The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Stop complaining about statues
Arational decision this week apropos statues. Cambridge City Council has ordered that a bronze effigy of the late Duke of Edinburgh be toppled and removed. This is not because those issuing enforcement notices shared the views of the late businessman Mohamed al-Fayed, that Prince Philip was a Nazi, racist and orchestrator of car crashes. It’s that the work is ghastly, or, as they put it, has a “harmful material impact” on the landscape.
Indeed, the council’s public art manager, Nadine Black, went further describing the sculpture as “possibly the poorest quality work that has ever been submitted to the council”. So awful, in fact, that even the artist allegedly commissioned, Uruguayan sculptor Pablo Atchugarry, has now denied making the piece, saying such assertions constitute abuse. Although it should be noted that Bill Gredley, chairman of the Unex Group, who commissioned the 4m-high bronze work entitled The Don, has said: “He did it. He got paid for it.”
But before the autumn deadline, this swirling, jutting, sharp-edged and ghoulish object must be removed and dispatched to the land of the lost sock, where it can rest in peace ’til eternity next to, perhaps, Ed Miliband’s 2.6m-tall election pledge political tombstone known as EdStone.
For tearing down statues because they look ghastly seems to me a rather more sensible approach than ripping them down because the inanimate object offends your feelings.
And while Gredley’s taste in statues verges on the criminal, his intentions must be applauded. Because if you don’t like particular statues, if you find that what they represent is distasteful, then take action: put one up yourself (but just make sure you go through all the tedious rigmarole of getting the appropriate permissions so that once the Princess Royal or Danny Dyer has unveiled it you don’t have to hire a JCB to have it removed).
The erecting of statues is a noble and democratising tradition, although it takes considerable time, commitment, energy and resolve. And I know because my father, Francis, had a habit of doing it. For no financial gain to himself, save expenses (and I’ll admit he liked a good lunch) he managed to raise the money to erect two sculptures, working alongside an old buddy called Christopher Moorsom (who liked an even longer lunch). The results are two sculptures that will forever not just be monuments to the individuals they represent but also proud memorials to my dad.
Lovers of music, Moorsom and my father reckoned that London was missing edifices to commemorate Mozart and Duke Ellington. The latter was paid for by jazz enthusiast and founder of Pizza Express Peter Boizot and the work done by Nicholas Dimbleby. Although having installed it in Soho Square it, er, fell foul of planning (whoops) and was last spotted somewhere in Peterborough.
But the Mozart statue, by Philip Jackson in 1991, continues to stand proud in Belgravia depicting the composer as a five-year-old opposite the house on 180 Ebury Street where he lived and composed his first symphony in 1764. Look carefully and you’ll see he is standing on two large volumes of books – one of which has engraved onto its spine: The Complete Works of FTS Sitwell. It is a triumph of endeavour and many long, long planning lunches at the neighbouring French restaurant Poule au Pot.
Marching, demonstrating and toppling statues into docks were not my father’s forte. But what he did have was the patience and guile to manoeuvre his way through the corridors and planning offices of Westminster City Council and the strength of character to rinse funds out of his contacts at Kleinwort Benson.
So if my father could erect (with a 50 per cent success rate) sculptures to his heroes, you can do the same.