The Tories displayed unlooked-for emotion over the Nelson pen- sion
debate. It was known that a handful of them intended as indi- viduals to oppose the Bill ending the annuity of £5,000 to the descendants of Lord Nelson's brother, but in the end they voted as a party against the Bill, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe winding up against it for the Opposition Front Bench. There was a good deal of unconvincing talk about obligations, broken faith and national honour. The plain fact is that titles and material honours were showered on Lord Nelson after his great victories at the Nile and Copenhagen ; none were or could be after Trafalgar, for he died in the cockpit of the ' Viotory ' seventeen days before the news reached England. As Mr. Dalton recalled in introducing the Bill on Tuesday, Nelson's last and urgent appeal on the day of his death was that his country should care for Lady Hamilton. His country preferred to ignore that moving request completely and to endow Nelson's elder brother, a Norfolk clergyman, with an earldom, a perpetual annuity of £5,000 a year and an estate which cost Doo,000. The £5,000 has been paid foc 140 years so far to the Rev. William Nelson's indirect descendants, and it is obviously open to the Parliament of 1946 to take a different view from the Parliament of 18°6 regarding
its perpetual continuance. * * * *
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