Europe > United Kingdom > East Anglia > Barsham > Sailing > Articles > Nelson's Norfolk

You could easily miss the Church of the Holy Trinity at Barsham, tucked away as it is off a minor road in a back country part of the Suffolk/Norfolk border. But for anyone on the trail of Norfolk’s greatest and most glorious son, it’s the right place to start; for it was just across the churchyard wall in Barsham Rectory that Catherine Suckling, mother of Horatio Nelson, was born in 1725, and here in Holy Trinity that she was baptised.

Horatio Nelson owed the well-connected Suckling family more than just his mother. If it hadn’t been for the patronage of Catherine’s brother Captain Maurice Suckling RN, after her early death in 1767, the thin young lad with the burning ambitions might never have gone to sea. Uncle Maurice found 12-year-old Horatio a berth as midshipman in his 64-gun ship-of-the-line Raisonnable, remarking jauntily, ‘What has poor Horace done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come; and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.’ As for Uncle William Suckling, Comptroller of Customs, it was to him that the impoverished Nelson applied for funds when he had decided to marry Fanny Nisbet. A fine stained glass window, installed in Holy Trinity church in 1905 on the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar, commemorates these pivotal people in Nelson’s life.

Across the county border the seaside town of Great Yarmouth is Norfolk’s biggest seaside resort these days. In Nelson’s time it was a bustling and prosperous port. He returned several times in triumph to land on the ancient jetty, still preserved between the piers – most notably on 6 November 1800, two years after his bold night action against the French fleet he had trapped in Aboukir Bay, which secured the stunning victory of the Battle of the Nile. The Little Admiral wasn’t at all sure he would be well received in England, having courted scandal and stirred up opprobrium by his openly adulterous affair with Emma Hamilton. But Yarmouth saluted him with cannon and cheered him to the echo. He was drawn in a carriage pulled by volunteers to be granted the Freedom of the Borough in front of a wildly enthusiastic throng, all mad with worship of their local icon.

An enormous fluted column 144 feet high, topped by a figure of Britannia in full flowing dignity, proclaims this familiar ‘Nelson Triumphant’ image across the town. Among the displays in the well-ordered little Norfolk Nelson Museum on South Quay - astonishingly, the only museum in these islands dedicated to our greatest naval hero – one gets a rounder view of this fascinatingly flawed man, so brave and sympathetic, yet so insecure and vain. Local businessman and Nelson fanatic Ben Burgess spent all his long life hunting for Nelson memorabilia, and the museum is based round his splendidly wide and haphazard collection – portraits of the Little Admiral with his swarthy chin, deeply grooved cheeks and unkempt grey hair, another likeness executed in scrimshaw etching on a whale tooth, snuffboxes and toby jugs, a ticket of admission to Nelson’s state funeral, and a model of the funeral car that bore his coffin dressed up as his flagship Victory, a piece of gloriously over-the-top ostentation that the showman sailor himself would surely have loved.

Over at North Walsham the hero’s alma mater of Paxton’s Grammar School (nowadays a sixth-form college) has more Nelson mementoes on display – pieces of the White Ensign ripped to pieces for souvenirs by seamen at their beloved Admiral’s funeral, letters in Nelson’s wobbly left-hand writing (perforce, after he lost his right arm in a raid on Tenerife in 1797), an elm-wood bust carved by a dockhand during Nelson’s lifetime, official portraits that enhance his honour and glory, cartoons that mock his pretensions and penchant for self-aggrandisement.

Strung along the North Norfolk coast are the little marshy ports of Brancaster, Wells-next-the-Sea and Burnham Overy Staithe where the youngster used to ride to watch the ships. And at the village of Burnham Thorpe, birthplace of the great man, a ‘Nelson Walk’ (see alongside) links together many of the sites of Nelson’s early life.

The figure of Horatio Nelson, slender, one-armed, eccentric, spindle-shanked and awkward, bestrides our naval history. All the great tales associated with Nelson – the midshipman who recklessly stalked a polar bear, the daring Captain who broke ranks to seize victory at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the telescope to the blind eye at Copenhagen, ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ at Trafalgar – make one long to see through the mists to the man beneath the myth, and beyond that to the boy who was father to such a complex and utterly dynamic man. Nelson truly was ‘the greatest Norfolk man that ever lived’, and his native county has not forgotten its much-loved, homegrown hero.

Nelson Walk at Burnham Thorpe

With warm spring sunshine drawing up the daffodils it was a wonderful morning to be starting out on the ‘Nelson Walk’ at Burnham Thorpe. All Saints Church rang with Nelson vibrations: the font where he was baptised, the crests of ships named after him, a marble bust of the Little Admiral, a rood cross and lectern made of timbers from HMS Victory, a contemporary 1805 newspaper account of a nation convulsed with grief at the grand state funeral of this Burnham boy. In front of the altar lay buried his father Edmund, Rector of Burnham, and his mother Catherine Suckling who died when Horatio was nine years old.

As I tramped pale flinty paths through the cornfields, larks sang and March hares frolicked. Young Horatio might have blinked at the sight of tractors drawing seven-fold ploughs through the soil, but little else has changed since he wandered here. A green woodpecker rattled from the trees of Holkham Park, where Nelson often went by invitation of the Coke family to course hares and shoot (he was such a rotten shot that others were scared to go out with him). Down by his childhood paddling and fishing haven, the River Burn, I found the site of the Parsonage where he was born, and the man-o’-war shaped pond that he dug in the garden. The house itself, commemorated by a modest bronze plaque in a nearby wall, was demolished in 1803 at the height of Nelson’s fame as a national hero. (How on earth was that allowed to happen?)

Back in the quiet brick-and-flint village of Burnham Thorpe I called in at the pub opposite the church. This modest inn was known as The Plough at the time of the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in February 1793, when the young Captain gave a farewell party here before setting off in the highest of spirits to command the 64-gun Agamemnon – his first ship after five years ‘on the beach’. Years of unimaginable success, glory and adulation were to follow. In 1807, two years after his death, Burnham Thorpe proudly renamed its alehouse after its most illustrious son. Sitting in the high-backed settle of the Lord Nelson among pictures and mementoes, I raised a glass of the pub’s own secret-recipe ‘Nelson’s Blood’ to the Immortal Memory of Norfolk’s naval hero.

Walk guides:
• download walk guide and map from www.edp24.co.uk
• Nelson’s Heritage Walks by Allan Jones (£2.70 in local bookshops and TIOs, or by post + 40p from 42 Elvington, Springwood, King's Lynn, PE30 4TA. Cheques payable to Ramblers Association.)

Articles

• More from Christopher Somerville
• More on the same theme