Morpathia: History and Art – Monuments

She chose five monuments in Newcastle. At each one she asked people what they knew about it, and what they thought of it. One of them was Winged Victory, which stands on Barras Bridge near to Haymarket bus station.

A lot of people – and this applied to all the monuments – said they didn’t know anything about it – 32 per cent knew it was a war memorial, but only 16 per cent knew it was the Boer War.

The monument in the grounds of the Civic Centre, with a crowd scene in relief, is about the First World War, as is the one in Eldon Square.

What I found more interesting, however, was Gerritsen’s findings about the Grey Monument and the memorial to Joseph Cowen on Westgate Road, across the road from the Old Assembly Rooms.

To most of us, the Grey Monument is the Monument. Everybody knows it. It’s in a pedestrian area where you can walk, talk, sit and listen to the buskers, and it’s got a Metro station named after it.

Despite the text on the plinth, not many people know why it’s there. Some thought it was about Earl Grey tea. Only 21 per cent knew that he was a prime minister. But regardless of that, everybody has a great affection for it.

Joseph Cowen has fared less well. He owned the Newcastle Chronicle, was an MP for Newcastle and founded the Tyne Theatre. In 1906, when the statue was put up, it was well placed – with his newspaper office nearby and the Tyne Theatre only a bit further up the Westgate Road.

But nowadays, hardly anybody knows it’s there. The reason for this is that Westgate Road is a noisome traffic artery where nobody walks unless they have to. You certainly wouldn’t sit there to enjoy the surroundings.

Only Winged Victory, once people knew what it was about, raised questions about its suitability for the present day. But, says Gerritsen: “Regardless of this, a desire for the monuments to remain exists cross generationally.”

People may have forgotten why they are there, but have internalised them as part of their mental landscape. None of them provokes the anger raised by the Edward Colston statue in Bristol or the Confederate statues in the southern states of the USA.

We in Northumberland have monuments as well, many of them quite recent. One such is the statue of Emily Davison in Carlisle Park, Morpeth.

At first glance she looks like a typical Edwardian lady with her hat, high-collared dress and ankle-length skirt. But she’s sitting on a prison bench tipping out the food she’s been given, waiting to be force fed. It’s about votes for women.

Despite its pleasant surroundings, once you know all this it isn’t an entirely comfortable thing to be around – but Emily sits erect and proud, and her monument commemorates something important and relevant to us today.

She is celebrated in Morpeth every year on International Women’s Day and the monument even gets school visits when the children leave artwork and messages for her.

If you want an old-school monument, you can’t beat the statue of Lt. Col. Benson in Beaumont Street in Hexham. The statue speaks for itself – a man of action, a soldier, vigorous, alert, striding forward, binoculars in hand.

If you don’t mind risking crossing the road, a plaque on the plinth tells you that he fought in the Sudan campaigns of 1885, 1896 and 1898, and in the Ashanti expedition of 1895, and was killed in battle in the second Boer War. He was only 40.

Was he a hero? Undoubtedly. But two of the responses to Winged Victory might apply equally to the Benson statue: “it glorifies colonialism,” and “it’s not for this age”.

Even so, I doubt that people in Hexham would want to see it go. Our picture is courtesy of Hexham Local History Society, www.hexhamhistorian.org/historic-hexham/photograph-archive

Couple at Newbiggin attracted virulent criticism from a London art critic and gets mixed reviews from ordinary people on Tripadvisor. It stands out at sea on a steel framework and all you can see of the two people is their backs.

The idea is to make them appear to stand on the water at high tide, but at low tide they look as if they’re standing on a café table. Happily, a smaller version on the sea-front is more accessible – in two senses: you can see both sides, and a single glance tells you what it’s about.

It isn’t heroic. It’s two ordinary people. She wears jeans and a summer top, he wears an open-necked shirt, trousers and a cloth cap, but they’re standing upright and looking towards the distant horizon. They could be anybody and that’s the idea.

Robin of Pegswood is a tribute to the mining community of the village. It doesn’t stand in Pegswood itself, but on a traffic island, and is designed to be seen by people in cars and lorries.

Unless one is totally oblivious to the mining heritage of south east Northumberland – and one day that will happen, if it hasn’t done already – the symbolism is obvious.

The miner wears his pit trousers, helmet and boots, but is stripped to the waist. He’s at full stretch with his arrow poised, except that it’s actually a spade. Like Couple, it’s of its time – our time.

Alnwick has a lot of public art, much of it celebrating the Percy family to whom the town owes so much, but today I’m thinking about St Michael’s Pant.

It was erected in 1765 by the then corporation following the failure of an earlier attempt to bring a good supply of water into the town. It still works and it’s quite obvious what it’s there for, even though there are no cattle crowding round it and people nowadays have taps in their houses.

Less obvious is why it should have a statue, but it’s a practice that goes back thousands of years.

On top is an angel slaying a dragon. This is not St George but St Michael, the patron saint of the parish church, the dragon being Satan. They stand on a small Gothick tower. The ‘k’ indicates that this is an 18th Century piece when Gothic ornament was not yet the serious study it became under the Victorians.

Unless you’re a rabid atheist, it’s totally unobjectionable. St Michael’s Pant is right in the town centre, familiar and no doubt well-loved – but it really needs to be landscaped to save it from being hemmed in by parked cars and vans.

Like all of the other pieces, the Pant is of its time, which is perhaps why we tolerate them and wouldn’t want them taken away.

We don’t necessarily know why they’re there, but aren’t too bothered either. It’s enough that they are part of the familiar scene.

Books by Roger Hawkins make ideal presents for anyone interested in local history. Available on Amazon, or from the Old Herald Office and Newgate News in Morpeth.