The Welsh statue mania

Desmond Clifford

It’s boom time for sculptors and masons. Statues are proliferating across Wales with a fever not seen for a hundred years.

Then the subjects were luminaries of empire and industry: Lloyd George, Sir Thomas Picton (whoops), the Butes, Lord Llandinam and the like.  All were men and most had titles.

The Betty Campbell statue in Cardiff (2021) was the first of a woman in Wales.  Betty was Wales’s first black head teacher (and, as it happens, the only subject of a statue who I met in real life). Created by Eva Shepard it includes representation of children around whom Betty’s claim to stone immortality is centred.

Betty was followed by Elaine Morgan, a writer from Mountain Ash. A third statue was commissioned by Monumental Welsh Women of the multi-talented Cranogwen (Sarah Jane Rees) in Llangrannog (2023). Lady Rhondda was unveiled in Newport in 2024 and Elizabeth Andrews will appear soon.

Owain Glyndwr

Boxer Howard Winston was unveiled in Merthyr in 2001.

Corwen claimed Owain Glyndwr in 2007.

Pembroke realised Henry VII’s tourism potential with a statue only in 2017, 532 years after the Battle of Bosworth.

Caerphilly acknowledged the birth of Tommy Cooper with an incongruous statue (2008) in the shadow of the town’s mighty castle.

Denbigh commissioned HM Stanley (2011), one of Victorian Britain’s most famous men; his life is viewed ambiguously now but residents chose to keep him in a vote a few years back.

Max Boyce had the rare accolade of seeing his statue (2023) unveiled during his lifetime in his home town, Glynneath.

Also in 2023, the first statue of black men in Wales was displayed in Cardiff Bay. It records the achievement of locals Billy Boston, Clive Sullivan and Gus Risman, outstanding sportsmen who “went North” to make a professional living from rugby league when the union version was still amateur.

Happily, Billy Boston was there to see it.

What’s going on with all these statues? Why so many? Why now?

Statues are a statement about the society which commissions them.

When Trafalgar Square was laid out in 1844, Nelson had been dead for 40 years.

Dublin’s Nelson statue was a genuine commemoration, completed in 1809, only four years after his death.

London’s Nelson’s Column was very consciously about Britain’s future, not the past.

After long scepticism and indifference, Britain was about to embrace empire and London was being recast as an Imperial City.

The fin-de-siecle statue fever in Cardiff was also the product of empire.

The Butes and their commercial interests had transformed the town from obscurity.

Coal poured down the valleys to be shipped from the new docks around the world.

Global Wales

Wales became global for the first time. As Cardiff’s wealth and confidence grew, so did its appetite for recognition.

The imposing new city hall was built with a Marble Hall of statues of major figures from Welsh history: Boudica, St David, Hywel Dda, Gerald of Wales/ Gerallt Cymro, Llewelyn II, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Owain Glyndwr, Henry VII, Bishop William Morgan, Pantycelyn and Sir Thomas Picton.

Boudica has dropped out of fashion as a Welsh icon and Picton was cancelled recently because of his links to slavery; otherwise, the roster stands up pretty well.

Cardiff staked its own claim as an empire city.

The nouveau riche upstart, the historically snoozing town which greatness, culture and intrigue had largely bypassed was pitching to become Wales’s pre-eminent city.

Essential to that pitch was persuading the nation that this town created by industry, money and empire, might also serve as a dignified capital.

The statues of this century also say something about Wales.  Belatedly, they show a wider sense of who has contributed to the building of the nation – women, people of immigrant origin, and people from ordinary backgrounds who achieved extraordinary things.

There’s limited rhyme or reason as to who gets a statue and who doesn’t. Even without Black Lives Matter, Sir Thomas Picton stuck out like a sore thumb at Cardiff City Hall.

Now he’s even more conspicuous, absurdly encased in plywood when an explanatory panel or removal to the museum would make more sense.

Figures who might in later years have been seen as subversive – Owain Glyndwr, Llewelyn II – were judged as merely picturesque in the early 1900s, frightening to nobody.

Bemusing

It’s very likely that some of today’s statues will appear bemusing and mysterious to future generations, only time will tell.

We need better ways to curate the accumulation of statues over time, especially in Cardiff which has special duties as the capital.

For example, a rather good statue of Mahatma Gandhi is almost comically hidden on a traffic island in Cardiff Bay.

Surely it should stand outside the Senedd as a permanent inspiration of political courage, national pride, non-violence and self-sacrifice?

Shelley wrote a famous poem about a statue, Ozymandias, King of Kings, once mighty but now a “colossal wreck” wasting in the sands of Egypt.

There are plenty of statues whose purpose has disappeared.

The former Soviet Union has parks full of them, though I note with gloom that the grim revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose removal was a key moment in the collapse of communism, has been re-erected in Moscow.

The Ozymandias effect erodes many attempts to preserve the supposed luminaries of a generation.

Picton lasted a hundred years before changing values caught up with him.

Michael Jackson’s statue outside Fulham’s Craven Cottage lasted only two.

Dublin’s Nelson Pillar lasted until 1966 when it was blown up by Irish republicans, an extreme method for dealing with outmoded statues.

The dominant statue in Cardiff city centre is John Batchelor, our very own Ozymandias. Thousands of shoppers walked past him daily. A seagull often sits on his head. I wonder if one in 1000 people know why he once merited a statue.

Meanwhile, the man who made modern Cardiff, the second Marquis of Bute, stands at a lonely spot on an empty square a couple of hundred yards away.

The Butes and Batchelor were political rivals, their passions now spent and frozen in stone.

Surely they should be located together with an explanatory panel describing the rapid development of the city and the political tensions that created?

I have no real issue with the subjects of our statues.

A case could be made for a good range of people.

My question is: are there better ways to commemorate than commissioning static blocks of stone or bronze?

Might Betty Williams’ inspiration have been better captured by renaming the school at which she was headmistress after her and endowing a fund to provide free books for its pupils?

When Cardiff’s St David’s Hall re-opens wouldn’t it be better re-named for Shirley Bassey or Tom Jones rather than a shopping centre?

How about rebranding the airport Jan Morris International?

Central Square

The uselessly named Central Square in front of Cardiff’s main railway station might become Rhodri Morgan Plaza (the abject concrete slab might acquire some personality in the process).

It can only be a matter of time before the Millennium Centre is re-named after Michael Sheen, and it’ll be the better for it.

We’ll go on with statues, no doubt.  Some atavistic urge is satisfied by stone figures.  We imagine that something will live on – memory, example, inspiration – and sometimes it does, at least for a while.

As a community, however, before we rush automatically to the sculptors, we should maybe consider whether alternative responses to lives worth remembering publicly might work better.

If not, at this rate, Wales will gradually become a giant statue park with silent stones and bronzes telling us who we are, who we once were and who we might become.