Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire

TRAFALGAR SQUARE Emblem of Empire

Rodney Mace

2005 LAWRENCE AND WISHART LONDON 3

First published in 1976, this edition 2005 Copyright Rodney Mace 1976

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder. The author has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1998 to be identified as the author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press

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To Jessica, Joe, Shay, Anisha, Róisin and Niamh

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PREFACE Like many a schoolchild I was introduced to Trafalgar Square, probably on a day trip to London, by way of feeding pigeons or being photographed against one of the lions at the base of Nelson’s Column. Later and much more importantly the Square became a place to hear speeches, to march to or set off from to demonstrate that some hope was left for humanity and justice. Often on these latter occasions I was struck by an obvious irony. The causes that were so urgently advocated were most often anti-imperialist. Yet the Square in its design is an impenitent and rather vulgar commemorative edifice to men and events that, by force of arms, had helped to extend the hegemony of British capital over large areas of the globe. The present study is an attempt to explore this contradiction and will, I hope, contribute to the debate currently taking place around the bi-centenary of Nelson’s death, the battle of Trafalgar and their long aftermath in the popular imagination. Since this book’s first publication in 1976 the Square has continued to be a site of public demonstration, and some of these demonstrations, along with the campaigns they espoused – such as the campaign against the much disliked Tory poll tax – have wrought changes on the government in power. In 2000 the Square was transferred to the Greater London Authority, and there have subsequently been changes made to its century-old layout, which have made it more attractive to the millions of people who pass by or linger there every year, while still retaining its position of being Britain’s premier place politique. Many libraries, archives and organisations, along with friends and colleagues, assisted me with the original research for this book. In the intervening thirty years I have often been reminded by those around me that the task I undertook rather lightly in those days of youth has grown more complex with age. Rodney Mace Whitbourne, Herefordshire January 2005

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CONTENTS

List of Plates

8

List of Figures

10

Introduction

11

1. Charing Cross

23

2. Hero of Empire

48

3. A Very Select Committee

69

4. Thirty Years in the Making

86

5. Ugly Bronze Images

111

6. Riotous Assembly

134

7. Black Monday and Bloody Sunday

155

8. In the Minister’s Gift

204

Appendices

235

Select Bibliography

323

Index

329

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LIST OF PLATES Plates, between pages 234 and 235 (Photographs are by the author unless otherwise credited) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Aerial view of Whitehall (Fox Photos) The Duke of York’s Column (Fox Photos) Statue of Charles I on site of Charing Cross Imperial Standards of Length, in north wall of Trafalgar Square John Goldicutt’s proposal for a London Amphitheatre (R.I.B.A.) St. Martin’s Church from Pall Mall East, c. 1825 (G.L.C.) Lowther’s Arcade (G.L.C.) Morley’s Hotel (G.L.C.) National Gallery and proposed layout for the Square, c. 1838 (Westminster Public Library) Charles Barry’s plan for layout of the Square, c. 1840 (Public Record Office) Wyatt’s drawing for a Memorial to Nelson (British Library) Nelson’s Pillar, Dublin (National Library of Ireland) Wellington Monument, Hyde Park Corner (Science Museum) Nelson Monument, Great Yarmouth (National Monument Record) Goldicutt’s design for a National Naval Monument (Westminster Public Library) Bellamy’s design for a National Naval Monument (Westminster Public Library) Railton’s winning design for Nelson Memorial (British Library) Britton’s entry for the Nelson Memorial Competition (Westminster Public Library) Sievier’s and Fowler’s joint entry (Westminster Public Library) Collmann’s entry (Victoria and Albert Museum) Goldicutt’s entry (R.I.B.A.) Wetton’s entry (Westminster Public Library) M.M.’s entry (British Library) Nelson’s Column (G.L.C.) Railton: view of proposed layout for the Square (G.L.C.) One of Railton’s designs for layout of the Square (Public Record Office) Nelson’s Column under construction (Science Museum) Barry’s proposal for a single basin in the Square (Public Record Office) Bas relief “Copenhagen” (National Monument Record) Bas relief “The Nile” (National Monument Record) Bas relief “St. Vincent” (National Monument Record) Bas relief “Trafalgar” (National Monument Record) 8

List of Plates 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

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Baily’s statue of Nelson (Keystone) Police box in corner of the Square (Fox Photos) Busts of Admirals Cunningham, Jellicoe and Beatty Statue of Major-General Charles Napier Statue of General Sir Henry Havelock A scheme to turn the Square into a garden, 1894 (British Library) Heathcote-Statham’s project to redesign the square, 1912 (R.I.B.A.) A suggestion to make Trafalgar Square into Washington Square, 1902 (Harmsworth London Magazine) Suffragette meeting (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) Launching the “Peace and Joy” Loan, 1919 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) Meeting to demand release of Irish prisoners, 1922 (Radio Times Hutton Picture Library) Welcome for Welsh Miners, 1927 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) A. J. Cook speaking in the Square, 1927 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) Unemployed assembling, 1932 (Keystone) Unemployed in Whitehall, 1932 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) Unemployed meeting, 1932 (Radio Times Hutton Picture Library) Unemployed in the Square, 1934 (Radio Times Hutton Picture Library) A placard display (G.L.C.) Second Front Demonstration, 1942 (Keystone) “Wings for Victory Week” (Westminster Public Library) Statue of Charles George Gordon (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) Meeting to protest against British invasion of Suez, 1956 (Radio Times Hutton Picture Library) A fascist demonstration, 1959 (Keystone) Demonstration during Suez Crisis, 1956 (Fox Photos) C.N.D. rally, 1958 (Camera Press) C.N.D. rally, 1961 (Fox Photos) Committee of 100 sitdown, 1961 (Fox Photos) “Ban the Bomb” demonstration, 1963 (Fox Photos) Vietnam demonstration, 1968 (Keystone) T.U.C. protest demonstration, 1971 (Camera Press) Lapel sticker for students’ demonstration, 1972 Senora Allende speaking in the Square, 1974 (Guy Brett) Protest against ban on meetings on Irish Questions, 1975 (Morning Star) GLC leader Ken Livingstone as Nelson (Rodney Mace) Poll tax riot March 1990 (David Hoffman Picture Library) Alison Lapper 8 Months Pregnant 2003 Fourth Plinth competition (Marc Quinn) The Square in 2003 (Hayley Madden, courtesy GLA) 9

LIST OF FIGURES Illustrations in text The Royal Mews at Charing Cross (G.L.C.) 27 Royal Stables at Charing Cross (Westminster Public Library) 28 Temporary barracks at Charing Cross (G.L.C.) 28 Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square 30 John Nash’s 1812 proposal (Senate House Library) 32 John Nash’s 1826 proposal (Senate House Library) 38 Flaxmann’s statue of Britannia (Victoria and Albert Museum) 50 William Woods’s proposed National Monument (British Library) 53 Woods’s proposed entrance to National Monument (British Library) 54 Construction of Nelson’s Column (Illustrated London News) 91 Notice prohibiting meetings in the Square, 1848 (Public Record Office) 136 Black Monday, 1886 (Illustrated London News) 163 Demonstrators in St. James’s Street (Illustrated London News) 164 Sleeping out in London (Illustrated London News) 173 Handout of bread and soup (Illustrated London News) 174 Demonstrations on 23 October 1887 (Illustrated London News) 175 Notice prohibiting meetings in the Square, 8 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 178 Police in the Square, 13 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 180 Meeting at Clerkenwell Green, 13 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 181 Demonstrators attacked by police in St. Martin’s Lane, 13 November 1887 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) 182 Demonstrators crossing Westminster Bridge, 13 November 1887 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) 182 Police attack demonstrators in Haymarket, 13 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 183 Police charge in the Square, 13 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 183 Arrival of the Magistrate and Life Guards, 13 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 184 Life Guards parade in the Square, 13 November 1887 (Illustrated London News) 185 The Grenadier Guards attack demonstrators, 13 November 1887 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) 186 Special constables, 1887 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) 186 Notice to prohibit meetings in the Square, 18 November 1887 (Public Record Office) 191 Crane’s design for Morris’s “Death Song” for Alfred Linnell (British Library) 194 Fifth anniversary of Bloody Sunday (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) 199 Plan for temporary building in the Square, 1916 (Public Record Office) 211 10

