The Tough Old Commodore / The bullets and gout have knocked his hulk about

This caricature by Thomas Rowlandson depicts an elderly naval officer with a wooden left leg. Behind him, a younger man looks through a telescope, and a woman wraps her arm around a marine. In the foreground, a woman leans on a cannon with clay pipe in her mouth. Ships are visible in the distance. The watercolour is mounted on another sheet with a border.

The naval officer in this caricature has long been identified as Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley Bt. (1734–1808), who lost his leg at the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794. The traditional title of this drawing is ‘The Tough Old Commodore’, together with the associated quotation: 'The bullets and gout have knocked his hulk about'. This line is derived, with minor changes (including 'hull' to 'hulk'), from a popular song entitled ‘The Tough Old Commodore’, which was circulating at least as early as 1800, when it appeared in print in ‘The Myrtle and Vine; or, Complete Vocal Library’ (London: West & Hughes, 1800), vol. 3, p. 91. The lyrics were credited to Mark Lonsdale and the music to W. Reeve in ‘Songs, Naval and National, of the Late Charles Dibdin’ (London: John Murray, 1841), pp. 322–24. It is unclear exactly when or how the title and quotation of this song became associated with the present drawing or with Pasley, but the quotation also appears in other naval caricatures and printed sources, so it was presumably at one time a well-known piece of naval humour. The association dates back to at least 1880, when Joseph Grego listed the drawing in ‘Rowlandson the Caricaturist’ (vol. 2, p. 426) as ‘Admiral Pasley – The Tough Old Commodore’ with a long version of the ‘bullets and gout’ quotation: ‘Why, the bullets and the gout / Have so knocked his hull about / That he'll never like the sea any more’.

Pasley had a long and active naval career through the Seven Years War and the American and French Revolutionary Wars. Appointed Commodore in command in the Medway in 1788, he became a rear-admiral in April 1794, just before losing his leg in the 'Bellerophon' in Howe's victory over the French at the Battle of the Glorious First of June that year. He received a pension of £1000 in compensation, a baronetcy and one of the gold medals and chains awarded to the seven flag-officers in that action, an unusually high number. His last active services were as a vice-admiral; as commander-in-chief at the Nore (1798) and, from February 1799, at Plymouth. He became Admiral of the Blue in January 1801 and Admiral of the White in the post-Trafalgar promotions of November 1805 and died in retirement at his home near Winchester in 1808. The Museum also has an oil portrait of Pasley by Lemuel Abbott (BHC2941) and a fine miniature apparently based on that by Horace Hone (MNT0085).