Nelson & His World

Folks

Apologies - this is an offshoot from my other thread about Horatia's parentage.

In Flora Fraser's biography of Emma she refers to the alter egoes, Mr & Mrs Thompson adopted by Nelson and Emma around the time of Horatia's birth. She states that this was due to their fear that their letters would be read by the naval censors and the information leaked.

If they did indeed exist, who and where were these censors?

Would they break the seal of a letter from an Admiral? Likewise letters addressed to an admiral.

I don't recall ever seeing a letter that had obviously been altered by a censor. Or a missing letter believed to have been intercepted by a censor.

Promise I am not getting paranoid about the Horatia parentage issue - but I am just keen that all the appropriate questions are both asked and satisfactorilly answered.

If there really were censors that will be something new that I learned.

MB

Mark:

In her opening chapter of 'Naval Wives and Mistresses' (pub. NMM, 2007) Margarette Lincoln observes:

'No one could be certain that letters once posted remained confidential. People were aware that some letters were opened, but were never sure where or how. In fact, successive governments tried to control the exchange of both the national and overseas mail. The Post Office in London had sophisticated equipment for steaming open wafers and reproducing seals with bread impressions, and officials routinely opened suspect letters, especially in times of crisis, although they were not supposed to do this without a warrant. When Nelson, having anchored at Spithead in August 1805, wrote to Emma Hamilton to say that he was coming home, he asked her to imagine what was in his mind and what he wanted to say, since he supposed his letter would be 'cut open, smoaked [sic] and perhaps read.'

So perhaps the proper term for what went on was 'government surveillance' rather than 'naval censorship', since there is no suggestion that the contents of letters were edited, but rather simply examined and the contents noted.

In this particular case, the Victory was in quarantine, and letters being cut open and smoked was presumably part of the routine fumigation of mail brought ashore.

There is some interesting information about the fumigation of quarantined mail. Wiki, with links to authoritative sites like the Royal Philatelic Society, notes that there were numerous processes available, such as making tiny holes in a grid pattern or snipping off a corner of a letter to allow the fumes to penetrate Often, too, there was a system of marking fumigated post to certify the process had been carried out - a valuable reassurance to recipients when infectious diseases were thought to be carried via paper, amongst other things. This was obviously quite different from the deliberate inspection of the contents of mail - but it is clear that this happened, and that Nelson feared it - hence his eagerness to entrust letters to private intermediaries such as Troubridge who passed on letters to St Vincent to be read, so Nelson's precautions were in vain. One wonders how St V. managed his inspection of Nelson's mail. It takes a degree of skill to re-seal an intercepted letter. Maybe there were indeed special naval inspectors of mail that St V could call on to open and reseal letters without leaving any trace that they had been opened.

Does anyone know more?