In the early autumn of 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson set sail from Portsmouth to lead his fleet into battle against the combined fleets of France and Spain; on 8 January 2006, the nation mourned, as his body was interred in St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Britain - and Portsmouth - had lost its greatest hero since the Duke of Marlborough, but the name of Horatio Nelson would achieve "immortal status" and the threat of a French invasion of Britain had been destroyed forever.

Meanwhile, in Portsmouth, as with everywhere else in the country, domestic life quickly returned to normal, as the townspeople got on with the day-to-day business of living, working and, wherever and whenever possible, taking what enjoyment they could from what was still a very hard life.

Born in the previous century, a local lad by the name of John Pounds, son of a sawyer in the dockyard, became an apprentice shipwright there at the age of twelve and probably felt he could eventually look to a life of relative comfort, as an experienced and qualified man.

Three years later, in 1781, however, he fell into a dry dock and suffered injuries that crippled him for life; certainly, his intended career as a shipwright had come to a grinding halt.

Young John, however, was made of stern stuff and turned his attention to learning the skills needed to become a shoemaker and, by 1803, he had established his own shop in St Mary Street, in Portsmouth.

His dedication to children possibly stemmed from an encounter he had with a young boy who had a deformed foot, and whose friends subjected him to ridicule as a result. John made a cast of the lad's feet, from which he then produced a pair of specially designed shoes to all but eradicate the boy's limp.

This is reckoned to be the first recorded manufacture and use of "orthopaedic shoes" and in time, the idea was adopted far more widely.

In about 1818, in addition to his work as a shoemaker, John began teaching many of the local poor children and, as his reputation grew, he soon had more than forty children attending his classes.

Primarily, he taught them to read and gave them a grounding in basic arithmetic, but gradually he expanded his curriculum and taught cookery, carpentry and his own main trade, shoemaking, all the time refusing to charge a fee for his efforts.

John Pounds eventually died in 1839, aged 73, but he had provided a legacy that spread far beyond Portsmouth; "Ragged Schools" as they became known, began to appear in other towns and cities and many youngsters who would have grown up illiterate and fit only for basic labouring or soldiering, owed their opportunity to make a better life to the Portsmouth man who, in 1999, was voted "Man of the Millenium" by readers of a local Portsmouth paper.

The John Pounds Memorial Trust has built a replica of his original workshop (right), in the grounds of the John Pounds Memorial Church; the original building was lost in the Blitz, in 1941.

Another famous resident of Portsmouth was born in 1806; Isambard Kingdom Brunel, arguably the greatest engineer the world has even known and almost certainly the greatest engineer of the nineteenth century, at the very least, was born to Marc Isambard Brunel, an exiled French engineer and Sophia (née Kingdom) Brunel.

Marc Brunel was living in Portsmouth with his wife, whilst working on his new block making machinery in the dockyard, which was the world's first "mass production line" and speeded up the production of pulley blocks for the Royal Navy unbelievably - but more of both Marc and his son (see the image with link on the right here) elsewhere in this site ...

Charles Dickens, another of Portsmouth's world-famous historical figures, was born on 7 February 1812 in Commercial Road, in the stretch that is now known as Old Commercial Road.

There is a lot more about Dickens in this site (naturally!), but if you click on the icon immediately below here, you can visit the website of the Dickens Fellowship. (If your browser blocks pop-ups, you will need to hold down the "Ctrl" key on your keyboard, as this will open in a new page and your browser may think it's a pop-up and treat it accordingly.)

In 1811, Portsmouth introduced its first piped water supply, but the cost of being connected was prohibitive to all except the rich and the wealthier of the middle classes. It would be several years before the pipes network had grown to the stage where water could be piped to all houses and, even into the twentieth century, there were still some houses without mains water.

In 1820, the Portsea Improvement Commissioners decided to install gas street lighting and Old Portsmouth followed suit in 1823, but as a money saving measure, the lamps were not lit during and immediately prior and following the nights of the full moons.

Elsewhere on Portsea Island, building was continuing at a steadily increasing rate - at the end of the eighteenth century a small suburb had started to grow up around Commercial Road and Charlotte Street and it soon became known as Landport, after the newly built Landport Gate.

