Legacies in Bronze

The Warden

There is a bench in deepest Cambridgeshire which always raises a smile; it looks across to the county city a few miles away and proclaims that its eponym loved ‘these hills’– given the bench finds itself on what might rightly be termed at best a minor undulation [the handbrake could be necessary], my interpretation vacillates somewhere between amusement at the certain irony or pity that its dedicatee never made it beyond a 1 in 200 slope. From drain covers, park benches, pillar boxes, foundation stones, war memorials, to blue plaques, and monuments, I have always had a keen eye for noticing things and am particularly interested in and attracted by municipal and institutional architecture, and what it says about the community which created it. Inevitably, the date of its erection is the starting point for my appreciation of the object as well as its relation to the present. In some instances, the individual or event depicted can be challenging for the modern eye – the values which supported its creation are not shared by the values of today. In a country that has engaged with such memorialisation for hundreds of years, one can quickly find most subjects guilty of one crime or another by the standards of today, be they a crusader’s tomb, a general of Empire, or an eighteenth-century slaver. This is not to excuse or condone the practices or even crimes which led to the casting in bronze but to caution the application of modern standards to times which were very different.

I spent a number of years of my own life looking in depth at the birth of a radical movement and how this found expression both intellectually and popularly, and always had difficulty with the expression of the movement’s theology in iconoclasm. I have a natural desire to curate and there is simply a part of me which wants to preserve any object, because such objects tell so much about the development of a society’s understanding, perception, and criticism of self. I admit that I struggle to imagine a great English cathedral in all its pre-Reformation glory, and would perhaps struggle to like it if it were to still exist but this could be more nurture than nature.

My desire to retain such items is more than aesthetic. To rid oneself of even one’s troublesome past seems to deny the scars that have made the face of a country what it is today.

There are clearly times, however, when such statuary cannot be tolerated by the public eye; the emblems and imagery of National Socialism rightly do not have a place on the streets of modern Europe. A sighting of a swastika quickly calls to mind the horrific crimes of its movement, and thus they instruct in the way in which evil can find its way to acceptance through different channels. Yet the physical de-nazification of European towns and cities has not de-nazified global politics, and its philosophy sadly continues to manifest itself. However, there are other ways to deal with such visual reminders. Memento Park is a must-see attraction in Budapest as a graveyard not only to figures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin inter alia, but also the society which erected, supported, and subsequently toppled them. At the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Hungarian population had a choice to obliterate these statues in an attempt to cleanse civic and societal consciousness of the past or to retain, to study, and to acknowledge that what has been, cannot be erased. The now outdoor museum pieces are artefacts which bind a population to the sins of the past.

The retention of these reminders in a proper place de-glorifies the individuals depicted but also indicates a more mature understanding of self, as well as perhaps tells of a society doing more to come to terms with the implications of its past today.

The removal of Colston’s statue from a city centre is right but so is the retention of the figure for posterity; to dispose of the bronze to the Bristol Channel singulates responsibility for a global trade, practised by many and invested in by many, many more and denies the banality of evil that we still need to see and to learn today.

The Dog

I like it warm, but not this warm; warm, though, is perhaps not the right word. Clammy, muggy, mafting – aye, that’s it, it’s mafting. Anyway, it serves Himself right. First, he sends me to find the dummies. Clearly, Mrs Warden thinks they are well-hidden – and they probably are if you can’t smell ‘em. But I can; you might as well park an elephant on a cricket pitch and ask all if they can see something out of place. Secondly, He then gets shirty when I decide to take a mini-break mid-retrieve – just a little dip to cool off the paws.

Admittedly, the pond oozes more toilette than eau de, but it does the trick – although for beings otherwise incapable of detecting a true scent, they don’t ‘alf make a fuss when I deposit said dummy in some very outstretched hands.

Anyway, the result of this little exercise necessitates a swim in the river which is what I would have preferred to do in the first place; if only He’d ask …