Wales renews its campaign against Nelson

SIR – The continuing denigration of Britain’s greatest naval hero by the Welsh authorities is based on ignorance at best – and, at worst, might be considered malign.

Following your report in November 2020 about Nelson being listed as a person of concern by the Welsh government in its study on historical figures’ connections with slavery, the Nelson Society wrote to the First Minister informing him that the two sources on which the government had based its claims about Nelson were both incorrect.

The letter purportedly from him to a Jamaican plantation owner criticising William Wilberforce has been proved to be a forgery concocted by antiabolitionists after Nelson’s death.

The second piece of “evidence” was that, in 1834, following abolition, someone called Horatio Nelson received compensation for giving up one slave. The fact that this person was not related to Admiral Lord Nelson, who had been dead for 29 years, seems to have eluded the researchers working on behalf of the Welsh government.

Now, however, the Caerphilly Borough Council has listed the village of Nelson as being of concern because of the name’s links with slavery (report, October 10). To my certain knowledge there is no documentary evidence that Lord Nelson ever “opposed abolition of the slave trade or slavery”.

So far none of the evidence in the council’s dossier has been revealed, but I suspect it will have been based on similarly sloppy research. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the Caerphilly council is critical of Nelson’s responsibility for the supremacy of Britain’s navy.

Presumably this would be the same supremacy that allowed it to enforce the abolition of the slave trade, capture 1,600 slave ships and free more than 150,000 enslaved Africans, in the process sacrificing the lives of 1,500 of its sailors.

Lt Col Ray Aldis (retd)

Salisbury, Wiltshire