Odd this day
Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronte, KB, was laid to rest in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. (Three centuries earlier, fact fans, the sarcophagus had been earmarked for Cardinal Wolsey, but this isn’t strictly relevant.)
What is important is that Nelson’s funeral took place 2½ months after he died on 21 October 1805 while winning the Battle of Trafalgar. This being a time before refrigeration, you’d think he would have been a bit whiffy by then, and perhaps he was, but the aroma may not have been that of decay.
His body was first stuck in in a cask filled with brandy and taken to Gibraltar. There, the brandy was replaced with ‘spirits of wine’ (port or sherry, in other words), and sent off to England on HMS Victory. After an autopsy on 11 December, the great hero was put in a lead coffin filled with brandy. (It is perhaps a good thing that cremation was only introduced in Britain 80 years later.)
Later in the month, he was taken out of the lead coffin, put in a wooden one made from the mainmast of a destroyed French ship, which was put in another lead coffin, which was put in another wooden one. It was this Russian doll of dead naval hero which lay in state in Greenwich in January 1806 — so the 100,000 people who came to pay their respects may not have been able to smell him at all.
The funeral service itself began at 1pm and ended at 6, which must have felt above and beyond the call of duty to the 7,000 attendees. (As Prince Philip observed of sermons, “The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure.”) However, it was enlivened by HMS Victory crewmen tearing into pieces for keepsakes the ship’s flag which had been draped over the (many) coffin(s).
1972
In other maritime news today, Cunard’s RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Queen Elizabeth came to the end of its natural life in Hong Kong harbour, just as it was nearing the end of a £5m conversion into a floating university. The last thing that remained to do was… er, install the fire suppression system. Inevitably, then, a spark became a blaze, which — delighted with its diet of fabric and woodwork — tore through the ship, and the water from the fireboats caused the charred hull to sink.
The James Bond people — who rather enjoyed making little nods to recent events (having Dr No, for example, be the new owner of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which had been snatched from the National Gallery six months before filming started) — famously used it for external shots of MI6’s overseas headquarters in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun.
