Comment Time for our great women to break the bronze ceiling
striking work by one of Britain’s greatest sculptors, Sir Jacob Epstein – a portrait bust of Obstetrics Professor and medical pioneer, Dame Hilda Lloyd. But unfortunately, like a character in a Brontë novel, she’s mostly kept indoors in the Medical School, accessible only by prior appointment.
Far more visible – fronting its most important building and seen, if not comprehendingly, by all students in their first days in the University – is Henry Pegram’s Pantheon of the Immortals frieze of nine life-size stone statues representing founder Joseph Chamberlain’s vision for his new institution for the study of the universality of human knowledge.
Their dress and hairstyles mean several could easily pass as women – Beethoven, Virgil, Faraday, Newton certainly, maybe even Shakespeare. But all, of course, are indisputably Great Men.
If several are apparently looking down, it’s possibly at the only woman around – Bernard Sindall’s perky bronze Girl in a Hat. Yes, that’s it... just a hat – even in winter.
Odd, but she’s not alone. In the middle of James Watt Queensway there’s Robert Thomas’s Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth, seemingly panning optimistically for gold, and, in the Cadbury factory grounds in Bournville, Terpsichore the muse of dance, both activities evidently necessitating complete nudity.
Incidentally, Terpsi’s creator, William Bloye, easily Birmingham’s most widely displayed civic sculptor, was also responsible for the Huntsman and Dog pub sign of my near-local, The Green Man in Harborne.
And partly too for Queen Victoria in Victoria Square – though, perhaps thankfully given Bloye’s creative predilection for undraped women, for its 1951 bronze recasting, not the 1901 original.
Manchester councillor, Andrew Simcock, reckoned his city’s Queen Victoria was similarly its only female statue. So he launched a WoManchester campaign, raising enough to commission its own Emmeline Pankhurst.
But there are loads of other recent, and more original, examples: Sheffield’s wartime munitions factory workers, Women of Steel; Carlisle’s biscuit factory Cracker Packers; 1930s aviator Amy Johnson in both Hull and Herne Bay, Kent ; Victoria Wood, as Dinnerlady Bren, in Bury.
Which suggests it’s time, surely, for Birmingham to break through our own bronze ceiling? Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham