Why Is Having a Good Time Called “Painting the Town Red”?

There’s an old etymological folk tale that claims the phrase painting the town red—meaning “to have a boisterously (or even violently) good time”—alludes to an actual event from the early 1800s, in which an unruly English nobleman went quite literally to town, armed with a can of red paint.

The 3rd Marquis of Waterford’s Wild Night
Painting the Town Red in Print

The 3rd Marquis of Waterford’s Wild Night

The story goes that on April 6, 1837, Henry de la Poer Beresford, the 3rd Marquis of Waterford, spent a drunken day hunting and gambling with a band of his aristocratic companions at the Croxton Park races in Leicestershire before heading off to the nearby town of Melton Mowbray for food (and yet more drinks). At around 2 a.m., the group arrived at a tollgate on the outskirts of the town, but were refused entry on account of their drunkenness. With nothing to keep them entertained, the gang decided instead to find their own fun, and ultimately embarked on a riotous spree in Melton Mowbray in the early hours of the morning.

The marquis and his crew rode around the outskirts of town to gain entry by another route and returned to the tollhouse at which they had been refused entry, and began boarding up its windows and doors. The hapless tollkeeper inside was awoken by the noise and tried to fire his gun at them, but he forgot to add the powder to the barrel, so the gang got away.

Back in the town square, the marquis and his friends began destroying flowerpots and absconding with door knockers, overturned a caravan (with some poor victim asleep inside), and tore down the local Red Lion pub sign before tossing it into a canal. Then, they somehow got their hands on a can or two of bright red paint, which they began daubing all over the local buildings—even going so far as to climb on one another’s shoulders to reach the upper floors of another local pub, The White Swan. When the town watchman attempted to intervene to stop the vandalism, he too supposedly received a coating of paint.

By morning, the town was in disarray—and the marquis and his companions found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Although it took several months to bring them and the case against them to court, the revellers were eventually fined £100 each for their night of debauchery and vandalism.

But is this tale of someone literally “painting a town red” the origin of this expression? The events of the night of April 6, 1837, are well documented, with contemporary accounts and local court records detailing everything that happened. Such a night of unruliness was by no means out of character for the Marquis of Waterford, either; even his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records him as a “reprobate” who stole from Eton College, was asked to leave Oxford University (after which “he was to be found most frequently at the racetrack, on the hunting-field, or in the police courts”), and had several questionable habits—including challenging strangers to fights, tipping over carts, and smashing windows. So extraordinary was Waterford’s behavior, in fact, that when an eccentric fire-breathing acrobat known as Spring-Heeled Jack began terrorizing Victorian London, he eventually landed on the list of suspects.

But as strong as the evidence may be that the marquis is the origin of painting the town red, the link is far from certain—not least because it seemingly took another five decades for the phrase to find its way into print.

Painting the Town Red in Print

Considering that the Marquis of Waterford’s night of rioting took place in 1837, it seems odd that, per the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the earliest references found of the expression (at least so far) comes from a newspaper printed not in rural England, but in Stanford, Kentucky—and not until 1882, when the Semi-weekly Interior Journal wrote that “He gets on a high old drunk with a doubtful old man, and they paint the town red together.” (The phrase appeared in other newspapers in the state as early as 1880.) Were paint the town red really a regional British English invention, we would expect to find some evidence of it from the UK sometime between 1837 and 1882.

So despite the obvious overlaps, it’s possible that the Marquis of Waterford’s night of “painting the town red” is nothing more than a coincidence. Which begs the question: If that’s the case, where else might this expression have come from?

There are plenty of theories. One suggests that the phrase painting the town red somehow refers to the red-light districts found in American frontier towns. Another is that it somehow alludes to the town of Jaipur in India (whose buildings were literally painted bright pink for a visit by Queen Victoria in 1876).

Then again, perhaps paint the town red is just a quirk of English slang: paint, or more specifically nose paint or nose rouge, was mid-19th century slang for drink, based on the image of a drunkard’s face flushing red. Did painting the town red emerge as some kind a play on that? In the absence of any more evidence than is currently available, it’s certainly a possibility.

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