"In my last year at school I was among many Grammar School boys who ran down the High Street, past the George Hotel, onto the Hot Walls. This happened, amid immense excitement, at morning break, then at lunch time and again after school. 

From the Hot Walls we beheld the most extraordinary spectacle. HMS Nelson, then, with her sister ship HMS Rodney, the two most powerful battleships in the world, had run aground on the Hamilton Bank, at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour. Several attempts had been made to refloat her : seven tugs had done their utmost, a dredger had tried and the most incredible manouvre of sending six destroyers, rushing at speed to create a bow wash had merely succeeded in swamping the Floating Bridge, used to ferry cars between Portsmouth and Gosport, thus putting it out of action for 24 hours. But the most amazing sight of all, raising cheers from all the excited schoolboys, was the behaviour of the ships crew. The Portsmouth Evening News reported: "During the whole of the operation the ship's company of the flagship, numbering something like 1000 men, had been mustered on the quarter deck, and with someone standing high above them, they were jumping up and down in unison, taking their time from the leader, waving his arms up and down like a bandmaster. This was another effort to give the ship buoyancy but, like all the others, it failed and at midday the ship was still aground with the tide falling rapidly" Eventually the combination of tide, tugs, dredger, and the removal of fuel, succeeded in freeing the ship from the shingle. The indelicate remarks of the schoolboys, linking Nelson with Hamilton, were as crude as they were obvious."

News footage of the incident is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdNCLHHs4o