance to honour his victory over the Danes.
It’s always interesting to gain some insight into the attitudes of past generations. Nelson was a strict disciplinarian yet steadfastly humane and – as we know – always led from the front, a habit that was to prove his downfall.
An early 19th century naval battle must have been a gruesome business. And all the more so bearing in mind that there were boys as young as 10 involved. These were the ‘powder monkeys,’ serving the guns during an action.
Nevertheless, it’s a common mistake to judge the past on the morality of the present.
Not the same thing by a very long mile, but as a 16-year-old cub reporter I was sent to road accidents where people had suffered injuries far too appalling to describe in a family newspaper.
These days, such practices would certainly attract the attentions of social services. Yet the chief reporter would probably have seen far worse scenes in a bloody war that had ended only 20 years before.
Too many people view the past through the prism of the present.
However, Nelson’s story is actually timeless, a fact that the great man undoubtedly suspected during his eventful life.
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