We Will Remember Them: London’s Great War Memorials, Wellington Arch - exhibition preview

As two of London’s finest First World War memorials are upgraded to Grade I listing, Robert Bevan discovers, from a moving new exhibition inside Hyde Park Corner’s Wellington Arch, that no area of our heritage is more poignant
Upgrading: the Royal Artillery memorial © Jerry Young
Robert Bevan15 July 2014

Exactly how many war memorials there are in London is anyone’s guess. It’s only now that the enormous task of trying to count them has begun. In the UK as a whole there are an estimated 100,000 — from rolls of honour on town hall walls to stone crosses, statues and the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Roughly 20,000 are monuments that commemorate the First World War. As the last living witnesses of the conflict die, these memorials provide ever more important touchstones to the past but theft, vandalism and time are taking their toll.

Among the greatest of these is the Royal Artillery memorial at Hyde Park Corner by sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger, with the help of architect Lionel Pearson. As part of the war anniversary consciousness-raising efforts, the Government today announced that it has upgraded the listing level of Jagger’s monument, along with the one to Edith Cavell in St Martin’s Place, to join the Cenotaph at Grade I, making them practically inviolable. Three other major London memorials have also been raised a grade from II to II*. (There are 119 war memorials in the capital that are already listed, ranging from the Afghan and Zulu war memorial in Woolwich to the Victory Arch at Waterloo station.)

The Royal Artillery memorial takes the form of an over-scaled Portland Stone howitzer cannon on a plinth flanked by realist bronzes of grim-faced artillerymen, exhausted, with their rain capes draped heavily across the stonework or covering the face of a dead comrade. Finely carved stone friezes with the dynamic diagonals of an Uccello canvas depict soldiers at work loading shells and being shot from the back of the horses while pulling the big guns.

It has just emerged from conservation work in time for the opening this week of English Heritage’s exhibition, We Will Remember Them: London’s Great Memorials, showing in the rooftop gallery of Wellington Arch, across the traffic island. It tells the compelling story of the six mighty memorials in their care, including Edith Cavell’s monument — the nurse executed in Belgium by the German occupiers for helping wounded British soldiers escape — and the equestrian statue of controversial commander Earl Haig that prances further up Whitehall from the Cenotaph.

Lest we forget: The Cenotaph (Pic: Paul Brown/Rex)

“No area of our heritage is more poignant than that of war memorials,” says Roger Bowdler, English Heritage’s designation director. “The absence of the Commonwealth’s 1.1 million dead [during the First World War] created a powerful need for monuments.” Today though, he notes: “They are very overlooked, taken for granted or ignored.”

Bowdler has curated the exhibition and hopes it will increase public awareness and care for the memorials. With the volunteer help of the War Memorials Trust and Civic Voice, his organisation is hoping to identify and research the most important and then increase the number protected by listing by 500 in each of the next five years — £5 million in government grants has been identified towards restoration.

Exhibits on show in the arch include bronze maquettes of Jagger’s soldiers and the Art Nouveau-tinged figures on the Belgian Monument to the British Nation on Victoria Embankment that was commissioned by a grateful Belgium. Also on display are early commemorative paper poppies made in Edinburgh (the first were made in a New York YMCA).

Images from We Will Remember Them: London’s Great War Memorials

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Sir George Frampton’s portrait of stern-faced Edith Cavell (her sister Lillian modelled for the memorial statue) can also be seen. Bowdler concedes the historians’ point that Cavell, who will feature on a commemorative £5 coin next year, was “bang to rights” on the charges but her death was a propaganda coup for the British. “Murdered by the Hun”, she appeared on recruiting posters and in sentimental prints where an ethereal angel Edith rises from her (suspiciously glam) dead body. A German officer, complete with spiked helmet, looks on.

In a break from previous practice, however, the First World War memorials were less inclined to glorify blood and conflict by depicting dead soldiers sleeping peacefully or as classical heroes despite the “for King and Country” inscriptions. One stylistic approach was Jagger’s unapologetic realism using an elusive modern aesthetic that elides modernism, the classical and the deco.

Another is shown in architect Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph that is almost entirely abstract save for the empty stone sarcophagus — a receptacle for grief — at its crown. Yet what has (unintentionally) become Britain’s national monument to the war dead is still full of symbolism, with the Cenotaph’s apparently vertical lines slightly angled so that they would meet, if drawn invisibly, 900ft in the sky. Its horizontals are also imperceptibly bowed, so that they describe part of a circle penetrating some 900ft underground, effectively freeing the memorial’s boundaries beyond its physical limits.

For the fallen: the Edith Cavell memorial (Pic: Jerry Young)

Not all First World War monuments were as avant-garde. The exhibition includes a photograph of the memorial to 18 toddlers killed when a bomb fell on a Poplar school in 1917. It is an angel on a column straight out of a sentimental Victorian cemetery catalogue. It is as if the rupture between the pre-war Edwardian Summer and post-war modernity never happened.

Perhaps one of the most difficult memorials to interpret is that raised by the Machine Gun Corps, also at Hyde Park Corner. Featuring a profoundly camp naked bronze of David flanked by bronzed Vickers machine guns and wreaths, its inscription reads, “Saul hath slain his thousands but David his tens of thousands”, suggesting notches on a gun if not on a bedpost.

Photographs in the exhibition, however, show how its sculptor, Francis Derwent Wood, also volunteered his artistic skills in painting features on tin masks for hospitalised soldiers to hide disfiguring facial wounds.

Bowdler suggests that Wood’s monument hints at the damage 500 rounds a minute could do to naked perfection, but that didn’t stop it being removed for roadworks shortly after being erected and not reappearing until the more permissive Sixties.

The six great memorials recorded in this exhibition, at least, are not in danger of neglect. Just the opposite, in fact; the recent conservation work of Jagger’s sculpture was necessary not only because of traffic pollution but also because earlier scrubbing had helped wear away some stone faces to blurry potato heads; it has been loved to death, as have faces on the Belgian monument.

The whiteness of Jagger’s reliefs is due to a protective “shelter coat” being applied to them. The greatest risk to the memorials, however, is that we stop seeing them at all. This is Bowdler’s greatest fear. “We’ve got to stop ignoring them,” he warns. “That’s when bad things happen.”

We Will Remember Them: London’s Great War Memorials is at Wellington Arch, W1 (020 7930 2726, english-heritage.org.uk/quadriga) until November 30. Open daily, 10am-6pm; admission free to English Heritage members, otherwise £2.50-£4.20.

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