Program Title
I Remember Nelson

Based On
Historical fact

Adapted By
Hugh Whitemore

Number of Episodes:
4

Description
Drama series based on the life of Admiral, Lord Nelson, the victor at the Battle of Trafalgar. Each of the four episodes shows the life of Nelson through the eyes of people whose life he affected closely: his wife, Fanny, Lady Nelson; Sir William Hamilton, the man he cuckolded; his friend Captain Thomas Hardy, probably the man who knew Nelson better than anyone else; and, finally, through the eyes of a young sailor on board "Victory" (Nelson's ship) at the Battle of Trafalgar, when Nelson lost his life and earned his place in history.


Original broadcast date
1982-02-21

Cast	Characters
Kenneth Colley
Geraldine James
Anna Massey
John Clements
Laurence Naismith
Sylvester Morand
John Forbes-Robertson
Tim Pigott-Smith
Vernon Dobtcheff
Liza Sadovy
Daniel Massey
Phil Daniels
George Raistrick
Nicholas Frankau.

Credits

Producer: Cecil Clarke
Director: Simon Langton

Intro
I REMEMBER NELSON/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight, we have an experiment in biography from a British commercial company, ITC Entertainment. The producer is Cecil Clark and he had the idea of dramatizing the character of a man as seen through the eyes of four individuals who were close to him. The man is Horatio Nelson, the greatest of British naval heroes, whose final feat of breaking Napoleon's naval power opened the oceans to a continuous patrol of the British Navy--which, I guess, guaranteed as much as anything that Europe would have no major war throughout the nineteenth century.

Now these portraits are painted in turn by Nelson's wife Fanny, his friend Sir William Hamilton (whose wife Emma became Nelson's mistress), Captain Thomas Hardy who served with Nelson for a dozen years or so, and finally a simple seaman whose first battle was Nelson's last: the Battle of Trafalgar.

Well, before we come to his wife's view of him, I'd like to say something about Nelson's extraordinary, though typically eighteenth-century career. The eighteenth century in England was a time when--especially among genteel and well-born families--boys were, as they said, brought forward early. Now, this meant that a fifteen-year-old scholar went to the university. And ambitious boys became law clerks and merchants, practically in boyhood. Nelson was descended on one side from generations of clergymen and on the other from Navy men who had links with the aristocracy. His father was the rector of a parish in the county of Norfolk. And when Nelson was only twelve, he heard that his uncle, a Navy captain, was going on a voyage to the Falkland Islands and this little boy begged to go along. And so he did. And he went from ship to ship until, when he was sixteen, he'd been to the East Indies, the West Indies, and had been on a polar expedition. He even fought a polar bear. When he was in the Indies, he contracted a tropical fever and it plagued him for years, which resulted in him being on the retirement list for five years.

His great opportunity came in 1793 when the war with France broke out. For seven years, he was in continuous action and soon commanded it. He lost his right arm in Corsica and was later blinded in his right eye. He was knighted and made a Rear Admiral for his defeat of the French fleet, but he didn't become a world figure until Napoleon, having rebuilt his fleet, sailed to Egypt to take it, and then went to the conquest of India. Well, those hopes were shattered when Nelson trapped the French fleet in the Bay of Aboukir. This was known as the Battle of the Nile. And that's where mischief came in, in the comely shape Emma Hamilton.

Now, Nelson had been wounded in the Battle of the Nile and to recover from his wounds, he went to stay with the British ambassador in what was then the Kingdom of Naples. Sir William Hamilton was an old man with a young wife. And she and Nelson became lovers almost at once. And this first episode is Nelson's wife's memory of a great theatrical celebration that was put on in London when Nelson returned from the Battle of the Nile.

His wife had been a young widow of a doctor when Nelson married her in the West Indies when he was twenty-nine. He's now forty-two, though of course through many of the intervening years he'd been at sea.

I must say that one of the pleasures, I think, of this theatrical show is to see God Save the King rewritten for Nelson, sung in the eighteenth-century manner almost as a chorus out of Handel. The pain of this occasion was Fanny Nelson's coming for the first time to face a fear that she'd suppressed for almost two years.





The Archive Database | Program History | Poster Gallery | Awards

Home | About The Series | The American Collection | The Archive
Schedule & Season | Feature Library | eNewsletter | Book Club
Learning Resources | Forum | Search | Shop | Feedback


©