Toppling the past

Whether it’s Colston, Lenin or a wonky wooden Melania Trump, tearing down statues is pointless

FALLEN IDOLS by Alex von Tunzelmann

262pp, Headline, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99

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When I mention in an indignant voice gender reassignment surgery on the NHS, trigger warnings, colour-blind casting, escalating HS2 costs, overcompensatory diversity in commercials (the only white folk now ever seen are those near death on ITV3 advertising mobility scooters), the disappearance of meadows and woodland in favour of affordable homes, vegans, nudists, and vegan nudists, my children gleefully chant, “Pull him down! Pull him down!”, whilst doing a yo-heave-ho mime, rocking sideways in unison, pretending to pull on a rope.

Though Boris Johnson has said tearing down statuary is “to lie about our history and impoverish the education of generations to come”, and that “previous generations had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong”, this hasn’t stopped people, this past year, from displaying a general hatred of olden days, a contempt for patriotic pride, all over the world. Last October, across America, statues of Roosevelt, Lincoln and Washington were desecrated and covered with banners: “Stop honouring racist coloniser murderers!” Columbus was toppled in Minnesota. Churchill was daubed with paint in Westminster. In Hamilton, New Zealand, Captain George Hamilton, founder of the town, had his likeness removed after a Maori warrior said he was “a murderous a--hole”. Graffiti appeared on the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, claiming she was “Racist Fish”.

As Alex von Tunzelmann says in her lively study, Fallen Idols, making a statement by removing monuments is nothing new. Indeed, it was given a mandate in Deuteronomy: “Ye shall overthrow their altars and break their pillars.” The Reformation and the Civil War, for example, saw the wanton destruction of religious and regal iconography. During the French Revolution, “hundreds of statues and emblems of royalty were smashed or melted down”. A statue of George III in New York was melted during the War of Independence and turned into 42,088 musket balls. A statue of George V, measuring 43ft and 6in in height, a centrepiece in Lutyens’s New Delhi, was scrapped only in 1968, when Cambridge-educated Nehru was out of the picture.

Sometimes, no one will object to the obliteration. Von Tunzelmann is correct to say we were all glad when Jimmy Savile’s gravestone was pulverised. Germany understandably removed Nazi symbolism and made it a crime to display the swastika. In 1949, Italy outlawed images of Mussolini – and the frog-featured il duce had fully believed he’d last as long as ancient Rome.

If Fallen Idols has a lesson, it’s the impermanence of monuments intended to be on view forever. Nothing lasts. A statue of “Stalin and the Happy Soviet Child” was mass produced, but later had to be scrapped when the father of said Soviet child was executed by the secret police. The girl, though only 10, became “politically unacceptable” and it had to be pretended she was someone else.

Once Khrushchev, after Stalin’s death, had denounced his predecessor as an “evildoer”, the statues started toppling. The enormous one in Budapest took ages to break up – steel cables “requisitioned from local trams” had to be deployed. Lenin, however, is still weirdly with us – his embalmed corpse has, since 1924, been a “living sculpture” in its glass case in Red Square. Periodically it is dipped in “a bath of special liquid”. Like Joan Rivers, Lenin’s armpits and feet “have undergone cosmetic correction”.

Self-aggrandising statues erected by dictators quickly fall when their power is gone. Trujillo, President of the Dominican Republic, who shoved opponents into “coffinsized, rat-filled cells”, ordered the construction of any number of phallic obelisks, which were destroyed by his (equally despotic) successors. In Iraq, Saddam’s cast-iron likenesses were pulled down on camera – broadcast live on Fox News. If the take wasn’t adequate, the soldiers and television crew easily found another edifice. The entire seemingly spontaneous action by jubilant mobs was thoroughly staged.

Von Tunzelmann’s commentary on the complex emotions behind who puts a statue up in the first place, who then pulls them down, and why, is fascinating. There are obvious monsters – King Leopold of the Belgians, who presided over a

A New York statue of George III was melted down and turned into 42,088 musket balls

brutal regime in the Congo that was responsible for 13 million deaths; the Duke of Cumberland, who massacred the Highlanders in 1746 at Culloden, and whose statue in Cavendish Square came down in 1868 and “has not been seen since”. But other personalities are more ambiguous, their heroism and enterprise, once venerated, now deemed villainous and exploitative.

Cecil Rhodes, for instance, who was long since pulled down in Zimbabwe by Mugabe, has now been removed from his prime site outside the University of Cape Town. Oxford wants to get rid of him, too, even though Rhodes bequeathed his De Beers billions to education, and many of the beneficiaries have been black people. “He never married or had any intimacy with women,” adds von Tunzelmann, as if here at least is a plus-point. Stephen Fry is soon to play him in a biopic.

A 17th-century version was Edward Colston, who was recently “hurled into the harbour in Bristol”. In 1689, Colston was appointed deputy governor of the Royal African Company. “Most of the 400,000 Africans transported to the Americas by English merchants before 1700 were traded by the Royal African Company, for the profit of the English and Scottish monarchy.” Nevertheless, Colston, another congenital bachelor “with no direct heirs”, gave his fortune away, principally in Bristol, where he endowed schools, alms-houses, hospitals and churches. My own brother received a full scholarship for his first-class private education with Colston money. It’s also worth remembering that slavery was brought to an end two centuries ago. By 1807, the British Navy was patrolling the West African coast, “intercepting slave ships”.

In the end, tearing down effigies can be rather pointless. “You’re free to have whatever feelings you like about history,” says von Tunzelmann, “but they don’t make the slightest difference to what really happened.” Whether a hammer and chisel are taken to a Bellini bust or a wooden sculpture of Melania Trump (she objected to one in particular, which gave her “a blobby nose and wonky eyes”), it is vandalism, a fruitless attempt to stamp out memory, the act of moral simplifiers. What is really required (as successfully in post-war Germany) is “a thorough programme of education”. Wrongs won’t be righted by angry stunts – though an exception may be made for an aesthetic protest. The appalling new statue of Princess Diana at Kensington Palace makes her look like a “woke” Maria von Trapp posing in the window at Dorothy Perkins. Down with it instantly, in the name of good taste.

My own view – which would solve everything – is that sculptures should be ice-sculptures, like those swans you see at banquets. Melting slowly, they’d disappear and not outstay their welcome. This wouldn’t help Michael Heseltine, however. A nine-ton bronze bust of Lenin that used to sit proudly outside the KGB headquarters in Riga made its way into an auction of garden furniture. Lord Heseltine nabbed it for £20,000 and it now adorns his shrubbery in Northamptonshire as one hell of a conversation piece.