Place Name
Takes its name not from the battle directly but from the East Indiaman frigate, Trafalgar, which was a ship built in 1848 at the nearby Blackwall shipyards, for Green’s Blackwall line and registered for the London to Calcutta run. In his 1922 book The Blackwall Frigates, Basil Lubbock describes the crew of the Trafalgar in terms long-forgotten: “The crews carried by the Blackwall frigates both in numbers and quality far surpassed those of any other British merchant ships, they were in fact almost equal to those in the corvettes of the Royal Navy. The petty officers and men before the mast were always very carefully selected by the mate, aided as a rule by the bosun, and then submitted to the captain for his approval. Thus there was seldom a man aboard a Blackwaller who was not an expert rigger, practical sailmaker, a neat marlinspike workman, a burly sail-fister and a good helmsman… The Trafalgar carried 5 mates, and besides the usual petty officers a ship’ s fiddler and a cooper. The cooper was a most necessary man in the days when all the ship’s water was carried in casks. The fiddler vanished when patent windlasses and steam donkeys came in; before that date his was one of the most important duties when heaving up the anchor. This, with the old fashioned endless messenger, was a long job, and the fiddler on the capstan head kept the life in the men on the capstan bars. He was also an invaluable aid to dog-watch sing-songs and ship’s concerts.” The ship was eventually scrapped in 1875. As for Trafalgar, it became a popular vessel name following Lord Horatio Nelson’s victory against a superior Franco-Spanish fleet. In doing so, he secured British naval supremacy for several generations. Trafalgar is of Spanish of Arabic origin. Either from Taraf al-Ghar meaning Cape of the cave or Taraf al-Gharb meaning Cape/extremity of the West.