Brazen Images

Mr Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, thinks that monuments to controversial figures 'are almost always best explained and contextualised, not taken and hidden away'. Oddly, I feel that they are almost always best taken and hidden away, not explained and contextualised. We've talked about this before, but the government's proposed legislation in this area brings the topic up again. 

Of course when you put it as I have deliberately done, my position sounds entirely unreasonable. In fact I would much rather monuments and statues were only removed after proper public debate and accountable decision-making, because that's how we develop our self-understanding as a society. However it's worth remembering that the authorities in Bristol had talked for years about de-plinthing Edward Colston, the removal of whom sparked this whole current debate off, and had never quite got round to it. Equally, any fair-minded person baulks a bit about our public art being subject to the passing whims and enthusiasms of crowds and 'town hall militants', as Mr Jenrick puts it, but we should recall that it is often passing whims and enthusiasms which result in statues being there in the first place. Coming from a background in history I'm fairly relaxed about public art changing on a regular basis as this is what's always happened, and who may move from hero of the decade to persona non grata is an interesting reflection of social change, rather than an outrage to be resisted. 

One of my favourite instances comes from that comfortingly mad tome A272, an Ode to a Road by Dutch folly enthusiasts Pieter and (the late) Rita Boogart. On their journey along and around that thoroughly English thoroughfare they came across, in monumentally bronze equestrian form, Field Marshal Lord Strathnairn. This statue was originally erected in 1895 in Knightsbridge, outside Harrods, in fact, but was eventually removed as an obstruction to traffic. It was spotted in a scrapyard in 1965 by a Mr Northcott who was told that if he could move the damn thing, he could have it for free, and move it he did, to Foley Manor near Liphook where it stands resolutely if irrelevantly at the entrance to the drive. Like almost every military man of his day, Hugh Rose, 1st Baron Strathnairn, was implicated in a variety of Imperial escapades including the Crimean War and suppressing the Indian Revolt, but on a personal level seems to have been quite a good egg to judge by some of the anecdotes concerning him. In his current location, though, the locals have neither knowledge of nor interest in the identity and achievements of this once-lauded general. They know him only, so the Boogarts relate, as 'The Banana Man', owing to the fruit-like appearance of his plumed helmet. In his case 'contextualisation' would be rather a shame.

The closest public statues to me are in Guildford, and it's interesting to think of the objections that might be raised to any of them. The Surrey Scholar by Alan Sly (2002) at the bottom of the High Street depicts a young chap running to a lecture, and the only quibble might be against his sex: perhaps a female scholar would be preferable. Then there are two sculptural depictions of Alice of Wonderland fame, Alice and the White Rabbit (Edwin Russell, 1984) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (Jeanne Argent, 1990); again, surely no problem with these unless we are very sensitive about the Revd. Charles Dodgson's familiar relationships with small girls. Somewhere on the University of Surrey campus nearby is a statue of Alan Turing, which I've never seen, and he is definitely safe.

I'm not quite so confident for George Abbot (Faith Winter, 1993). who stands at the top of the High Street, the only real and genuinely local figure of the lot: Turing stayed in Guildford in the summer as a child, which is a bit tenuous. Abbot (d.1633) has the distinction of being the only Archbishop of Canterbury to have killed someone while in office, and had the statue depicted him with one hand clapped to his mouth and a crossbow in the other having just realised he's accidentally despatched a deer-keeper while out hunting, it would be far more interesting than the staid figure we actually see. 

Seeing that ++Abbot had written a tome entitled Geography, or a Brief Description of the Whole World in 1599 I thought, well, a sixteenth-century clergyman almost certainly had some unpalatable opinions which might be found therein, and so it proved. The African races get off lightly, Abbot merely remarking that the inhabitants of the coastal states of West Africa are 'blacker than all other men', but he describes the Jews as 'runnagates', 'scattered upon the face of the earth', 'a curse upon them and their children for killing Christ'; and as for the Muslims, his salacious account of the founding of Islam and the character of its prophet culminates in the statement that he was 'much given to lasciviousness, and all uncleanness of body, even with very beasts'. Oh dear. You won't tell anyone, will you, so poor Archbishop Abbot can remain unmolested on his plinth?

