Page 220 - The Secret Museum

IN ST PAUL’S IT HUNG alongside a French flag also captured at Trafalgar, to
symbolize the great victory Nelson had won with his bravery, his superior strategy
and, finally, with his life.

After Nelson’s funeral, it stayed in St Paul’s for a century. Now, it belongs to the
National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. They keep it in storage, because it’s very
fragile and they simply don’t have the space to hang it. It is 10 metres long and 14.5

metres high and is the biggest flag in their collection.

‘It’s a whopper,’ said Barbara Tomlinson, curator of antiquities since 1979. ‘We
haven’t ever displayed it officially, but in the 1960s the museum was very naughty
and hung it for one day from the front of the Queen’s House,’ one of the main, large,
buildings that make up the National Maritime Museum. ‘It trailed on the floor as it