THE PERIL OF MOVING STATUES

Over spring and summer 2020, the public display of statues of selected historic figures suddenly excited people on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, intemperate mobs of protestors struck at a diverse range of statues deemed offensive. Events saw attacks on memorials to Civil War generals and the toppling of George Washington’s bust from its plinth at Washington University. In Boston a crowd beheaded a statue of Christopher Columbus, and on the night of 9 June in Richmond, Virginia, another memorial to Columbus was overturned, set on fire and cast into a lake. ¹

Four days later in the UK, a copycat incident erupted during an anti-racism protest in Bristol, when protestors toppled an 1895 statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. This seemed to mark open season upon other memorials of historical personages in cities around the country. In Oxford, students demonstrated and called for an image of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College ‘to fall’, and other monuments to historical personages as diverse as Lord Nelson in Norwich, Sir Winston Churchill in Whitehall, Sir France Drake in Plymouth and Boy Scout movement founder Baden Powell, resplendent in his uniform and shorts, on Poole quayside in Dorset, were either deliberately damaged or highlighted as being at risk of protests and vandalism. ²

Altogether, there has probably not been such an outburst of iconoclastic sentiment in the UK since the enactment of the injunctions of Edward VI in 1547 demanded statues in churches should be “forthwith taken down”, accompanied by ritualistic homilies and sermons, and when zealous Puritans destroyed or mutilated thousands of images of saints, angels and the Virgin Mary the following century. ³

SCAPEGOATS AND SACRIFICES

Today’s vehement public rages against selected statuary would have intrigued earlier generations of anthropologists, sociologists and folklorists, especially those trained in the Golden Bough philosophy of Sir James Frazer. Within them they would have detected echoes of the age-old rituals of scapegoating and the sacrificing of humans in effigy form (a substitute for actual human sacrifice) for the benefit of the community.

Some statues, like naughty children, were reversed and made