188 to Russell Square

Emma Hamilton (1765-1815) was an amazing woman and I won’t hear a word said against her. Before today I would have said she was simply the woman who became Horatio Nelson’s lover but now, thanks to the fantastic exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich I realise she was an amazing woman with so much more colour and life than the Victorians painted her with.

Panno of the exhibition entrance

In fact a lot of the exhibition is made up of paintings. Paintings, mostly, of Emma. Emma in all sorts of guises but mostly, it seems, as a baccante. And she had the licentious and seductive look that one associates with these followers of Bacchus. Simply put, she was a stunner.

Her life from the lowest to living among the highest was a hard fought one but she managed to reach the heights. Trouble was that she outlived her protectors and wound up running to and dying in Calais (very much like poor Becky Sharp) penniless with creditors worrying at her door.

But before her fall, she was one of the world’s first celebrities. Having managed to move from Chester to London, working as a servant at Covent Garden then in a number of brothels as, one assumes, a much sought after prostitute, she caught the eye of the aristocracy in the guise of Sir Harry (the Fop) Fetherstonhaugh, and made her way to his house, Uppark, which is not all that far from us.

There are rumours of her dancing naked on the dining table for the assembled guests of the house but, eventually she became pregnant and was, basically, thrown out. Step in Charles Greville who took her on board as a sort of Pygmalion project. And he succeeded better than Henry Higgins could ever have dreamed. She was then passed on to his uncle, Lord Hamilton in Naples.

And this is where she really made her mark. She learnt French, Italian, the local dialect and met all the right people. She created her own dance/performance thing called Attitudes which made her the toast of Europe. She became friends with the Queen of Naples and, eventually, married Hamilton to become Lady Emma Hamilton. Then she met Nelson.

Her love affair with the great British hero is pretty much well known but what isn’t is that Nelson sounded remarkably like Rob Tichener from The Archers. It gave me quite a start to hear him reading out their love letters. I’m afraid that the BBC has done such a good job of making him evil that it’s very difficult to hear him as anything else.

Apart from this small blip, the whole exhibition was fantastic, although by the end, it was very sad. I felt like I knew Emma so the straits she was brought to hit quite hard. Still, I was very glad I went and thoroughly enjoyed learning about her.

I’m also glad that I found time to pop into the Jutland centennial exhibition. The Battle of Jutland was a horrendous loss of life in the North Sea in an engagement between the German and British navies in 1916.

The exhibition dispassionately describes the action from start to finish. While it’s informative rather than emotive, the final displays describing the aftermath and effect ‘back home’ are at times tear inducing. A marvellous invocation of the insanity of war which benefits only the powerful and the greedy.

Then, for a bit of an adventure, I caught the 188 bus all the way back to Waterloo. The 188 stops outside the National Maritime Museum and goes all the way to Russell Square. This means it stops outside Waterloo Station on the way across the eponymous bridge. While the journey took a bit longer, it was certainly more interesting than the DLR and Tube.