INTRODUCTION … a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult to the conquered by their conquerors …1

Most, if not all, capital cities of Western Europe have a place that could be described as their ‘front room’. This place, as in a household, attempts to give palpable expression to its host’s social, historical and political aspirations. It is most usually a place to be looked at, and only occasionally used; somewhere that will impress the neighbours and overawe the country cousins. And death and the memory of death of loved ones are often not far away. This study argues that in the case of England, for at least the last one hundred and sixty years, Trafalgar Square in the centre of London has been that place. The Square laid out in front of the National Gallery forms the north-eastern corner of an area that is edged by Whitehall to the east, the Palace of Westminster to the south, and Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park Corner to the west, an area that encloses both the symbolic seat of power and the centre of government of the United Kingdom. At almost every turn along the streets and in the parks and open spaces of this square mile stand bronze and stone effigies built to remember past battles and heroic men, most now forgotten. These effigies mark out a history that celebrates those virtues of Britain’s national greatness (usually exercised in distant climes) which so enchanted our Victorian and Edwardian forebears – ‘strength’, ‘character’, ‘courage’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘heroic death’. The equally admired womanly virtues of ‘caring’ and ‘motherhood’ are almost totally absent, except for two nurses: a stone statue of Edith Cavell, shot by a German firing squad in 1915, was erected opposite the National Portrait Gallery in 1920; and a large bronze was erected in honour of Florence Nightingale, the ‘heroine’ of the Crimea, in Waterloo Place in 1915 – five years after her death aged ninety years, and fifty years after the war that made her famous. The reality of war and death for the common soldier, although present all around, is only shown for what it is in Charles Sergeant Jagger’s 1925 Royal Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner. What follows is a history of Trafalgar Square written in two interre11

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Trafalgar Square

lated parts; the first part is a detailed examination of how the Square and its monuments came into being in the hundred years from 1840; and the second part shows how, as the national Valhalla, it slowly became transformed into a place synonymous not with heroes of war but with public celebration and demonstration for a better, safer and more just world. The Square is named after a six hour long sea battle that took place on 21 October 1805 off a small head of land, Cabo de Trafalgar (after Tarf alGharb, an Arabic term meaning Cape of Laurels), some thirty miles south along the Costa de la Luz from the Spanish port city of Cadiz.2 This battle became famous on two counts, firstly because on that windy autumn afternoon the British fleet’s commander, the forty-seven-year-old ViceAdmiral Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, died from a single enemy shot; and secondly, because the combined French and Spanish fleet was routed in the battle, and was never again able to pose any real challenge to British naval domination during the entire period of the ensuing ten years of the war with Napoleon. The coming together of Nelson and Trafalgar as a forecourt to the new National Gallery some forty years after the battle, however, is, as we shall see, more down to chance than to design. Horatio Nelson’s life – from his relatively humble beginnings as the son of a Norfolk parson to his dramatic death aboard the Victory – became the subject of legend almost within days of his death. His funeral and burial (in a sarcophagus originally intended for Henry VIII) at St Paul’s Cathedral as opposed to Westminster Abbey testified not only to the gratitude of the state but also to the thanks of the City of London’s merchants and bankers. Almost to a man they feted his past victories on the high seas – victories which, as it turned out, would keep those very same seas safe for British Empire trade for the next one hundred years. Within a couple of years of his death books about his life and exploits began pouring off the presses; biographies, many hagiographic, were soon written, volumes of his letters were edited, and reminiscences were penned by those who knew him, many detailing his private life – especially his liaison, late on, with Emma Lady Hamilton. Monuments were erected all around the nation and the Empire. But in London – the very centre of Empire – there was no public memorial to Nelson apart from the one in St Paul’s Cathedral. As we shall see, it was not until thirty-five years after his death that anyone thought to remedy the situation by mounting a competition to build a public monument in London. Meanwhile, in the years and decades that followed, the Nelson myth grew like Topsy, much stimulated by the many editions of the 1813 biography by the poet laureate Robert Southey (an author not known for his historical accuracy on matters naval, or for that matter on anything else 12

