Local History Braughing and Trafalgar | Braughing and Trafalgar |
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The memorial obelisk of the Tower family of Upp Hall in Braughing churchyard (‘Hertfordshire Monumental Inscriptions: Braughing.’ Reference C8) may remind us of the connection between the village and the Battle of Trafalgar. Two of the obelisk’s four panels are uninscribed. However, the south and west panels are sacred to the memories of respectively Colonel Harvey Tower, much decorated veteran of the Crimea, and his mother, Mrs Maria Tower. Mrs Tower had inherited her 900 acres and the Lordship of the Manor of Braughing as one of the co-heirs of her father, Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey.
And there we may detect the link between Braughing and Trafalgar. As a second son with no prospects young Eliab had gone to sea in 1771 at the age of thirteen. By early October, 1805, Captain Eliab Harvey had risen to the command of the 98 gun battleship ‘Temeraire’ (‘Reckless’) in the fleet assembling off Cape Trafalgar. But Captain Harvey, with the death of his childless elder brother, was now also proprietor of both the family seat, Rolls Park, Chigwell, Essex, and the lands of the Manor of Braughing, which his great-grandfather had bought in 1695. After ‘Victory’, ‘Temeraire’ is surely the best remembered of the 73 ships involved in the Battle of Trafalgar. This is of course because of the part she played in the battle. Initially it had seemed that ‘Temeraire’ might lead the attack on the combined French-Spanish fleet. For Nelson appeared to have accepted his captains’ pleas that for the sake of their fleet’s morale he should take a less exposed, less dangerous place in the line of battle. But then he declined to give way, continued in the van, took the first massed broadsides of the enemy, and thereafter remained in the very thick of the fight. ‘Temeraire’ followed ‘Victory’ into the heart of the conflict, where she was grappled by ‘Redoutable’ and ‘Fougueux’, the one to port, the one to starboard. It was a marksman in ‘Redoutable’s’ mizzen topmast who had already dealt Nelson his mortal wound. ‘Temeraire’ silenced the guns of both enemy ships, repulsed their attempts to board her; then in her turn boarded them both and forced their surrender. ‘Fighting Temeraire’ indeed. However it does it seems that the phrase ‘Fighting Temeraire’, rather than being a contemporary epithet, originated with J W Turner, looking for a title for his picture of 1838. It is this painting, arguably the artist’s best, that has maintained ‘Temeraire’s’ fame for later generations. Though Turner’s painting of the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ records not the heroics of the battle but, in glorious swirls of colour, the last voyage of the famous three-decker to the breaker’s yard. When, just as after the battle, she was in tow. In 1805 dismasted, battered, rudderless, but magnificent, her fellow-fighter, ‘Sirius’, guided ‘Temeraire’ to Gibraltar for makeshift repairs that would see her home. Now, in 1838, an obsolete hulk is drawn to her fate by an apt representative of a new age, a steam tug, small, unglamorous, but many times more powerful that ‘Temeraire’ had ever been. So through Captain Eliab Harvey, promoted Rear-Admiral with immediate effect, pall-bearer at Nelson’s state funeral, Knighted 1815, Admiral 1819, M.P. for Essex, though never lived in the village, modern Braughing might feel closer to one of the greatest events in the nation’s history R.A.Horner |
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