The shaming of the Royal Navy and Britain

The two hundredth anniversary of the second Battle of Copenhagen will occur this summer. The more famous first victory had taken place in 1801, details here, and there under the command of Admiral Nelson my great, great, great grandfather John Wilson served as a Lieutenant on the HMS Glatton under Captain William Bligh, later of HMS Bounty renown. The Scottish John Wilson, reportedly received his first command as a result of this engagement and later became Post Captain of the Salisbury, flagship of Rear Admiral Fahie whose third daughter he married. What would these two naval warriors have made of today's Royal Navy that seems unable to properly organize the boarding of an Arab dhow while under the control of a government that presides over nothing but incompetence? It is sometimes difficult to imagine that such decay and decline has not been deliberately contrived, an impression that the quote below from a letter received from a distant relative who tried to visit the graveyard where Captain Wilson was buried can do little to dispel. "Last summer (2005) while holidaying in Cornwall (we) visited the parish church of Stoke Damerel where the Wilson family grew up (near Plymouth). ... The church was the the official church for the naval dockyard ....We could not find any Wilson memorials in the church and entered the large churchyard to see if we could find any graves. Alas! The churchyard had turned into an unkempt jungle during the 39 - 45 war (it is amazing the church survived the blitz) AND THE CORPORATION TOOK OVER ITS MAINTENANCE. Their solution to the mess was to uproot all the gravestones and use them as paving stones or to reinforce the boundary wall, level and grass the area and mow it. It is now virtually a park with I think 3 very large graves left in situ. It is almost impossible to read the inscriptions on many of the stones. Many are covered in ivy too." What future for any country that treats the graves of its heroes of past generations in such a manner?