I read with interest Jonathan Jones’ article on commemorative statues (So many causes, so many heroes – why defame them with a statue?, 11 May). Apropos the suggestion that a statue of “a suffragette” should be placed in Parliament Square, London, I wonder if many readers know that there is already a memorial to the foot-soldiers of the women’s suffrage campaign just a few hundred metres from the square? Not Mrs Pankhurst’s statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, but the Suffragette Fellowship memorial in Victoria Street.
It was funded by surviving campaigners and their supporters, unveiled in 1970 by the Speaker of the House of Commons, and is sited in Christchurch Gardens, open on to Victoria Street and in front of Caxton Hall, scene of so much suffrage activity.
The fellowship did not want a statue to commemorate their fight – as Jones suggests, by 1970 that idea was old-fashioned and kitsch. Instead they commissioned an abstract piece by Edwin Russell. On the resulting scroll-shaped sculpture is inscribed a message, invoking “the courage and perseverance of all those men and women who in the long struggle for votes for women selflessly braved derision, opposition and ostracism, many enduring physical violence and suffering”.
By all means let the campaigners attempt to add another figure to the random collection of gentlemen in Parliament Square but, to show they really care about the efforts made by the suffrage campaigners, I wish they would also put their energies into honouring the past, and publicising the Christchurch Gardens memorial and other sites of suffrage commemoration, rather than disregarding them simply because they are not positioned on one particular traffic island.
Elizabeth Crawford
London
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