File:One of Nelson's School -Joseph Burgin -Taken in Greenwich Park RMG PY3296.tiff

A portrait (titled as shown) of Burgin, a Trafalgar veteran and Greenwich Pensioner, seated slightly to his right on a folding chair, in his Hospital uniform and cocked hat, with his waistcoat painted blue and his other dress primarily drawn heavily in pencil. He has a drinker's red nose and mottled cheeks and an eye patch over the left eye. He wears trousers rather than breeches and his left peg-leg sticks out in front of him, visible below his left cuff. Burgin also appears - in a better state of apparent health and respectability - as the seated Pensioner in Andrew Morton's painting 'The United Services' of 1845 (NMM BHC1159), but without an eye-patch. With that proviso this drawing seems to be otherwise identical to the wood-engraved portrait of Burgin included with other Greenwich Pensioners in PAI8797, which is a page from the ILN of 13 April 1844 (p. 233): it may be its source. Burgin is there stated to have been about 60 (suggesting a birth date about 1784), was born at Bishop Stortford and in 1844 believed himself to the senior pensioner in the Hospital, which he entered in 1806. He was in Nelson's 'Vanguard' at the Battle of the Nile, 1798, was paid off at the Peace of Amiens but was reimpressed thereafter and lost his leg to a shot from the French 'Bucentaur' while serving on gun no. 13 on 'Victory's' middle deck at Trafalgar. In 1844 he was drawing a pension of £14 p.a.,. He appears in the 1851 census as aged 71 (ie. born c.1781). He may be the 'Joseph Berguin' who was buried in the Hospital burial ground on 17 July 1862 allowing that his age was then given as 87, which would give a birth date in 1775/6. Depicts clothing, outerwear: uniform, Greenwich Pensioner's.