Further to Aide Memoire of Aug/Sept 1805, discovered by the late Dr Colin White, Nelson wrote, 'Ralph Dixon of the Doris Transport lost an arm in carrying my dispatches. Wants a pension.' Very recently I found through the British Library Newspaper Archive index references in a number of newspapers - I quote the 'Morning Post's Monday 10th June 1805 edition - to an attack on Doris transport in June 1805 by a Spanish Privateer, 'a fine cutter brig of 18 guns'. The article begins, 'Dispatches were received on Saturday from Lord Nelson, which, however, are only duplicates of those which previously reached Government. They were brought by the Doris transport ----- which, on her passage, fell in with and gallantly beat off a Spanish brig privateer ---.' The action is described vividly in a letter written by George Lambe, Captain of Doris (a 'ship' with eight eighteen pounders) which the paper included in the report. The Captain is full of praise for his crew. There were two casualties, of whom Captain Lambe says , 'I am extremely sorry for a fine young man, a sailor that had the misfortune to lose his right hand early in the action, another slightly wounded.' He was writing from Falmouth, from where he was awaiting a favourable wind for Portsmouth. He concludes the letter - 'The young man's arm is in a dangerous state, I must have a surgeon alongside to-morrow to look at it.' This 'young man' must have been Ralph Dixon, who was born in 1785 (at Branxton, Northumberland - I think his father, William, was a blacksmith.) (Ralph left the Navy soon after , apparently, and in about 1810 married Ann Elliott, with whom he raised a family - including my Great Great Grandfather, William Dixon - in Spittal, Tweedmouth. Ralph was a Greenwich Out-Pensioner, a Pilot registered Berwick on Tweed and the owner and skipper of the four crew Hero of Spittal. He lived in copyhold property and died at Spittal in 1860.
_________________ Aug/Sept 1805 Nelson wrote 'Ralph Dixon of Doris Transport lost an arm in carrying my dispatches. Wants a pension.' 11. 6. 1805 Doris and Wasp - dispatches nr Cape St Vincent. Info sought. Pension 1820 - est no. 106. No Doris musters!
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