A REMARKABLE series of unpublished letters written by an 11-year-old midshipman who was at the Battle of Trafalgar has been acquired for the nation.

The vivid eyewitness account of George James Perceval, who served on HMS Orion, a 74-gun battleship that played a key role in the closing stages of the battle, has been purchased by the National Maritime Museum.

In more than 40 letters, many written to Lord and Lady Arden, his parents in London, George painted a portrait of life aboard ship during the Trafalgar campaign, as well as the battle on October 21 and the death of Admiral Nelson.

In a letter dated October 13, he wrote to his mother: “I expect to come home to eat a Christmas Dinner with [you] if my head is not knocked of [sic] in any action.”

Nelson, he reported, had assured the fleet that “he will have a good bang at them”.

In his next letter, which is undated and whose scrawly handwriting suggests that it was written in a hurry, he gave an insight into the minds of the men who survived the battle that established British naval supremacy in Europe.

“I have as you wished been in one of the greatest actions that ever was fought,” he wrote, “ . . . but I am sorry to tell you that brave Admiral Nelson was killed by a musquet [sic] ball that went through his body.”

In another letter, he described his desire to “give [the enemy] a licking”, but there are also reminders that he was a young boy. On one page he drew a head for his mother to kiss “and think that it is my round face”.

Claire Warrior, the museum’s exhibitions curator, said: “They’re poignant in that they are from an 11-year-old. It makes you realise that someone so young was fighting in the battle and going through this horrific experience.”

Perceval died in 1874 aged 79. His uncle was Spencer Perceval (1762-1812), the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated, and his father was a prominent politician with links to the Navy. George did not disappoint them. He rose to become an admiral in 1863. In 1840 he succeeded his father as 3rd Baron Arden and the following year became 6th Earl of Egmont on the death of a cousin. A selection of the letters will go on display from today in the museum’s Nelson and Napoleon exhibition, which will be free to Greenwich visitors over Trafalgar Weekend.

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