The KEDGE ANCHOR is the newsletter of The 1805 Club. It is published twice a year in Spring and Autumn and is distributed free to members. For information about the newsletter contact the Editor: Kenneth Flemming, 132 Slater Lane, Leyland, Preston Lancs, PR26 7SE, UK , +44 01772 513651 or mobile +44 07902919737. email: kenflemming@sky.com SPECIAL POINTS OF INTEREST: Meet the New Editor 10 Robert Leslie Fosterjohn 11 Nelson Marriage Register 12 Filling in the Blanckleys 16 Captain Cook 21 Admiral Hardy 24 Capo Noli 30 Nelson’s Lost Sword 33 THE KEDGE ANCHOR NEWSLETTER OF THE 1805 CLUB INSIDE THIS ISSUE ______________ Continued on page 2 Issue 51 Spring 2019 From the Editor 9 The Immortal Memory 18 Cornwallis Celebrations and Booking forms 34 AB&OS 29 Trafalgar Way Story Winners Make History 36 Painted Hall Greenwich 27 Inspirational Chairman Peter Warwick Has died aged 69 Club President Admiral Sir Jonathon Band GCB DL Says of Peter: What a man- what a contribution- what a loss. But he would not want us to be downcast because he never was during his extraordinary fight against cancer. Indeed, it was his will to fight on and to contribute to the Club right to the end that rightly earns him even more admiration. The Club is where it is thanks to his imagination, determination, inspiration and leadership. Our task now is continuing his good work and with a smile on our faces. Just how did his inspiration come about and from where. In Peter’s own words “all it took was one picture, the very last strip from the boy’s comic The Eagle, dated 15 March 1957, which concluded the story of The Great Sailor”. Creativity found by a boy of 7 that lasted for life and introduced a love of being part of a team. He first became captivated by Nelson’s river borne funeral shown in The Eagle comic strip. Replicating it by rowing HMS Victory’s cutter as part of her memorial crew in the Diamond Jubilee year of HM The Queen. While also taking part in the Fleet Review in the Solent, at Portsmouth. Enacting as one of the boats crew taking Nelson from the original point of the beach in Southsea from where he left to join Victory before Trafalgar. Voyaging from Southsea Beach, Portsmouth to Point Wild, Elephant Island, Antarctic to prepare a Nelson lecture. Truly Inspirational.
2 THE KEDGE ANCHOR Issue 51— Spring 2019 Educated at Pattinson College and Woodlands Comprehensive (now West Coventry Academy), Coventry, he read economics at Hull 1968-71 and, part-time, for a masters at Birkbeck 1972-75 on the impact of transport rationalisation on land values. His history was self-taught. Warwick was diverted from his intention of joining the Royal Navy for a short service commission by the offer of a job as personal assistant to the left-wing politician and entrepreneur T. Dan Smith. Smith gave Warwick great responsibility, while Warwick learned to network through dealing with Smith’s contacts who were as varied as the union-leader Vic Feather, the musician Yehudi Menuhin, and the then Foreign Secretary George Brown. His specific responsibilities included finding greenfield sites for motorway service stations and the planning application for Sullom Voe oil terminal. Though he believed he knew Smith’s business intimately, he was surprised not to be interviewed by the police after Smith’s arrest on corruption charges and remained convinced that Smith had been made a scapegoat by the establishment. In 1974-85 Warwick joined Legal & General’s investment planning team, ending as head of property research: projects included Landsdowne House and Leadenhall Market. His interests were never numbers, however, but people and while lent to a charity, Action Resource Centre 1985-88, he gained new qualifications in public relations, returning to L&G as business development manager 1988-91 and marketing director 1991-96. Warwick enjoyed champagne and fast cars, but the business world was changing around him and becoming less fun, and in 1995 he set up as a freelance consultant in marketing and communications, initially enjoying some success with Middle Eastern clients. This also enabled him to give more attention to his teenage son, Tom, and gradually, with a variable income, his life-style became more abstemious. He had already been known to put clients and junior colleagues at ease by descriptions, often using the cutlery, of Nelson’s battles, and now with downtime between commissions he was able to give full reign to his enthusiasm for his hero, Nelson. Warwick dated his obsession to 15 March 1957 when, aged 7, he read the last episode of ‘The Life of the Great Sailor’ in The Eagle, and experienced “a quasi-spiritual moment, like a hot knife going through butter”. Over the next 40 years he built a library about Nelson and collected artefacts related to him, but it was not until the 1990s, while showing friends round the Nelson exhiPeter Terence Warwick Was born on 20 December 1949 in Kenilworth where his father was a pioneer aero-engineer who worked with Frank Whittle and on jets from the Gloster Meteor Mk 1 to Concorde. HMS Victory Cutter at King’s Stairs Greenwich during the Emirates Thames Nelson Flotilla, 16 September 2005. Chairman Peter Warwick standing right wears a full dress replica naval captain’s uniform, and Alex Price, as John Richards Lapenotiere between the tossed oars wears a replica lieutenant’s uniform, both made by Keith Levitt at Henry Poole & Co, Savile Row.
