Colin White on Nelson, the Latest (1st of 2) -- The Nelson Touch

In two programmes recorded in Spain, London, Portsmouth and Norfolk, Colin White -- one of the greatest Nelson historians alive -- presents the latest news on Nelson. How much do we know, what has changed over the succeeding generations since his death, what has happened to the iconography, his saintliness, the uses to which his heroism has been put -- in short, what is the latest on Nelson. In Part 1 we scrutinise a piece of paper. Before Trafalgar, Nelson devised a brilliant battle-plan, which he shared with his excited captains at a famous dinner party on board HMS Victory. He called it,"The Nelson Touch."

Beginning where it ended, in the rough waters off Cabo deTrafalgar near Cadiz in southern Spain and tracking Nelson's body back to Britain via Gibraltar and its sad naval cemetery to the Painted Hall at Greenwich and the apotheosis of the Nelson legend at his state funeral at St Paul's cathedral, Colin White tells the story of the launching of that legend and what has happened to it ever since. With expert contributions from the Second Sea Lord (who currently uses Nelson's rooms on Victory to work from), Roger Knight (naval historian), Adam Nicolson (writer), Agustin Guimera (Spanish naval expert), Ron Fiske (scholar of Norfolk) and a new poem especially written for the programmes and the anniversary of Trafalgar by the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, the two programmes that straddle the anniversary of the battle itself will remind us who Nelson was, why he mattered to his and subsequent ages and what he might mean to ours. There are two types of"new" material about Nelson emerging at the moment and Colin White has been central to their discovery and interpretation. New, unpublished letters: Colin White has found about 1,200 unpublished letters written by Nelson in various archives, both in Britain and overseas. These include what has been described as the Holy Grail of naval history: the Nelson Touch sketch that Colin White found and which indicates his battle plans for Trafalgar. Much new material is emerging from current research that places Nelson's career in its wider context. Work on the way he supplied his fleet has shown he was a great administrator as well as a great fighting admiral. Work by French, Spanish and Danish historians has changed our perception of Nelson's key battles in certain crucial ways. In 2001 Colin White discovered in the National Maritime Museum archive a hitherto unknown pen-and-ink sketch drawn by Nelson in the autumn of 1805 to illustrate the tactics that he would use in his next battle. It enables us to actually see what he meant by"The Nelson Touch". The way in which the plan was discovered is in itself a fascinating story and it leads on to a discussion, with other naval historians, of the tactics that Nelson used. The common myth is that his ideas were revolutionary. Modern research has shown that they were firmly rooted in experiments in tactics that had taken place over the preceding 50 years.