Introduction

13

in his hero’s life).3 Widely circulated in English Public Schools and frequently given out on school prize days, this book, and the many ballads and chap-books being read by the newly literate working classes, ensured Nelson’s place in the nation’s imagination. As the Empire reached its zenith towards the end of Victoria’s reign, stories of Nelson’s exploits became increasingly anthologised amongst other ‘heroic lives’ and ‘leaders of men’, in texts that furthered the myth that Britain’s greatness was built solely on muscular, male and Christian values. Alongside all this publishing activity, representations of Nelson’s final moments flowed from the brushes of painters and the needles of engravers. The most famous and enduring of these were Benjamin West’s famous allegorical painting that portrayed Nelson as a Christ-like figure being born aloft by Neptune and angels with Britannia looking on, and Arthur Devis’s iconic painting, The Death of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson in the Cockpit of HMS Victory. In 2003 BBC Television conducted a poll entitled ‘Great Britons’, in which Nelson came ninth – one below the singer/songwriter John Lennon but well below Diana Princess of Wales and Winston Churchill. (It is interesting to note that Churchill had Nelson’s funeral arrangements in mind when planning his own.) Nelson and Trafalgar are also remembered in town and street names, in pubs and cafes, and – when gravitas is needed – in brands for everything from cigars to insurance. A much restored Victory, the ship Nelson commanded at Trafalgar, is the central exhibit at the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth and is visited by tens of thousands of people every year. Nelson himself has become part of the heritage and celebrity industry; he is the only British naval officer to have museums solely devoted to his life, and the number of books written about him in recent years is almost an industry in itself. And in the period running up to the bicentenary of his death, there has been a massive increase in all this activity, with new exhibitions, lectures, and television and radio programmes being commissioned, and in particular a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. However, times have changed since the centenary celebrations in 1905, when Britain still believed that it had an Empire and that Nelson and Trafalgar had played an important part in its formation. Among historians at least, Nelson has been pushed off his saintly perch in recent years. Generations of historical writing are now being reappraised, as are the events and personalities involved in his life and exploits; and a more measured view of the man is beginning to emerge. However, it is likely to take some time for this reappraisal to dent the popular imagination’s view of Nelson as an archetypal British hero – fearless, vain, high13

14

Trafalgar Square

handed, badly dressed, energetic, humble, disobedient and cunning. Several contemporary commentators might agree with Terry Coleman’s description of Nelson as ‘a paramount naval genius and a natural born predator’, though they might not accept the recent branding of Nelson by some Italian and French academics as a ‘war criminal’ (because of his treatment of the rebels in Naples in 1794).4 What all agree is that Nelson was an exceptional and often foolhardy commander, who frequently needlessly risked his own life and the lives of those that served with him; indeed some of his contemporaries suggested that, had Nelson been a bit more careful at Trafalgar, he wouldn’t have been such an easy target for a French sniper. But caution and restraint were not his style. When he spoke of the enemy the word ‘annihilate’ frequently came up – a sentiment not usually found among his peers in the Georgian navy, or given expression on the monuments built to commemorate him. It is surprising that a figure so deeply embedded in the Victorian imagination should be largely represented in the capital city of the ‘nation he so loved’ with four rather dull and pedestrian bas-reliefs of his naval victories, and a statue that is out of sight, atop a column placed in an even duller square – none of which warrant more than scant mention in the canons of architectural or sculptural history of the period. Yet despite this Nelson and his monument are perhaps the best-known piece of public sculpture in the imagery of Britain-as-London, as testified by their appearance on tens of thousands of postcards, tourist photographs and trinkets. The choice of a classical form for Nelson’s monument and the Square was probably deliberate, although other forms were initially put forward for consideration, not least those in a ‘gothic’ style, with their references back to Tudor England (as you will see below in the entries for the Nelson Monument competition: illustrations 15-23 and Appendix 2). However it is not the contention of this book that there is anything more than a very loose congruence, at any particular historical juncture, between, on the one hand, architectural and sculptural forms and, on the other, social and economic forms. It would be too simplistic to argue for a direct correlation between the rise of neo-classicism in England and the emergence of the idea of Empire in a Roman sense. But there is enough evidence to make some general observations. The most blatant examples are to be found towards the end of the period, especially when commemorating military heroes, when direct reference of this kind was both sought and intended. One particularly interesting example, which predates Nelson’s monument, is the Memorial to the Duke of York, one-time Commander-in-Chief 14