The houses in Commercial Road were mostly very middle class in appearance, whereas many of the buildings in the Charlotte Street area were a lot less imposing; indeed, some of them could be said to have been almost "thrown up", such was the haste to create more living space for the workers.

Bit by bit, every open space on the Island was being eaten up by developers; the muddy areas were drained and built up and the roads, previously a nightmare beyond the walls of the town, were rapidly improved.

Earlier, these roads had been either mud tracks, or else, for the more important stretches, built up using stone aggregate of different sizes and an earth based mortar, but around 1820 Scotsman John Loudon McAdam patented a process called Macadamisation, using single-sized aggregate and a stronger mortar to dind it together.

This method proved quite effective whilst roads were still catering for horse drawn traffic, but even before the invention of the motor car, some carts were being built that required whole teams of horses to pull them and this combined weight could still damage the surface and create a lot of dust, especially during prolonged dry spells.

This original technique should not be confused with later improvements, such as Pitch Macadam, which did not appear until much later, when heavier and motorised traffic began to place a heavier strain on roadways everywhere.

In 1818, work began on a massive project, designed to link Portsmouth and London by means of a largely inland waterway and the Portsmouth to Arundel Canal opened across Portsea Island in 1822 and then on to Arundel in 1823.

Actually, the only really true canal, apart from the stretch known as the Chichester Canal, was the stretch in Portsmouth, which ran from a position not too far away from the Lion Gate and then eastwards, along a line just north of what is now Arundel Street, beyond Fratton Bridge and through Milton, to the end of what is called, appropriately, Locksway Road.

Vessels then had to cross Langstone Harbour and go through dredged channels between Hayling Island and the mainland and then similarly between Thorney Island and the shore, along the Chichester Canal and eventually linking up with the River Arun.

There was never a great deal of trade along the route and by 1836 the entire stretch of the canal section was reported as being un-navigable; the canal was closed down and eventually a lot of the bed of the original waterway across the Islandwas used for laying tracks for the railway, which made its first appearance in Portsmouth in 1859.

In 1835, Portsmouth was hit by an earthquake - probably it was more of a large tremor than a full blown quake - and a year later the new Portsmouth Borough Police were established, as part of Sir Robert Peel's far-reaching reforms.

By 1857, the suburb of Southsea had grown to such an extent that it had to appoint its own Improvement Commissioners, with responsible for paving, lighting and street cleaning, a move that came surprisingly late, considering the problems suffered by the residents of Portsmouth and Portsea, especially during the cholera epidemic of 1849, when something like a thousand people died in a matter of weeks.

Hardly surprising, really, given that there was almost no drainage anywhere outside the dockyard itself and that there were no properly organised rubbish collections; refuse was left in the streets for weeks on end, before - when the situation became so bad - eventually it was burned.

Many people also kept pigs, that ran loose, spreading more mess and diseases such as smallpox and typhoid fever were commonplace; apart from the major 1849 epidemic, cholera was also ever present, albeit at a lower level of infection, and infant mortality was well above tha national average..

The fact that so much of the land was either below, or at best only just above sea level meant that even rain could not help wash the ground clean; visitors were appalled at what they saw and many commented in print about the all-pervading stench

Local doctors were frequently campaigning about the state of the place; a Dr Engledue described Portsea Island as: "one huge cesspool ... one hundred and sixty thousand cesspools daily permitting thirty thousand gallons of urine to penetrate the soil". Not an edifying image at all!

Eventually, in the 1860s and following central government legislation and continuous campaigning from the medical profession, the Portsmouth authorities took charge of the situation and a proper sewage system was commenced, using gravity to feed water and sewage across the Island in underground pipes, to Eastney, where a new pump house was built, using two enormous Boulton and Watt steam-driven beam engines to pump it out to sea.

The population continued to grow apace - in 1861 it was 94,799 and ten years later it had grown to 112,954. By 1901, the number was just short of 190,000, approximately the population of Portsmouth today, although neither figure comes close to the post-World War Two peak of more than a quarter of a million.

Click on the link below, to read the third section about Portsmouth in the nineteenth century, when the town acquired its first modern hospitals, a lunatic asylum and a hospital for infectious diseases - among a lot of other things!