The Nelson Companion by Colin White

Author:Colin White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Great Britain – London

Other than Norwich, London was the first city that Nelson saw when, as a boy of twelve, he passed through on his way to join his first ship at Chatham. He and his father stayed, however, in a northern suburb with his uncle William Suckling, a Commissioner in the Excise Office who lived in Kentish Town – local historians are currently researching the claims of two possible addresses, one of them in Kentish Town Road – among the beer-gardens, villas and wayside taverns.

A year later, Midshipman Nelson was commanding a ship’s boat plying between the Nore and the Pool of London, then crowded with shipping unloading into lighters. He would particularly have noted at Greenwich the Royal Hospital for naval pensioners (now the Royal Naval College) designed by Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh (open) and the naval dockyard at Deptford. However, the buildings of the Admiralty’s Victualling Yard, some of which survive by the river, date from the 1780s so he would not have seen them until later visits.

Subsequent visits to London took him to the Navy Office, the administrative department housed in the west wing of Somerset House, which still, of course, stands. He also regularly visited the Admiralty, Thomas Ripley’s familiar porticoed building in Whitehall. There he will have known the Board Room, now much restored after war damage, but still displaying the indicator of the wind vane on the roof, set amid carvings in wood by Grinling Gibbons. On the ground floor is a small room to the south of the entrance, overlooking the courtyard. Then known as the Captains’ Room it is now known as the Nelson Room because it was there, candle-lit, the walls hung with black crêpe, that his body rested on the night before his funeral on 9 January 1806. The Board Room and the Nelson Room both still belong to the Navy, which has otherwise been moved out of its historical home. (Both rooms are occasionally shown to special interest groups such as, for example, the Georgian Group.) In the adjoining Admiralty House, then the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty, he twice dined with Lord and Lady Spencer: on the first occasion, he was clearly much attached to his wife Fanny; on the second, after his return from Naples, he was irritated by her. Admiralty House is now used for Government entertaining and ministers’ flats. An alternative setting for these dinner parties might have been the Spencer House overlooking Green Park.

As a young officer he would take lodgings to be near both the Navy Office and the Admiralty at 3 Salisbury Street, south of The Strand, and 3 Lancaster Court, close to St Martins-in-the-Fields; both have long gone but the type of houses they probably were can be seen in 33 and 34 Surrey Street, running from the eastern end of The Strand towards the river. It was at this period, when a young captain, that he would visit his friend, and future prize agent, Alexander

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