Introduction

15

of the British Army, that stands in Waterloo Place, not more than a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square.5 In 1829 the Duke of York Memorial Committee (which counted among its members the Duke’s successor as Cin-C and later prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, as well as Lord Palmerston, Lord Shaftesbury and Sir Robert Peel) decided on Benjamin Wyatt’s edifice for the memorial, which was modelled almost exactly on the Emperor Trajan’s Column in Rome. This was a quite deliberate choice. Trajan’s Column, it will be remembered, was erected to illustrate two successful military campaigns, which in themselves marked the moment when the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent. (The absence on the London column of a bas-relief similar to Trajan’s resulted from the constraints of economy rather than design.) Several other suggestions for this Memorial had been equally ‘imperial’ in their choice of forms. The architect C. R. Cockerell thought a ‘Temple of Military Virtue’ appropriate. Someone else put forward a column surmounted by a Roman Eagle. Short shrift was given to one sculptor’s suggestion that ‘at the feet of the statue’ a group of children should stand ‘pointing to the Prince under whose benevolent attention and parental care they had been fortunate enough to have lived’. A memorial to a drunken womaniser and military incompetent seemed gross to many – but personal virtue was usually of scant importance in the matter of public statuary, as we shall see. Similar allusions to a Roman military commander were undoubtedly in the minds of a similar group of men in choosing in 1839 a design for Nelson’s monument (the group again included Wellington – himself already a military hero – and also Peel, twice prime minister, later to meet a rather inglorious death through falling off his horse). They chose William Railton’s design for the Memorial, in which the classical reference was a little less direct but no less potent. Railton’s Memorial was directly modelled – especially in its Corinthian capital – on a column in the temple of Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger) in the Forum of Augustus in Rome. Ronald Syme describes the Forum and the Temple – which together formed the culmination of the whole building programme of Augustus – as the ‘shrine and setting where the Senate debated on war and peace, where generals offered prayers before going to their armies or thanksgiving when returning from successful wars’: … Around the Forum stood the mailed statues of military men with the inscribed record of their res gestae, from Aeneas and Romulus in the beginning, down to recent worthies who had held triumphs or received the ornamenta triumphalia in lieu of distinction. In the temple itself three deities were housed in concord: Mars, Venus Genetrix and Divus Julius … 15

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Trafalgar Square The Temple of Mars the Avenger had been vowed by Caesar’s son at Philippi when he fought against the assassins of his parents, the enemies of the Fatherland.6

To a romantic classicist like Railton, the similarities between the events and people depicted in the Forum of Augustus and those of England’s wars with France (and particularly with Napoleon) must have been overwhelming. The fact that the Square’s principal feature is a pale reflection of Imperial Roman greatness may have incensed many people, but it has not yet resulted in any concerted attempts by the populace to physically destroy it. The ruling class, on the other hand, to judge by their considerable protectiveness towards the column and the Square in 1848 and 1887 and many times subsequently, has perceived these emblems of Empire as properties of immense importance. In the monument’s early days threats to its fabric by a popular uprising were often on the minds of police and government, and in the 1870s they had before them the example of the Paris Commune’s treatment of the Napoleon column in the Place Vendôme in May 1871. The Commune, it may be recalled, demolished what Theophile Gautier described as the ‘great exclamation mark set at the close of the sonorous phrase the First Empire’, because of its ‘Caesarian’ Bonapartist associations.7 Almost exactly one hundred years after Railton’s Nelson monument was begun, a man whose imperial ambitions were to put in the shade those of Napoleon or Nelson got quite close to destroying it as a feature of the London landscape. Adolf Hitler’s plan was not to bomb the column, but to remove it, after a successful German invasion of England (code-named Operation Sea Lion) in September 1940. The plan, drawn up by the Nazis’ Department III of the Security Service (the SS) and dated 26 August 1940, was as follows: There is no symbol of British Victory in the World War corresponding to the French monument near Compiegne … On the other hand, ever since the battle of Trafalgar, the Nelson Column represents for England a symbol of British Naval might and world domination. It would be an impressive way of underlining the German Victory if the Nelson Column were to be transferred to Berlin.8

