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| 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.