The myth

Admiral Nelson wore a patch over his right eye-socket, to hide the disfi gured (or missing) eyeball.

The “truth”

Nelson never wore an eye-patch. The nearest he came to it was a peaked eye-shade which he had built onto his naval hat, but that was there to protect his good eye from the sun, not to hide his bad eye. Horatio was awarded a disability allowance for his missing right arm (mislaid during the battle of Santa Cruz), but the Navy refused him one for his blinded eye, because their doctors couldn’t tell whether it was genuinely sightless. In other words, Nelson had no need to wear an eye-patch, because there was no disfigurement to hide. Have a look at Nelson’s Column: no eyepatch. There are no patches, either, on any portrait made during his lifetime. The little black number seems to have been invented in the mid-19th century, perhaps to accentuate the great man’s disabilities, and therefore his heroism. The image was cemented in 1941, when Laurence Olivier played a patched-up Nelson in the film That Hamilton Woman.

Sources

www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/trafalgar_waterloo/nelson_01.shtml; www.ely.org.uk/cromwell/pNelson.htm; leading Nelson expert Colin White, interviewed by Reuters, 19 Jan 2005.