The column’s re-erection in the capital of the Thousand Year Reich would have undoubtedly been ably stage-managed by Hitler’s architect, that exemplary latter-day Roman revivalist Albert Speer. Instead of look16

Introduction

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ing down on Britain’s Imperial focus – Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster – Nelson would have looked with an equally stony and disdainful one-eyed gaze on Germany’s: the Reichstag and the Fuhrer’s Chancellery. It is interesting to speculate whether the SS would have also removed the bronze replicas of Britain’s Standard Imperial Measures which are let into the wall of the North Terrace, and replaced them with metric ones in iron.9 Many writers have remarked on how the classical column, with its Roman references, developed a fetish-like significance for nineteenthcentury capitalism; it appeared on buildings large and small, singly and in groups, particularly in cemeteries and war memorials. In 1890 Ignatius Donnelly (pseudonym for Edward Bois-Gilbert, a leading figure in the American Populist Party) wrote a utopian novel entitled Caesar’s Column, a book that unremittingly assailed the graft and corruption of the capitalism of his day.The novel’s hero, Gabriel Welstein, arrives in New York from East Africa in 1898 to find that latter-day capitalism has developed into a system of unprecedented selfishness on the part of the rich minority, built on an equally unprecedented brutalisation of the ‘working masses’. The story culminates with a very bloody unplanned worldwide insurrection, and a total massacre of the rich, with the workers, under the leadership of a sinister Brotherhood of Destruction, achieving the destruction of capitalism. Not surprisingly after a massacre on that scale, the streets of New York lay thick with the corpses of the rich.To dispose of these, the Brotherhood’s leader, Caesar Lomellini, commanded that they be laid in layers, feet to the centre, and covered with concrete, to form an enormous column in ‘commemoration of the death and burial of modem civilization’. A civilization, the column’s inscription says, that was dominated by giant corporations who ‘plunder the poor … (have) hearts harder than nether mill-stone … and degrade humanity and outrage God’.10 By making the ruling class become the column instead of surmounting it, Donnelly succeeds, albeit somewhat crudely, in defiling a near sacred form. Trafalgar Square and its several monuments, of course, speak the language of the ruling class. To the mass of ordinary people, whose exploitation and death through nearly three centuries had enabled the ideal of Empire to be realised, the Square offers no bronze or granite memorial; yet it is they and their descendants who in the course of time by the use of the site as a public forum have given it its real significance. Among the most oppressed in the cause of Empire were the armed forces themselves. Sadly, few among them put words to their conditions of life. Those that did, however, spoke with poignancy more than equal to that found in the work of their more fortunate contemporaries. A soldier 17

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Trafalgar Square

after being flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails for a minor offence in 1832 recalled: … Only fifty (lashes) had been inflicted and the time since they began was like a long period of life; I felt as if I had lived all the time of my real life in pain and torture, and the time when existence had pleasure in it was a dream, long, long gone by.11

Flogging, a punishment often meted out in great measure by Nelson, was still common practice in the British Navy well into the twentieth century. It was officially abolished in 1939. In 1797, when Nelson was near the height of his fame and fortune, an anonymous sailor fighting desperately for a better life for those who served below decks during the Nore Mutiny wrote: Whilst Landsmen wander tho’ control’d And boast the rites of freedom, Oh! view the tender’s loathsome hole Where droop your injured seamen. Dragged by Oppression’s savage grasp From every dear connection, Midst putrid air, oh! see them gasp, Oh! mark their deep dejection. Blush then, O! blush, ye pension host, Who wallow in profusion, For our foul cell proves all your boast To be but mere delusion. If Liberty be ours, O! say Why are not all protected? Why is the hand of ruffian sway ’Gainst seamen thus directed? Is thus your proof of British rights? Is this rewarding bravery? Oh! shame to boast your tars’ exploits, Then doom these tars to slavery. Blush then, &c Hark then, ye minions of a court Who prate at Freedom’s blessing, Who every hell-born war support 18

Introduction

19

And vindicate impressing, A time will come when things like you, Mere baubles of creation, No more will make mankind pursue The work of devastation. Blush then, &c’ …12

