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From the third Trafalgar Square plinth Major
General Sir Henry Havelock surveys the tourist
crowds. Like Sir Michael Jagger Sir Henry went to
Dartford Grammar School. Abandoning a law career
Havelock entered the war just after Waterloo when
it was all rather quiet on the battle front so he too
became a General of Victoria’s British Empire
taking part in the First Afghan War in 1839, the
Anglo-Persian War and finally the Indian Rebellion
of 1857 dying of dysentery at Lucknow days after
the siege there ended. His was first statue ever to be
modelled from a photograph.
Ken Livingstone was shouted down in 2003 when
he suggested that these Victorian statues should be
removed to make way for
more relevant figures
.
There is an unbearable truth to this lack of relevancy
when you read the inscription on Havelock’s statue:
ToMajor General Sir Henry Havelock KCB
and his brave companions in arms during the
campaign in India 1857. Soldiers! Your labours,
your privations, your sufferings and your valour,
will not be forgotten by a grateful country.
An Avian Tangent
As a child my father would take my sister and I to
visit his terrifying mother a few streets and a whole
world away. She kept budgies in a cage on a stand
and let them fly around the living room threatening
to catch in the hair of defenceless little girls. I can’t
ever think of Nanny Louise without thinking of the
whoosh of wings and the grit-filled grey blindness
of the massive flock of pigeons that once colonised
Trafalgar Square. It was Ken Livingstone who
banished the birds in 2003 by introducing a £500
fine on anyone caught feeding the birds (what would
Mary Poppins say?) and taking away Bernie Rayner’s
trading licence. Bernie was the third generation of his
family to sell pigeon feed in Trafalgar Square and he
put up a bit of a fight aided by the pigeon lovers of
London who set up a Save the Pigeons Campaign.
Bernie then rather annoyed the pigeon protest people
by striking a deal with the GLC at the door of the High
Court which involved an undisclosed sum of money.
The GLC had been paying £140,000 each year to clean
the guano from the monuments so it probably seemed
worth it for them the time – but the pigeons didn’t just
go away voluntarily now they weren’t being fed daily.
Ken sent in the noo-noos but they sucked up the
pigeons as well as their mess. Oops. He didn’t fare
much better with the high-pressure hoses, which swept
pigeons to their deaths beneath the wheels of black
cabs and buses - all caught on the cameras and videos
of hundreds of tourists. Finally they settled on Harris
hawks and since 2003 the ratepayers of London have
paid in the region of three quarters of a million pounds
to the hawk people who must be very happy indeed.
Paws For Thought
Edwin Landseer, son of an engraver, was a child
prodigy exhibiting at the Royal Academy at the age
of 14. He became a favourite of Queen Victoria who
considered him to be
very good looking although
rather short
and royal patronage made him very
fashionable as a painter of household pets and
ghillies
and gamekeepers
pictures for grand country estates.
Towards the end of his life he was tortured by
melancholia and hypochondria and a nervous
breakdown brought on, some say, by alcohol and drugs
but maybe also by the pressure of undertaking a royal
