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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The origins of "Paint the town Red"

 

Painting the town red 



In 1837, the Marquess of Oxford who was famous for his drunken antics went for a night out with his friends in the English town of Melton Mowbray. Things got wild and the Marquess and friends decided it would be a grand idea to paint a few houses and a town statue red hence the phrase “Paint the town red”

But there’s much more to the story than that simple phrase coming to life.  

Beresford and his group were entering the town but were held up by a tollgate operator who insisted they pay before crossing a bridge. Spotting a pile of ladders, tools, and pots of red paint, they used the paint to splatter all over the operator and then rode into town.

In f Melton Mowbray, they tore down a pub sign, smashed the post office window, and trampled a couple of gardens, for fun. When a police constable tried to intervene they knocked him to the ground and painted his face red and then dismounted to paint walls, windows, doors, signposts, with the red paint.

The following morning, Beresford and his pals were arrested, charged with common assault,  fined £100 each (equivalent to more than $12,000 today), and made to cover the cost of all repairs to the town.

But did the expression… paint the town red….really come from Beresford’s night out? It appeared in print in July of 1883, almost half a century after Beresford’s antics, not in a British newspaper but in the New York Times. The piece in the Times read “Mr. James Hennessy offered a resolution that the entire body proceed forthwith to Newark (New Jersey) and get drunk … Then the Democrats charged upon the streetcars, and being wafted into Newark proceeded, to use their own metaphor, to 'paint the town red.'"

My guess is, that the term red referred to Satan who was long associated with the color, in fact, he’s still associated with the color today.