Should the world’s controversial statues be protected for tourists?
The past doesn’t produce itself. It is recreated — refracted — by those living in the present. And those who bother to direct so much energy into something as abstract as what no longer exists, into what has slipped through the fingers of time, are unlikely to be impartial actors, impervious to the zeitgeist of their age. Politicians, novelists and filmmakers would be the first to admit (well, the latter two at least) that the act of historical resurrection is a creative, sometimes tendentious, process. Some of the earliest historians, indeed, like Tacitus, saw nothing wrong with putting entire fabricated monologues into the mouths of “great men”.
All this should give us pause for thought when we consider freshly published guidance from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which has instructed custodians of the nation’s “commemorative heritage assets” to “retain and explain” — rather than remove — statues, monuments and commemorations that have become “contested”, if not the target of iconoclastic fury.
These artefacts of the past are to remain in place, with informative plaques giving “historical context” justifying their continued presence. But if such monuments are less manifestations, more invocations of history, sometimes erected at quite sometime later, and when the historical concerns of the present are forever fluid and always shifting, is it really wise to calcify the past in such a manner?
I believe not. I entirely respect the, I suspect, majority view to the contrary, but to me this smacks not just of Soviet-style government interference in cultural affairs but also of that most saccharine of adages that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Don’t get me wrong — I am all for vividly immersing people in the past as though you are travelling through an alien land and fully agree with fellow time-travelling historian Ian Mortimer that “we must do more than simply look at the waters of time passing from the riverbank: we must dive in and immerse ourselves”.
Creative approach
But for so many reasons, controversial statues and monuments are very rarely the best way of doing that and, while I’m in no way advocating a new iconoclastic wave of Calvinist fury, I do think the tourist (whether domestic or international) experience can be actively enhanced by taking a more creative approach, moving on from the idea that people in the past were either heroes or villains to be revered or reviled. If only life were that black and white.
To the howls of protest: it’s become something of a shibboleth to assume that anyone who wants anything other than leaving these controversial monuments in place is advocating the “erasure” of our history and the “cancellation” of key players from within it; is judging the past by the standards of the present — failing to recognise the “past is a foreign country”; calling for the obliteration of any monument that might cause even the slightest offence to anybody in a demented and never-ending “woke” cascade of iconoclastic vandalism.
Needless to say, I think these ideas are overblown. How many people “get their history” from statues? How many people even know who these equestrian gentlemen are? So how can their removal, or their modification or translation to elsewhere, be said to be erasing history? How many statues of Hitler are there in the world? How many to Jack the Ripper? How many statues of England’s most famous king, Henry VIII, are there in the capital? (One, over the gateway of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield.)
Odd and meaningless
If removing statues is cultural vandalism full stop, then was it wrong to take down the statue commemorating Jimmy Savile outside a leisure centre in Glasgow? If a majority of people who have to walk past the various monuments find them objectionable or offensive and want them gone then it is right and democratic to do so, and there is no chance these individuals will somehow be redacted from history as a result — quite the opposite. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann puts it “history is not erased when statues are pulled down. If anything, it is made”.
There are more inventive ways of capturing this than on a rain-spattered, schoolmasterly plaque. In Cavendish Square, just north of the hullabaloo of Oxford Street, stands an empty plinth. It once supported a statue, put there in 1758, of William, Duke of Cumberland, who brutally routed the Jacobites for good at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Initially hailed as a hero who had protected the Union and smoothed the path for Enlightenment values, public opinion latterly turned against him on account of his Scottish killing spree which went far beyond anything needed to win the battle: from Braveheart to butcher. His statue was removed in 1876 leaving an empty plinth.
This is odd and meaningless for most who see it, hardly ideal — yet the idea of restoring the statue with an explanatory plaque feels distasteful. More interesting by far is what appeared in 2016, albeit briefly: a soap statue of the Duke, conveying well the mercurial nature of his historical interpretation, with a clever analogy to another “Scottish Tragedy” and Lady Macbeth’s inability to wash away the specks of blood from her hands.
Startlingly apparent
In the sixteenth century, during England’s first wave of iconoclasm, the Puritans, after they had ripped down statues of the saints, wondered whether it was better to leave the fallen idol’s alcove fallow as a memento, or whether this would only remind people of what had once stood there. I believe this former sensation is pertinent for the now-infamous statue of Edward Colston in Bristol.
When this was grudgingly erected — the citizens of Bristol were reticent to pay for it — in the 1890s to exemplify the values of Bristolian entrepreneurialism and ward off socialist support, there was no mention of his role as deputy governor in the Company of Royal Adventurers, later Royal Africa Company, which, before 1700, was responsible for transporting the majority of the 400,000 enslaved people from Africa to the New World for profit, with the deaths of thousands en route — although this context had been startlingly apparent to many Bristol inhabitants since, many of whom had been lobbying the council for its removal, or at least for greater acknowledgement.
But after the murder of George Floyd — himself the descendent of slaves — at the hands of the Minneapolis police in 2020, it became unbearable, and the rest is well known: the protestor who knelt on Colston’s neck for nine minutes, the flinging of his “body” into the harbour echoing the grim fate of slaves who died, or were killed, mid-transit. I could just about understand the argument of leaving the salvaged statue in situ to convey how far we had advanced as a society since a time when we revered slave traders.
Alternative approaches
But that would miss the momentous historical significance of the protestors toppling it. Whereas the new guidance would suggest the statue be restored with an informative plaque, surely it would be much more fitting to house the statue in a museum and for the plinth to remain as a reminder of what was once, but is no longer, there, and for it to support experimental sculptures and guest statues representing the spectrum of opinion. Or even, if it were to be retained, for juxtapositional sculptures to be commissioned to sit beside it, by those who advocated its removal?
Around the world, different approaches have been tried with various degrees of success. In South Africa of course, the Cecil Rhodes statue was removed entirely from the University of Cape Town in 2015: will the same fate befall his statue at Oriel College, Oxford? It’s hard to imagine adding an explanatory plaque will quell the demands for its removal. Other approaches and outcomes are more imaginative.
In Moscow, at the Muzeon Park of Arts (formerly the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments), can be found busts of Stalin, Lenin, secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, and other key Communist figures standing — or sometimes lying — forlorn in the grass after the Communist Party was banned in 1991 (although the park has been smartened up since 2011). A pink statue of Stalin had had its face caved in by hammer blows.
The site is haunting and surreal — a commemoration of the commemorative, a meta-graveyard. If Britain had such an eerie place, who would go in it, and would any of the statues ever be “released”? At Memento Park, an open-air museum in Budapest, monumental statues of Marxist and Communist ideologues and leaders are paraded, some rather mockingly, as a testament to the democratic impulse that put them there in the early 1990s.
There are no definitive answers and the debate is likely to arouse strong and sometimes disrespectful passions for years to come. Yet when we consider both that statues and monuments are art forms, and the complexity of historical memory, neither the idea of smashing the statues entirely, Puritan style, or pedantically “retaining and explaining” seems quite right, given that much more creative solutions are possible.
