How brandy helped Lord Nelson on his last voyage

Tales that Lord Nelson's crew drank the brandy his body was preserved in were probably unture, Nick Ball said

With the Battle of Trafalgar won but the country's great naval leader killed in action, thoughts turned to how to get both Lord Nelson and his flagship back to England.

HMS Victory had led the Royal Navy fleet in its assault on the French and Spanish on 21 October 1805, and the Chatham-built warship had suffered a great deal of damage.

The naval commander himself had been killed by a French sniper, and his loyal captain Thomas Hardy was determined to keep a promise not to bury him at sea.

With HMS Victory going to Gibraltar for repairs before sailing home, he turned to French brandy to make sure Lord Nelson's body made its final voyage.

HMS Victory is now in dry dock in Portsmouth

"How do you bring someone back to England whose thousands of miles away who's died?" Nick Ball, of Chatham Historic Dockyard, said.

"They pickled him in the biggest barrel they had on the ship, in brandy, not rum – slightly ironic it was a French drink, with camphor and myrrh, and the alcohol preserved him."

Lord Nelson laid in state in Greenwich before a funeral at St Paul's Cathedral, being laid to rest in a sarcophagus that had originally been commissioned for Cardinal Wolsey.

Mr Ball said tales that Lord Nelson's sailors drank the brandy after bringing him home were probably not true.

HMS Victory had several more years active service ahead of her.

After extensive repairs in Chatham, the vessel was sent to the Baltic under Admiral James Saumarez, as part of a bid to break the French trade blockade of Britain.

HMS Victory became a tourist attraction in Portsmouth, after being moved to a dry dock in 1922.

The dock from which she was launched in Chatham is now home to another museum ship, the World War II destroyer HMS Cavalier.