Conditions a hundred and fifty years later for those still being forced to live below decks under admirals like Cunningham, the last ‘hero’ commemorated in the Square, were hardly different from those under Nelson. In 1946 one of them wrote: … I had no bunk. I slept where I could, when I could. The mess deck was a den indeed. We continuously shipped seas, our ventilators took in large quantities of water. For days on end, sometimes weeks, there was water to the depth of two or three inches about our living quarters, water that mingled with fuel-oil and vomit … We lived like felons. Tired men coming off watch, weak with vomiting, tried to clear up the filth, but only added to it. The stench was horrible. I was always wet. There was no means of drying our clothes. The ablutions were primitive. Two or three ordinary kitchen bowls served as baths. There was only one bath in the ship – for officers.13

It is only left to echo in this respect the poet John Masefield’s famous words: ‘Our naval glory was built up by the blood and agony of thousands of barbarously maltreated men.’14 The Navy didn’t have it all its own way in the Square, for between 1856 and 1886 three ‘soldier heroes’ of the British Army made their appearance in bronze. Two of them, Charles Napier and Henry Havelock, are almost completely unknown today, while the third, Charles Gordon, now relegated to Embankment Gardens, is probably only known for his appearance as the hero in the big budget Hollywood movie Khartoum.15 All three were well known in the nineteenth century as soldiers who, as ruthlessly as Nelson, championed the British Empire abroad, Napier and Havelock in India, Gordon in China and Sudan.16 In the original design for the Square the plinths at the corners of the north terrace were to be surmounted by equestrian figures, but this never happened – or not in the way the original design intended. George IV, who occupies the plinth on the north east side opposite South Africa House, is there by mistake; and what has come to be known as the ‘Fourth Plinth’ has, until recently, remained conspicuously empty. However this 19

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Trafalgar Square

all began to change in 1996 when Pru Leith, Chair of the Royal Society of Arts, began a campaign for the empty plinth to become the site for contemporary sculpture. After three successful trial runs to test public reaction, which included a naked Christ figure with a crown of barbed wire and an inverted plinth in transparent resin, a limited competition, with a jury chaired by the director of the National Gallery, was held in 2003. Of the six entries, the joint winners were Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper 8 Months Pregnant and Thomas Schutte’s Hotel for Birds (see illustration 68). Marc Quinn’s entry caused a considerable stir as his subject was not only pregnant but also disabled; it brought forth the usual chorus of derisory comments about modern art, and anyway wouldn’t a statue of the Queen Mother be better. Both the jury and Quinn himself defended the figure, pointing out that Nelson himself was without part of a limb and had limited sight in one eye. But also to the point is that Quinn’s proposal is a woman, the first to be remembered in the Square ever, and the third in the whole Westminster area. However, and rather sadly, Alison Lapper 8 Months Pregnant is not to be permanent, as it is intended that the Fourth Plinth should become a site for a changing exhibition over the years.17 The last three chapters of this book are devoted not to an analysis of the architectural and sculptural elements that make up the Square, but to its use as a public forum, almost as soon as it was built, by working-class organisations, trade unions, peace groups and the like in their struggle for a more just and safe world. After one particularly turbulent time in the 1880s the designer and socialist William Morris wrote News from Nowhere, a vision of a future England transformed from capitalism to socialism. In the famous Chapter Seventeen, ‘How the Change Came’, Morris details the precipitating event that brought about this revolution: the ‘massacre of Trafalgar Square’. This was an event of such gravity that the worker’s consciousness was changed from a mere trade union one to a higher and more political one, thereby producing a qualitative change in the relations between the classes.18 It is arguable that most of the events that have taken place in the Square over its lifetime have contributed only on the margins to the sort of change wished for by Morris and the early socialists. But one event, the ‘anti-poll tax riot’ of March 1990, did much to unseat Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Tory Party a little later. Uncannily these ‘anti-poll tax riots’ in the Square seemed to mirror the events of the riot of November 1887 (see illustrations 25, 29), including the riding down of a demonstrator by a police horse, but this time in full view of the press and television cameras. In the late 1990s a change did come, though not of quite the sort that 20

