The Wondering Brit

I’m not a great historian by any stretch of the imagination, but Trafalgar, while a Royal N…thing (sorry, can’t seem to spell that word) is one of history’s greats. It was important too. Nelson’s defeat of the combined Spanish and Fr**ch fleets and is one of the many reasons (and there are many) why the English language is spoken (or a form of it) in the USA etc.
But today is an important day in British military history – yet, typically, not much is going on about it.

The Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 was the most decisive British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Twenty-seven British ships of the line led (click map to enlarge) by Admiral Lord Nelson aboard HMS Victory defeated thirty-three French and Spanish ships of the line under French Admiral Pierre Villeneuve off the south-west coast of Spain, just west of a place named Cape Trafalgar (oddly enough). The Franco-Spanish fleet lost twenty-two ships, without a single British vessel being lost.
Nelson was mortally wounded during the battle, becoming Britain’s greatest war hero of the time and then only succeeded by Wellington himself. The commander of the joint French and Spanish forces, Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, was captured along with his ship Bucentaure.

Needless to say with Nelson at sea and the Duke of Wellington on land chasing down and whooping Napoleon, the day or at least the campaign was won – then we had to go and do it all again and England, will forever be our England! (well, until Hitler turned up and we had to do it yet again – Doh!)

This post is for the Richie family in Houston

UPDATE:

Loraine mentioned something in the comments about the lamp posts in Trafalgar Sq in London were cast from the cannons of the Franco Spanish ships that lost the battle.

Firstly, the Column itself is topped off with a ‘Capital’ (thats the bit that finishes the top of a column off)was cast from unused bronze ordnance. Furthermore, as I mention in the comments section, each street lamp running from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Place has a ship on it that was defeated by Nelson.

Old captured weapons adorn the streets of London, it was indeed common practice to spike and use them or melt them down, using them as trophies of sorts. None more so than old cannons. All over London and indeed the UK you will see a certain shape of bollard on the sides of roads etc – these are often old small canons that were captured from the ‘then’ enemies of the realm – and there was a hell of a lot of them.

These days they even manufacture this shape of bollard in order to keep the continuity of local architecture in tact because of the sheer number of originals.