Paint the town red
Meaning
Engage in a riotous spree.
瘋狂嬉戲
Origin
The allusion is to the kind of unruly behaviour that results in much blood being spilt. There are several suggestions as to the origin of the phrase. The one most often repeated, especially within the walls of the Melton Mowbray Tourist Office, is a tale dating from 1837. 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.
That event is well documented, and is certainly in the style of the Marquis, who was a notorious hooligan. To his friends he was Henry de la Poer Beresford; to the public he was known as 'the Mad Marquis'. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he is described as 'reprobate and landowner'. 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. He was notorious enough to have been suspected by some of being 'Spring Heeled Jack', the strange, semi-mythical figure of English folklore.
Melton Mowbray is the origin of the well-known Melton Mowbray pork pie - which could hardly have originated anywhere else. The town's claim to be the source of 'painting the town red' is more doubtful. It's 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). Unfortunately, plausibility is as far as it goes. The phrase isn't recorded in print until fifty years after the nefarious Earl's night out. If that event really were the source of the phrase, why would anyone, or in this case everyone, wait fifty years before mentioning it?
Further evidence for the event, but against it being the phrase's origin, comes from a text below a picture of the revellers, which was commissioned in 1837:
Coming it strong with spree and a spread
Milling the daylights or cracking a head
Go it, ye cripples, come tip us your mauleys
Up with the lanterns and down with the Charleys
If lagged we should get, we can gammon the Beak
Tip the slaveys a Billy to stifle their squeak,
Come the bounce with the snobs and a [bleep] for their betters,
And make all the statues so many dead letters.
That takes some deciphering but it is clearly a hymn of praise for going out and causing mayhem. The lack of any reference to painting anything red, let alone a citation of the phrase in question, tends to support the idea that the phrase came later.
Actually, as mentioned above, it is quite a lot later. Not until 1883 in fact, and in New York, not Leicestershire. The New York Times, July 1883 has:
"Mr. James Hennessy offered a resolution that the entire body proceed forthwith to Newark and get drunk... Then the Democrats charged upon the street cars, and being wafted into Newark proceeded, to use their own metaphor, to 'paint the town red'."
The other early references to the phrase also relate to America rather than England. The November 1884 edition of the Boston (Mass.) Journal has:
"Whenever there was any excitement or anybody got particularly loud, they always said somebody was 'painting the town red'."
The next is Rudyard Kipling. That's as English as you can get one would have thought. In this case though he too is referring to America - in his book 'Abaft Funnel', 1889:
"They would do their best towards painting that town [Chicago] in purest vermilion."
So, the jury is still out on this one. I'm sure many people would join those in Melton Mowbray in believing the rogue Marquess as the origin, but they don't have quite enough evidence for a conviction. However, they do make exceedingly good pies.
