File:John Pollard (Royal Navy officer).jpg

English: A young man called Midshipman John Pollard, 1787-1868. Oval head-and-shoulders miniature said to be of John Pollard, half turned to sitter's right but facing forward, in a blue coat (not apparently uniform), white shirt and black stock. It is executed in watercolour and gum arabic on ivory (probably), and is contained within an oval gilt metal frame with a black-lacquered rectangular wooden surround fitted with a suspension ring. A brass plate on the front of the surround is engraved 'Mid. J. Pollard R.N. / H.M.S. Victory / Trafalgar 1805.' The element of doubt is provided by the fashionable dress, which looks late-1820s in date, when Pollard would then have been about 40 - much older than the sitter appears. Pollard was on 'Victory's' quarter deck at Trafalgar where he was one of the first hit but only bruised, on the arm, by a heavy splinter. His telescope was then shot through a foot above his hand by a musket ball and his watch smashed in his pocket by another which just grazed his skin beneath. He returned the fire of the sniper who shot Nelson from the mizzen top of the French 'Redoutable' and was generally credited with killing him and congratulated accordingly by Captain Hardy, though all that is certain (and all he claimed) was that his fire cleared the top of men. Pollard entered the Navy in the 'Havick' sloop in November 1799. He served in the 'Culloden', 74, in 1802, the 'Canopus', 80, in 1803 and transferred from her to 'Victory' in the Mediterranean from March to November 1805 after being rated midshipman. He was promoted lieutenant after Trafalgar, serving under Collingwood in the 'Queen' off Cadiz, then in the 'Dreadnought' (under St Vincent) and the 'Hibernian'. His final active service was in the 'Brunswick' in the Kattegat. He then spent 14 years on half-pay, during which time he married in 1822 and eventually had six children, before being given a post in the ordinary (reserve) at Chatham 1828-31 and then in the coastguard in Ireland from 1836. In 1852 or 1853 he was finally appointed a Lieutenant of Greenwich Hospital and later made an honorary retired commander - both belated acknowledgement of his role at Trafalgar. He died at Greenwich on 23 April 1868. Comparison of the miniature with a photograph of Pollard in later life is inconclusive.