3 Issue 51 — Spring 2019 THE KEDGE ANCHOR bition at the National Maritime Museum, that he learned about The 1805 Club and realised that he could share his interests with others. He immediately joined and, by his infectious enthusiasm and natural leadership, quickly rose to be the club’s chairman, a position he was elected to annually for the last fourteen years. Warwick helped turn The 1805 Club into a vibrant, international sponsor of events, conferences and scholarly publications. These ranged from the restaging of Emma Hamilton’s semi-naked attitudes, an audience with HM the Queen of Denmark during the bicentenary of the Battle of Copenhagen, and conservation of more than a score of monuments to naval heroes of Nelson’s time. Warwick also became one of only a handful of people to enjoy a three-course meal at the top of Nelson’s column, while there was scaffolding up for its maintenance, and there he hid his own marker for future generations to find. For 15 years “the great joy of my life” was being one of the volunteer crew HMS Victory’s replica cutter, who, dressed in their 18th century uniforms were not, he felt, re-enactors but representatives of the highest traditions of the Royal Navy. In 2005 he co-founded Thames Alive, an umbrella group to emphasise the importance of traditional rowing to the River Thames. The first of several spectacular riverborne pageants was a fulfilment of a boyhood dream, the Thames Nelson Flotilla, partsponsored by the Daily Telegraph, which on 16 September 2005 recreated Lord Nelson’s 1806 funeral procession from Greenwich to Westminster. Subsequently, encouraged by Lord Jeffrey Sterling, he proposed to the Palace a procession along the Thames to mark HM the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which in 2012 resulted in 300 rowed craft being led along the Thames by the newly-built Queen’s Row Barge Gloriana. For Warwick it was a bitter-sweet occasion. He felt strongly that proper credit for the event was not given to Thames Alive, though not one to bear malice but always quick with a Nelson quotation, he would say of this, “Never let there be petty jealousies between us”: nevertheless, he could not bear to watch the BBC’s “pathetic” courage of the event. He was also saddened that the zealous application of health and safety rules ended HMS Victory cutter’s appearances at this and other public events at home and abroad. Thames Alive also campaigned successfully for the London 2012 Olympic Torch Relay to feature the river and on 27 July 2012 the torch embarked at Hampton Court Palace and carried downriver to the Tower. The last event in which Warwick participated was a river parade to mark the centenary of the November 1918 armistice. In 2008 Warwick started another career as a speaker on Noble Caledonia’s sea cruises, rapidly establishing himself, his magic grin and grasp of detail, as one of its leading personalities. He was happiest spending many weeks each year at sea, particularly in the Caribbean where he made his name synonymous with naval history cruises in the three-masted barque Sea Cloud II. Whether there or in the Baltic, the Antarctic or the Pacific, Warwick brought naval and polar history to life through spellbinding, note-free talks given to the background of rapid-fire, colourful slides; he assisted the expedition leaders in boats and on land; and, always kind and interested in people, he expertly hosted his own ‘captain’s table’ in the dining room. He took perverse pleasure in that, like the sailors of old, he could not swim. His organising ability and his refusal to accept a rebuff were recognised by an invitation to join the Waterloo Dispatch when, inevitably, he soon took the lead in staging the bicentenary of the arrival in 2015 in St James’s Square of Wellington’s dispatch from the Battle of Waterloo. Warwick’s gift was his ability to light up a room, to engage each person as though he or she were the only person in that room, his phenomenal memory for names and places, and his numerous lifelong friendships. Warwick also had a powerful sense of duty and in the last phase of his cancer, after he had been advised not to drive, he rose early one morning in Lewes to make an unaccompanied, complex, cross-country rail journey to the West Country to honour a commitment to speak at a NADFAS (now Arts Society) function. He wrote Voices from the Battle of Trafalgar (2005) and two booklets Trafalgar: Tales from the Front Line (2011) and, in the pocket giant series, Horatio Nelson (2015). He regarded his last four and half years’ treatment for cancer and several major operations not as a battle but, like another of his heroes, Captain James Cook, as a voyage of discovery. Even in the closing days of his life he pursued new projects and was researching and fund-raising for a television series on the life of Emma Hamilton. Warwick married Paulette Beauchamp-Lait in 1976: they separated in 1982 and he is survived by his son who cared lovingly for him in the last months. Peter Warwick died on 20 March 2019. Peter Warwick recorded an interview for his obituary on 2 January 2019. For additional information the writer thanks,
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