What silly nonsense — Nelson’s towering virtues dwarf his vices
As a campaign is launched to pull down hero’s statue because he was a ‘white supremacist’, an exasperated MAX HASTINGS says...
Afua HIRSCH is a 36-yearold half-British, half-Ghanaian journalist brought up in London who, until this week, scarcely anybody had heard of. She has now, however, achieved her five minutes of notoriety, space in the Guardian and a television debate, by proposing that Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar Square should be torn from its plinth among the pigeons because he was a ‘white supremacist’.
She is pursuing the trail blazed by the Oxford protesters who seek to depose Cecil Rhodes, the Bristol campaigners who have secured the rebranding of the Colston Hall concert venue, and the americans who are everywhere overthrowing images of Confederate Civil War heroes.
all those whose monuments are being challenged face similar charges — exploitation of black people, engagement in slavery. Some modern black or mixedrace British and american people find it offensive that representations of historic figures who cruelly mistreated their forefathers should continue to occupy places of honour in our communities.
Because summer is not yet over and most of us have many reasons for happiness, I refuse to froth and foam about afua Hirsch’s outburst: she is entitled to further her career as best as she can.
Instead, we may briefly review the record of Vice-admiral Viscount Nelson, whose presence in Trafalgar Square she finds offensive, for different causes from those that once irked the old french President Charles de Gaulle.
Horatio Nelson was born in a Norfolk rectory in 1758, and secured his first command 20 years later through the influence of his uncle, who was a senior naval officer.
In his youth, beyond a brush with a polar bear while a midshipman on an expedition to find a north-east passage to the Pacific in 1773, he experienced his share of disappointments and indeed unemployment.
Then the outbreak of the french Revolutionary Wars opened the way for a long succession of triumphs, the earliest taking place in the Mediterranean, where he was blinded in his right eye.
He distinguished himself commanding HMS Captain at the 1797 Battle of Cape St Vincent against a larger Spanish force off the coast of Portugal, and mislaid his right arm in the unsuccessful action at Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
In the following year, he commanded a British fleet in the first of his historic victories at the Battle of the Nile.
Nelson’s reputation — for personal courage, aggression and tactical brilliance — won him the adoration of his captains and indeed crews. To this was soon added the love of Sir William Hamilton’s wife Emma, whom he met at Naples.
In 1801, he secured another victory, this time over the Danes, at Copenhagen, bequeathing to folklore the story that he ignored an order to withdraw by putting a telescope to his blind eye to read the flag signal.
HE SuBSEQuENTLY commanded fleets involved in a blockade of french ships in Toulon harbour, and in unsuccessful pursuit of the french and Spanish fleets to the West Indies.
Only on October 21, 1805, did he finally bring the enemy to battle off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar, which became his greatest victory and secured Britain against invasion by the vast army Napoleon had assembled on the Channel coast.
at Trafalgar and in the actions that immediately followed, the french and Spanish lost 24 ships of the line, more than Nelson commanded when he engaged. He was shot down by a sharpshooter in the tops of the french Redoubtable, and died three hours later.
Nelson’s signal before the battle ‘England confides that every man will do his duty’; his words as he lay dying: ‘Kiss me Hardy. Take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Thank God I have done my duty’, have ever since been part of every British schoolchild’s education.
afua Hirsch remains unmoved. Her attention focuses on Nelson’s friendships with West Indian slave traders, and his description of the ideals of abolitionist William Wilberforce as ‘a damnable and cruel doctrine’.
Putting about such ideas, Nelson wrote to a friend in June 1805, encouraged rebellion in Britain’s West Indian islands.
Nelson’s finest biographer, John Sugden, observes that it is uncertain how far this remark reflected the admiral’s considered view.
He was exemplarily kind to black sailors who did good service on his ships, and in 1802 wrote another letter in support of a proposal by one of his own officers to employ free Chinese labour in the West Indies instead of slaves.
To most of us, all nit-picking about these things is ridiculous. Nelson was a man of his time. He would have mocked the notion of women being granted the vote; though he disliked the ‘cat’, offenders were cruelly flogged on his ships.
There is no record that he was much troubled by the hanging of sheep-stealers or the impressment of poachers into ships’ crews, any more than were the ruling classes of the civilised world.
all that matters, in the eyes of sensible British people, is that Nelson wrought wonderful service against his country’s foes. Without his genius at sea, it is conceivable that the tyrant Bonaparte could have prevailed over our ancestors.
His towering virtues make his vices, among which conceit and nastiness to his wife were conspicuous, visible only through a microscope — one which is now in the hands of afua Hirsch and her friends, whom I venture to guess know little and care less about the Napoleonic Wars.
I will offer them comfort, however, on another such case: that against america’s statues of Confederate Civil War heroes. Most were erected in the early 20th century by Southern segregationist politicians, for the explicit purpose of glorifying the cause of white supremacy in their lifetimes.
In other words, they were created not as authentic acts of commemoration, as was Nelson’s Column in the 1840s, but instead to support an ugly and indeed indefensible racist case, and in pursuit of Southern hopes of reversing the consequences of the u.S. Civil War, their own fathers’ defeat.
It is thus understandable why black americans, and many white ones, too, want them removed.
CONTRaRILY, while the mining tycoon and nation-builder Cecil Rhodes was an unpleasant human being, he made a notable contribution to the British Empire of his day — when even the best people were imperialists — and to philanthropy after his death.
Edward Colston is commemorated not because he was a successful 17th and 18th-century slave trader, but because he was a prominent citizen of Bristol, who did many good things for that city.
History is shot through with bad behaviour. In the heyday of empire, West Indian sugar processed by slaves was a cornerstone of Britain’s prosperity.
Likewise many imperial generals, up to and including Kitchener, were at best cavalier, at worst brutal, in their treatment of native races, including prisoners. We no longer treat people so cruelly, any more than we hang convicted homosexuals as did the courtsmartial of Nelson’s Royal Navy, but it is childish to pretend that we can undo their customs and reverse their verdicts, hundreds of years later.
The Welsh might as well demand the right to tear down the ruins of Edward I’s magnificent castles in their country, because they were built to hold Wales under English subjection.
In this silly season, we should laugh off afua Hirsch’s spasm of silliness about Nelson. But if a day comes when our rulers take seriously such demands, agree to erase portions of our heritage as Stalin erased Trotsky from every photograph of the Russian Revolutionaries, then we shall relinquish essential cultural values, rooted in a proper understanding of history.
The past is another country in which matters were done differently, but we must continue to revere our great men and women, heedless of the odd blot on their escutcheons.