DAME VERA ART IS NEXT TO PAEDO’S
Gallery decision ‘an insult to her memory’
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PAINTINGS by Dame Vera Lynn have gone on display alongside works by a known paedophile.
An exhibition celebrating the wartime legend has been set up in a museum hosting sculptures by Eric Gill, who had an incestuous relationship with his sister and abused his daughters and dog.
Both Vera and Gill, who died in 1940, lived in Ditchling, East Sussex, where the Museum of Art and Craft is based. It says it has a “duty” to display works by local Gill as well as the Forces sweetheart who died in 2020 aged 103.
One furious Vera fan said: “For this celebration of her life to be near the creations of a paedophile is an insult to her memory.”
It comes after a hammer attack on Gill’s Prospero and Ariel statue, depicting a naked child, outside the BBC’s London HQ earlier this month.
Campaigners for its removal have called it a “monument to paedophilia”.
Yesterday, it emerged Gill’s statue of John the Baptist may be removed from St John’s College at Oxford University.
The sculptor had long been recognised as one of the great British artists of the 20th century, but his horrific crimes were exposed in a biography released in 1989.
Dame Vera’s daughter Virginia Lewis-Jones declined to comment.