How Sunderland hero Jack Crawford was feted and forgotten - then celebrated all over again
Professor Angela Smith, of the University of Sunderland, recounts the story of Sunderland naval hero Jack Crawford - and how a Victorian-era revival of interest in his story led to his memory being commemorated with a headstone in an east end cemetery, and a statue in Mowbray park
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00:00 Jack Crawford was born in Sunderland in the dock area in 1775 and he would have been one
00:09 of those people whose names would have vanished because he was born into a very poor environment.
00:16 But he is someone who has a statue to him in Sunderland, so you might think, well why?
00:22 Why is this very impoverished beginning to a life now celebrated in the statue? And what
00:30 is he doing on the statue? He is nailing a flag to a mast. So why do we have to remember
00:36 what he was doing, where he came from and what he did? That's basically why Jack Crawford
00:42 is an important person in Sunderland, because he is someone who was very poor and yet we
00:47 have a statue to him. The one thing that we can say that is still in our culture that
00:54 is to do with Jack Crawford, apart from the statue in New Ebbry Park, is the phrase 'nailing
01:00 your collar to the mast'. And we have this idiomatic phrase in English, particularly
01:05 British English, where it means showing your true feelings or showing your true desires.
01:11 He was a celebrated sailor around the beginning of the 19th century because of the actions
01:20 in the Battle of Camperdown. Well, what he actually did in the Battle of Camperdown was
01:24 he was on a ship which was the commanding officer in that part of the naval action.
01:31 And that ship's mast was blown down by cannon from one of the French ships. And in naval
01:41 code, if your central mast with your flag is not visible, then that means you've surrendered
01:48 your ship. So Jack Crawford climbed up the shattered mast and nailed the ship's flag
01:55 back to the mast to show that the ship was still in action and hadn't been surrendered.
02:00 This is taken at the time to be one of the saving acts which led to the British Navy
02:07 winning the Battle of Camperdown. That's how he comes to be initially well known. He
02:13 was given a medal by the people of Sunderland and he was given a pension by the king. So
02:21 he was actually celebrated nationally at the time, not just locally. Unfortunately, the
02:27 pension was not very much. There was no social welfare at the time and he fell on hard times
02:35 as he got older. And he was very well known for sitting in the corner of a pub telling
02:43 his story about the Battle of Camperdown to anyone who would buy him a pint. He spent
02:48 most of his pension money on alcohol and he pawned his medal that the city or the town
02:55 had bought, had given him, for more money to buy alcohol. So this was the thing that
03:01 was quite common at the time. If you were very poor you would seek consolation and comfort
03:06 in alcohol. And he was actually recorded in Dr Clanney's notebooks as the second person
03:12 to die of cholera in 1831. So the biggest outbreak of cholera, the first recorded mass
03:19 outbreak of cholera in the UK is in Sunderland in 1831 and Jack Crawford is the second person
03:25 to die. If you look at the pattern of people who died of cholera at that time, early on
03:32 they were the very poorest people. They were the people in the very impoverished households
03:37 down by the docks. So he was obviously living in a very impoverished household. And that's
03:43 1831. And basically he gets forgotten about. It isn't until another 50 years later you
03:51 have a resurgence of interest in British imperialism and one of the things that they do is they
03:59 look back to British naval battles during the Napoleonic Wars and see, 'Oh, we've got
04:04 someone who is quite well known at that time, Jack Crawford.' And that's when you start
04:08 to have a resurgence of interest in Jack Crawford. And it was only when there came to be a greater
04:15 interest in Jack Crawford, this sort of heightened sense of British imperialism that we have
04:20 towards the end of the 19th century, that there started to be a lot of interest in British
04:26 naval history in particular and Jack Crawford's name cropped up as a local lad. And they constructed
04:33 a, or they put a plaque to him on his birthplace which was in the east end of Sunderland, although
04:42 most of the plaque was taken up with the details of the person who had funded the plaque, the
04:47 Earl of Councilor Anderson. And they also paid for a very, not so much expensive, but
04:57 a very high spec memorial stone to him which was in the grounds of Holy Trinity which is
05:05 now called 1719. And he's not actually buried there, but that's just where the memorial
05:11 to him is. And then later on, because there was such a lot of interest in him, they put
05:17 the statue up in Mowbray Park. There is a very famous poem which appears in children's
05:24 school books in the 19th century and that is about Jack Crawford and the battle, the
05:30 hero of the Battle of Camperdown. So it is not only a Sunderland thing, but it becomes
05:36 quite well known nationally as well. 'You nail your colours to the mast'. And that actually
05:40 is a phrase that comes from the poem written about Jack Crawford. So there is this legacy
05:47 that perhaps no one could ever have envisaged where there is a phrase in our language which
05:52 has a direct link to Jack Crawford in the Battle of Camperdown.
05:57 [BLANK_AUDIO]