"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/12/17 (nailing your colours to the mast)

Thanks to John Barringer, who e-mailed in to ask for the story behind "nailing your colours to the mast", which is to declare your intentions very openly and also the idea that you will hold on to those beliefs intil the end, and there is a lovely story behind it. A little bit grisly, perhaps, because it goes back to a very famous 17th-century naval battle, and in those days colours, or flags - it's another word for flags - were struck or lowered to show surrender in a battle, but it was also a custom in warfare for one ship to direct its cannon fire at the opponent's ship's mast, so to disable it completely. Sometimes if all of the ship's masts were broken, the captain then had no alternative. He was completely lost. But if there was a little bit left, sometimes they would hoist the colours onto the remnants of the ship's rigging - in other words, they would literally nail their colours to the mast, as I say, quite literally. But there is a specific event involved and that is exploits of the crew of the ship called the Venerable, which is at the Battle of Camperdown, and that was a naval engagement that took place in 1797. It was between English and Dutch ships during the French Revolutionary Wars. Camperdown, because it was near Kamperduin in Holland. And the Venerable was under the command of the captain Adam Duncan. He led the fleet, the entire fleet, and it didn't go very well, the battle, at the beginning, so the main mast was struck and the blue standard, the Admiral, the blue flag, was brought down in the process, which could mean, as they say, that everything was over, but that's when history became an adventure story. Step forward the intrepid sailor called Jack Crawford. He climbed what was left of the mast - ans there wasn't very much left, a very, very precarious job - and nailed it back to where it was visible to the rest of the fleet, to show thst they hadn't surrended. It provided crucial in the battle. Duncan's fleet was victorious in the end and many saw Camperdown to be the end of dominance of the Dutch and the beginning of Britannia ruling the waves. Crawford returned home to Sunderland. He was an absolute national hero and, for years after, the bravery of those English sailors bacame the yardstick against which anything else was measured, so a very literal a nailing colour to the mast, all thanks to the sailor Jack Crawford.