Welsh Journals

Two Pembrokeshire midshipmen were in HMS Victory with Lord Nelson. Of Robert Cutts Barton little is known except that he was born in the county in 1785 and joined HMS Victory off Toulon on 31 July 1803 from the frigate HMS Amphion in which he had gone out from Britain. Two weeks after Trafalgar he transferred to HMS Queen 98, flagship of Admiral Collingwood. He was promoted lieutenant in 1806 and served in the boats of the Apollo cutting out a convoy in Rosas Bay in 1809. Barton was made a commander in 1819 and died aged 42 at Bideford in 1827.102 The other Pembrokeshire midshipman in HMS Victory, Francis Edward Collingwood, born at Milford on 23 March 1785, is immortalised in Arthur Devis' famous painting of the death of Nelson. The Admiral's biographer, Carola Oman,103 records that some midshipmen, walking wounded, were being treated in the cockpit where Nelson lay dying. In the painting Collingwood is shown standing in the background with Lieutenant Yule, 'their British bulk and complexions contrasting with those of the Admiral's wizened, whiskered Neopolitan valet'.104 Collingwood was the son of 'Francis Collingwood of Greenwich Esq. by Sarah, sister of Captain Thomas Richbell RN, Chief Magistrate of the Thames Police'.105 His grandfather, Edward Collingwood, had been Master Attendant at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Chatham and Deptford Dockyards. After serving in sloops and frigates, and in Foley's old Nile command, HMS Goliath, Collingwood joined HMS Victory at Spithead on 14 Sep- tember 1805, the month before Trafalgar. Young Collingwood has long been reputed to have been the avenger of the death of Nelson by having shot the French sharpshooter in the rigging of the Redoutable. This dis- tinction was, however, claimed by a fellow midshipman, John Pollard, then in retirement at the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, in a letter to The Times on 13 May 1863 in which he said that Collingwood had been with him on the poop of the flagship but for a short time only: It is true my old shipmate, Collingwood, who has now been dead some years, did come in the poop for a short time. I had discovered the men crowding in the tops of the Redoutable, and pointed them out to him, when he took up a musket and fired once; then he left the poop, I conclude, to return to his station on the quarter deck. I remained firing until there was not a man to be seen in the top; the