viii The Chairman’s Dispatch: Victory, Remembrance, and Daring Peter Warwick Over Time’s misty tide-stream sailing, Stirring the heart like the throbbing of the drums, Banners of conquest and bravery trailing, Out of the past she comes. How shall we honour her? How shall we name her? What shall her blazon be? FLAGSHIP OF NELSON, FLAGSHIP OF ENGLAND, VICTORY’S ‘VICTORY’ Anon. This year with the successful celebration of the 250th anniversary of Admiral Lord Nelson’s birthday fresh in our minds, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the laying down of the keel of HMSVictory. However, we also said mournful farewells to Lt Cdr David Harris MBE RN and Dr Colin White, two leading lights of The 1805 Club and the naval history community generally. Meanwhile, we have all been shocked by the grim financial climate – an economic crisis so severe that it has set the scene for public spending cuts that may affect the future of the Royal Navy. Concurrently, we are on the threshold of commemorating the death, in March 1810, of another great figure from the era of the Georgian sailing navy, Admiral Lord Collingwood. This is very likely to be the last great naval bicentenary of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that will be remembered in a major way. Will future generations look back and see the years immediately following the Trafalgar bicentenary as some kind of symbolic watershed marking a time when the allure of Britain’s naval history and heritage had reached a highpoint, while the simple lessons ‘out of the past’ were misunderstood or even ignored? What shall Victory’s blazon be now? In the mid-nineteenth century William Thackeray penned, ‘The bones of the Victory ought to be sacred relics for Englishmen to worship almost’. Today, there is still no more illustrious a warship name in British naval history than
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