Siam p Story No. 52 Admiral Nelson

Press, Volume C, Issue 29709, 30 December 1961, Page 8

Siam p Story No. 52 Admiral Nelson

[By KEN ANTHONY] AT first sight it seems strange that Barbados in West Indies should have been the only country in the world to pay tribute to Admiral Lord Nelson with a special set of seven stamps on the centenary of his death in 1905—even though the stamps were not put on sale until March of the following year. But Nelson, who joined the Royal Navy when he was only 12 years old, spent much of his early service in West Indian waters. And when the French fleet under Villeneuve evaded his blockade of Toulon, Nelson chased them to the West Indies. Then he followed them back across the Atlantic once more before defeating them r* Trafalgar on October 21, 1805.

Barbados, one of the earliest of British overseas settlements (dating back to 1027) almost fell Into the hands of the French at this time. Nelson's victory effectively ended the French threat to the West Indian islands, and in Barbados, a monument was erected in his honour. But it was a fit of excessive local patriotism that the stamp designer described the monument as the first of its kind. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. That distinction is believed to belong to the statue of Nelson in Montreal erected as early as 1808. And by the time the Barbados statue had been unveiled by the governor of the colony in March, 1813, two monuments had been built in Britain—at Birmingham and Edinburgh—and a column had been unveiled in Dublin. A close-up view of the Barbados statue appears on the 4c. stamp issued by the colony in 1950, and again on the stamp of the same value used there today. But in both cases the incorrect inscription has been removed.— (Central Press Features, Ltd. AH Rights Reserved.)