The picture is labelled A Spree at Melton Mowbray and subtitled Or doing the Thing in a Sporting-like manner. If that event really were the source of the phrase, why would anyone, or in this case everyone, wait fifty years before mentioning it?įurther evidence for the event, but against it being the phrase's origin, comes from a text below a picture of the revellers, dated 1837. The phrase isn't recorded in print until fifty years after the nefarious Earl's night out. Unfortunately, plausibility is as far as it goes. It is at least plausible that it came from there of course, but no more plausible than Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire being the source of 'cock and bull story' or Ashbourne, Derbyshire being the source of 'local derby' (which they aren't). The town's claim to be the source of 'painting the town red' is more doubtful. Melton Mowbray is the origin of the well-known Melton Mowbray pork pie - which could hardly have originated anywhere else. He was notorious enough to have been suspected by some of being 'Spring Heeled Jack', the strange, semi-mythical figure of English folklore. His misdeeds include fighting, stealing, being 'invited to leave' Oxford University, breaking windows, upsetting (literally) apple-carts, fighting duels and, last but not least, painting the heels of a parson's horse with aniseed and hunting him with bloodhounds.
In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he is described as 'reprobate and landowner'. To his friends he was Henry de la Poer Beresford to the public he was known as 'the Mad Marquis'. That event is well documented, and is certainly in the style of the Marquis, who was a notorious hooligan. It is said that year is when the Marquis of Waterford and a group of friends ran riot in the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray, painting the town's toll-bar and several buildings red. The one most often repeated, especially within the walls of the Melton Mowbray Tourist Office, is a tale dating from 1837. There are several suggestions as to the origin of the phrase.
The allusion is to the kind of unruly behaviour that results in much blood being spilt.