Police seek the head of Her Majesty

Police in Victoria are searching for the severed bronze head of Queen Elizabeth II after a bust of her in the city's Beacon Hill Park was decapitated.

“Investigators are asking for those with information to come forward after the Queen Elizabeth II statue in Beacon Hill Park was `beheaded' in an act of vandalism,” read a Thursday statement by Victoria Police.

It added “the head has not been recovered.”

The statue's desecration occurred at roughly the same time that City of Victoria bylaw offices were vandalized with graffiti reading “Support Beacon Hill” and “Stop Lying.”

The beheaded statue is adjacent to a massive homeless encampment that has cropped up in Beacon Hill Park following the closure of downtown shelters by COVID-19 restrictions.

The growing tent city has coincided with a marked rise in local crime, including a full-fledged “bicycle chop shop” that was found operating within the park.

More recently, it has been connected to a series of violent attacks on City of Victoria bylaw officers.

On Tuesday, an unidentified man allegedly smashed a sledgehammer into the front windshield of a City of Victoria bylaw truck before fleeing into the park. Last week at another Victoria park, a shovel-wielding man needed to be arrested at gunpoint after he threatened passing bylaw officers. That incident prompted Victoria City Council to approve $76,000 in new funding to provide police escorts to city workers entering civic parks.

The Queen Elizabeth bust was first installed in the halls of Victoria City Hall in 1960. Originally done in concrete, it was one of the first statues erected of the young Queen following her 1953 coronation. In its 60 years, however, the sculpture has become notable for enduring a number of highly publicized indignities.

Soon after its installation, in a brazen heist, university students managed to haul the 500-pound statue out of city hall without attracting a single witness.

Recovered without incident, the statue was then installed in Beacon Hill Park, where it stood for only a matter of weeks before it was targeted by a series of chipping attacks, culminating in its head being removed and thrown into the city's iconic Inner Harbour.

A bronze replacement was then commissioned by a local newspaper and installed in 1962. The bronze proved more resilient to vandalism, including a 1965 toppling and repeated scratching damage. It was even formally unveiled by the Queen herself during her 1994 visit for the Victoria Commonwealth Games. It was this bronze statue that was beheaded this week with a remarkably clean cut to the neck.

Sculptor Peggy Walton Packard, a Victoria native, never took another public art commission largely out of offence at the statue's repeated desecration. “It was awful. It seemed the university students were attacking the Queen and indirectly attacking me, too,” Packard told the Times Colonist prior to her death in 2010.