Channel 4's Trafalgar Below Decks season celebrates the 200th anniversary of Britain's greatest sea battle with tales of real life in Nelson's navy. The season consists of three films:
Nelson's War
Saturday 28 August 8pm
This programme examines the battle of Trafalgar as the culmination of Nelson's personal struggle for recognition, status and fame. He was courageous, charismatic, passionate, ruthless, a true statesman, according to his admirers, but vain, self-important, melancholic, irrational, according to his critics.
Nelson's War examines the man behind the legend, his affair with Lady Hamilton (one of the great romances of history) and the dark side of a hero whose exploits were described by his contemporaries as both 'glorious' and 'a stain on the national honour'.
Rum, Sodomy and the Lash
Saturday 28 August 9pm
What was life really like for the ordinary sailors of Nelson's navy who fought so bravely at Trafalgar and whose traditions, according to Churchill, were 'rum, sodomy and the lash'?
Drawing on contemporary testimony – from vivid personal journals to courts-martial for sexual misdemeanours – Rum, Sodomy and the Lash lifts the lid on the reality of life below decks in the Georgian royal navy.
Incredibly, considering how courageously they fought, half of the ordinary sailors had been 'press-ganged' – ruthlessly kidnapped and forced to serve on ships, often for years at a stretch. With the sailors drunk for much of the time on grog, even minor indiscipline was savagely punished. Sodomy, for instance, was punishable by death.
Many of the sailors' brothers-in-arms were actually sisters. Were these disguised women simply faithful sweethearts searching for their press-ganged husbands, as contemporary documents suggest, or were they transvestite lesbians, as keen on finding a girl in every port as the men were?
Trafalgar Battle Surgeon
Sunday 29 August 9pm
Trafalgar is remembered for Britain's defeat of the French navy and for the death of Nelson at the moment of victory. But Trafalgar Battle Surgeon takes an alternative view of the battle. This drama follows its course through the eyes of HMS Victory's surgeon William Beatty and his team on the lowest decks of the ship.
The film, directed by Justin Hardy (Princes in the Tower) and starring Francis Magee as Beatty and Roger Daltrey as his assistant, is based on the detailed journals left by Beatty and his contemporaries.
Thanks to Nelson's brutal tactics, they faced the toughest day of their lives. And just when they thought that it couldn't get any worse, a new patient arrived. Nelson had been shot by a French sniper as he walked the deck at the height of the battle. The film poses the question: why, if Beatty was able to save over 100 crew members that day, did he not even attempt to treat Nelson?
Made in association with the Wellcome Trust and based on new academic research drawn from primary source material, Trafalgar Battle Surgeon is a fresh look at the true heroes of the battle.
Channel 4 History website
Accompanying this short season of films is a fascinating article on below-decks life in Nelson's navy by Andrew Lambert, professor of naval history at King's College London, who appears in Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.