Dib Dib Dubious

Before doing my Museum Studies course at Leicester, I spent a summer volunteering at the Museum Service in Poole. The first job I was given to do was cataloguing a box of objects that had been sitting in the office for a couple of years. They all related to a recently-deceased Poole resident who'd been, among many other things, heavily involved in the Scouting movement. I went through the programmes, tickets, badges, and other bits and pieces, and found a medal: a brass swastika in a circle stamped on the back HitlerJugend 1934. Actually I can't swear to the date, but you get the idea. It caused quite a jolt. But if you were a 1930s Boy Scout leader without that much political awareness (or just enough to make you a Conservative), the Hitler Youth looked like a parallel organisation. Young fellows went out into the woods and tracked animals and lit fires. Mr Hitler will be a breath of fresh air for the Germans. Don't go along with him on everything, of course, but they probably need a bit of that sort of thing over there. That's what the Germans are like. 

I do feel a bit bad for Baden-Powell: he was hardly the only prominent Briton to be taken in by Mr Hitler, and his dreadful hierarchical views were no worse than a lot of his contemporaries'. His Poole statue strikes me as rather a humble object, as these things go: he sits looking out at Brownsea Island and passersby look down at him. As for Mr Gladstone, his fall from grace on the grounds of the origin of his family's wealth seems more than a little unfair. Not only do few lives stand up to that kind of scrutiny (a truism we all know), but dig beneath the surface of virtually any well-off individual's background between the late 17th- and early 19th-centuries and you'll find some connection or other with the Triangular Trade. Picking individuals for public obloquy beyond those most directly involved in it is a bit invidious.

But there lies the problem. For a century and more we British have told ourselves a story that begins in Tudor maritime exploration and derring-do, and continues through the Industrial Revolution into progressive modernity. I certainly remember that from my distant childhood. In so far as slavery comes into it, as soon as the Trade was abolished we spent our time congratulating ourselves for having done so and castigating any nation that was tardier than we were; the fact that it needed abolishing was apparently easy to forget, as was the way its colossal profits underwrote the investment that went into mines, textile factories, railways, and everything else that made Britain the world's first industrial power. Racism wasn't the point of any of this, really. Notions of racial hierarchy, and the appropriateness of one category of human beings owning members of another, or ruling over another, were justificatory veneers laid over the economic and geopolitical competition of European powers. That was what it was all about.

We can't extract this from who we are: it runs through the whole post-Reformation history of this country and has brought us here, to this point. There are public monuments to the people who made this history happen, surviving from the time when we we had no suspicion of the self-serving ideology that underlay the business of Trade and Empire, and their survival amounts to a denial in stone and bronze that it happened, or that it mattered. Removing them, though, I suppose might also be a form of denial. We've only just begun facing who we really are, and that's the real task.

(Photo snipped from the Dorset Echo)

Chichester

It was years ago that I went to Chichester so last week I decided to pay a second trip. You have to warm to a city that has Gothic road signs and tops its pedestrian signposts with little versions of the Market Cross:

And this endearingly hideous gargoyle is on one of the buildings on West Street:

There is gaudy medievalism in the cathedral ...

... and Georgian restraint in the side streets.



Bus Stop Ornée

My travels took me to Guildford today. On Farnham Road I found what may be, unless you know better, Britain's most elaborate bus stop.

And it's not just the balustrade, but these amazing carved figures inside. Turkish chap with a pipe and a figure with a lyre - not sure what that's about, nor why it should be here. On the 1873 Ordnance Survey there is nothing along Farnham Road apart from the Hospital, which lies a couple of hundred yards downhill from this. A mystery.

Down in the Depths

Last Thursday took some of the London Goths to Shoreditch to view the exhibition 'Subterranean London', which was kicking off the annual Illumini Event, in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall.
I saw some interesting items on the way along Old Street; an excitingly derelict building, a Gothic triple doorway, a backbone on a building, and a beguiling rogue sculpture which I now know to be the Credit Crunch Monster created by a guerilla sculptor naming himself Ronzo.



However, little did we know that we were not the only people there, but that several hundred (and for all I know several thousand) others had had the same idea. It took me, at any rate, an hour and a quarter to make it along the queue. We were, to be fair, plied with sweetmeats by costumed attendants and juggled at by entertainers during the long, long wait.

Once inside, a labyrinth of tunnels, chambers and stairways was revealed, decorated by a variety of artworks mostly of the sculptural variety inspired by the strange world of underground London - crypts, forgotten railways, cellars, air raid shelters, and the like. It was very intriguing, if cramped, and I thought the quirky and slightly unsettling humour was worth the wait.

Of course I can't help viewing these types of things as a former museum curator, and my only gripe was with the tiny size of the labels - rather than squint through the semi-darkness I photographed the most interesting for future reference!

For Virginia

Our friend Virginia has an enthusiasm for postboxes. Here's a black one from Swanvale Halt for her.