TRAFALGAR DAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 October 1926, Page 6

TRAFALGAR DAY

LONDON COMMEMORATION.

(Australian and N.Z. Cable Association.)

LONDON, October 21. Nelson’s column at Trafalgar Square was surrounded by a mass of flowers to commemorate Trafalgar Day. . A bunch of violets was placed on his tomb at St. Paul’s, inscribed : To the memory of Emma Hamilton, W best beloved of Nelson, who was left to starve by an, ungrateful and hypocntical country.” “A VERY VULGAR PERSON.” A sentimental public has always turned a blind eye.to ths morality.o Lord Nelson’s affair of the heart with Lady Hamilton. Accepting his version of her services to him and so to the country which his victories saved from Napoieon s yoke we have enshrined Lady Hamilton,'with all her frailties, in our hearts ; we have pictured her, taking our cue from Romney, who was her devoted slave, as a beautiful woman, fit companion of a courageous man. But now we are told a different story. Tn ‘‘The Letters of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin,” we hear from the pen of one who was m Naples at the time the great Emma was mtrffiuino- for Nelson’s benefit that ‘ she is Indeed a I think her manner is very vulgar.’ Perhaps Lady Hamilton in those days had become careless in success, for in her early days she was a nised beauty, and it was indeed owing to her beauty of face and figure that she first had the chance, which she eagerly seized, to become a notability. Born the daughter of a blacksmith of the north country, Emma came to London, working first as a housemaid, and later attracted the attention of a notorious quack doctor. She appears to have been the lirst to appear in public, posing in scenes which have later been called “living statuary,” for Dr. Graham, taking her into his service, staged presentations of “Vestina, Goddess of Health,” in a house in the Adeplhi, which he called the Temple of Health. Mud-baths, lectures, and medicines were the stock-in-trade of Dr. Graham, and Emma, posing in “classic” costume, assisted him right well. Here her-beauty first became famous, to attract the attention of Neville, who lodged her in an apartment off the Edgware Road. Here she studied “elegance” and crudities of manner, and to learn how to behave in society. She succeeded, and the fame of her beanty—and. it must not be forgotten, her goodness of heart—spread through the town. The artist Romney pamte<| her agian and again. Besides his famous portrait of her there are twenty-four sketches of her still in existence. At this time Emma must have been very beautiful, far from the “whapper” she is spoken of as being later on after she had married Lord Hamilton and gone wiith him, wife of an ambassador, to Naples.

Frail as she was, it cannot be denied that there must have been great goodness in her that she became the friend and confidante of the Queen of Naples and of Lord Nelson.

Even when a life of ease had perhaps marred the lines of her figure, still she could charm people with its beauty, for in Naples Lady Hamilton entertained guests with “scenas” in which she posed in much the same manner as in her earlier days in the employ of Dr. Graham.

The Countess of Elgin modifies her criticism a trifle by saying “she looked very handsome at dinner, quite in an undress ; she is pleasant, makes up amazingly.” But yet there is a Mtle sting in the pice things she has to say about the woman of whom Nelson thought so much. Alas, it is only too true that, after the death of her hero, Lady Hamilton let herself go. Having squandered her capital—she was extravagant as well as generous—she retired to a small French village, and there was found ageing quickly, fat, lazy, with untidy hair, and manners no longer of the court, but reminiscent of the smithy whence she first came.