There’s been a lot of conversation in some Exeter circles about the statue of Redvers Buller that stands outside Exeter College, including Alan Lester’s article covering his career and another on the curious practice of coning. This post will record some thoughts on the man and his career, and then move on from the statues that exist already, to discussions of all the other statues and plaques that are yet to be erected.
Writing about colonial statues, the biographies of their depicted subjects, and acts of contestation in the present can often feel like a gloomy affair. Of the numerous individuals recorded in the Cast in Stone database, we find types such as slave-owners, slave-traders, colonial administrators, race scientists, war criminals and the like. Many of these men – and they are almost always men – inflicted serious pain, trauma, and death on ordinary people through acts of physical and epistemic violence during their lives. In drawing attention to the enduring legacies of such violence and the historical erasure embodied by such memorials to these “great men”, acts of anti-racist protest against statues often take an equally serious and sober tone: words of indictment are scrawled on their plinths, placards listing their crimes are affixed to their bodies, and blood red graffiti is splashed all over them.
Popular protest against statues needn’t always be so sad and heavy however. In June 1979, for instance, black Zimbabweans celebrated their triumph over white-minority rule by placing a sign saying “THIS SPACE TO LET” in the hands of Cecil Rhodes’ statue in Salisbury. Churchill has had a green mohawk dutifully placed upon his bald head, and if you happen to be a certain well-known “Milk Snatcher” in Grantham, you can expect a welcome egg thrown in your face from time to time.
So, in the spirit of such interventions, this blog post looks at the power of laughter and comedy in destabilising the meaning of colonial statues. More specifically, it focuses on Richard Westmacott’s scantily-clad Wellington Monument in London as an early example of how an imperial statue, intended as a model symbol of civic masculinity, could be immediately subverted upon its unveiling through widespread public ridicule.
Of all the films I’ve watched throughout my life, Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! (2003), a tragicomic story of an East German family living through German reunification in the 1990s, has stayed in my memory the most. I’m not sure exactly why: it might be Yann Tiersen’s touching soundtrack that moves between the melancholic and the joyful, the sense of this ordinary family navigating the winds of historical change, or the conflicting feelings that come from the transition from socialism to capitalism as history dramatically shifts gears. One particularly evocative scene in the film depicts a broken statue of Lenin being flown by helicopter past the family’s mother Christiane, who stands looking on, absolutely stunned at what she is witnessing.
Restitution and repatriation of objects looted (from the Hindi lūṭ, or ‘to rob’) by European imperial powers has been a key aim of decolonisation campaigns across the planet, with the focus on pressuring European countries like Britain and France to return stolen colonial items to their home countries. Tracing the afterlives of colonial statues, however, reveals a different and little-known history of repatriation: that of colonial statues themselves. This blog post is about the history of Britain’s attempts to recover and repatriate statues from its former colonies as imperial rule began to crumble.
I finally found time in January this year 2024 to take myself to Reading, to explore the Tweed archive, the collection of private papers, sketchbooks and artefacts deposited by the daughters of the sculptor John Tweed in Reading Museum in 1968. I received a wonderful welcome from the art curator and her team, as she gave up an entire day in order to accompany me to the museum store and literally walk me through the materials. This of course, is the reality of research in smaller, regional archives and museums, there is rarely dedicated staff available to facilitate research and access depends on the generosity of very busy staff with many other things to do. However, when one does secure the time of such colleagues, the depth of knowledge that they can offer about the area is a resource in its own right.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold
The statues mapped across Britain and France as part of the Cast in Stone project have frequently been the source of controversy for their links to slavery, colonialism and racism. In this blog post, however, I would like to use colonial statues to open up a different set of conversations arounds gender and masculinity in postcolonial Britain. For if ‘everyday life is an arena of gender politics, not an escape from it’, as R. W. Connell put in in their pathbreaking work Masculinities (2005), then we need to interrogate public space as a key site in which masculinities, old and new, are represented, performed, and negotiated with across contemporary British life.
This week, I finally found the opportunity to take myself to Shrewsbury to undertake research on the history of the statue of Robert Clive situated in this historic market town in county Shropshire, near the border with Wales. The trip opened up as many questions as it answered.
Shrewsbury is a beautiful town, enclosed in a meander loop of the River Severn. The station building itself is gorgeous, with little decorative stars lined up on the top of the stone front – there must be a technical name for this, but I have no idea. The historic centre, a mere ten minutes walk from the station, boasts narrow cobbled streets with seriously odd names (Grope Street, for one), and many well preserved Tudor shop and house fronts, now also bearing signs for the best high street brands. The Shropshire Library and Archives is in a gorgeous old building too, just a minute’s walk from the station.
The statue of Sir Redvers Buller, a Victorian army commander, in Exeter has recently received a new interpretation board contextualising his career across the British Empire. I played a largely informal role in the project led by Prof Nicola Thomas, which led to that board. In this blog, I tell the story of Buller’s career, fleshing out the content of the new board.
Statue of Redvers Buller, Exeter from the website of Historic England
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