Introduction

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Morris had imagined, when institutional responsibility for the Square changed. Along with Parliament Square, it was handed over from central government to the newly created Greater London Authority. Some might have seen this as a poisoned chalice for new Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, at the time much derided by New Labour and Tories alike. However, the opposite turned out to be the case. Within months of coming to power the GLA set in train plans that were to transform the Square from a traffic island into a truly popular esplanade. In July 2003 the project was completed with a grand flight of steps connecting a traffic free concourse in front of the National Gallery down into the main body of the Square. Traffic was re-routed, a cafe and public lavatories were set into the north wall, heritage wardens were appointed and serious attempts were made to rid the Square of the pigeon infestation – with Ken Livingstone describing pigeons as ‘flying rats’. In 2004 the National Gallery opened a new street-level entrance giving direct access to the concourse, which completed the transformation of the Square, and was much welcomed by the Square’s neighbours and everyone who uses it, including demonstrators. But what has really made the difference is the way the Square has been reclaimed by the people of London, ably assisted by the GLA, for it is no longer the sole preserve of the state and its dead, with the population let in on sufferance, but truly a place that is both popular and yet still political. In summary, the object of this book is simple. It sets out to show that, as in any drama, the stage and all that is on it form an integral and indissoluble historical link with the narrative. NOTES 1. The French revolutionary, Felix Pyat, on Napoleon’s Column in the Place Vendome, quoted in Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (Newton Abbot 1972, pp.301-2). 2. By coincidence a laurel wreath indicating honour and glory was placed on Nelson’s coffin next to his cocked hat and viscount coronet at his state funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral. No women were invited to the funeral, not even his wife Francis Lady Nelson. 3. Robert Southey, Life of Nelson (London 1813). More than fifty editions of this book had appeared by 1914, and a further fifty by 2000. 4. For a full discussion of these issues, see Terry Coleman, Nelson: The man and the legend (London 2002). 5. For correspondence relating to this monument see PRO WORKS 20/5/1 and PRO WORKS 20/6/1. 21

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Trafalgar Square

6. Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford 1966) pp.470-1. See also, Alex Boetius and J. B. Ward Perkins, Etruscan and Roman Architecture (Harmondsworth 1970), p.190. 7. Quoted in Frank Jellinck, The Paris Commune of 1871 (London 1937), p.283. 8. Quoted in Norman Logmate, If Britain had Fallen (London 1972), p.135. For details of this whole invasion plan see David Lampe, The Last Ditch (London 1968); and R.R.A. Wheatley, Operation Sea Lion (London 1958). 9. For the correspondence relating to the placing of these standards see PRO WORKS 20/2-3. 10. Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column (Chicago 1890), pp.329-30. For an interesting discussion of this novel see A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London 1971), pp.229-232. 11. Quoted in the writer and poet John Masefield’s extraordinary book first published in 1905, entitled Sea Life in Nelson’s Time (London 1971), p.74. 12. PRO ADMIRALITY 1/727, Nore Mutiny, papers of the Repulse No 2 1797. 13. Quoted in Hannan Swaffer, What would Nelson Do? (London 1946), pp.27-8. 14. Masefield op. cit., pix. 15. Basil Dearden’s ponderous 1966 film featured an all-star cast, with Charlton Heston playing Gordon, and Laurence Olivier a blacked-up Mahdi. 16. For a particularly good analysis of the making of male heroes in the nineteenth century, see Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London 1994). 17. Artists during the trial period were Marc Wallinger, Bill Woodrow and Rachel Whiteread. The other artists in the competition were Chris Burden, Sokari Douglas Camp, Stefan Gec and Sarah Lucas. 18. For some of the circumstances surrounding the writing of News from Nowhere, see Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris (London 1994), pp.583-8; and E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London 1955), pp.692-8.

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66. GLC leader Ken Livingstone as Nelson. Lee Robinson’s front cover cartoon on a book that formed part of the 1983-85 campaign to save the Labour run Greater London Council from being abolished by the Thatcher government (Rodney Mace)

67. The day that finished Thatcherism. Poll tax riot March 1990 (David Hoffman Picture Library)

68. Alison Lapper 8 Months Pregnant. Marc Quinn’s winning design for the 2003 Fourth Plinth competition (Marc Quinn)

69. After 150 years of celebrating death the Square is transformed in 2003 by the new Greater London Authority into a place of popular 2 celebration (Hayley Madden, courtesy GLA)