THE MONUMENT: A CLASSICALLY-THEMED WAR MEMORIAL

 

THE MONUMENT:

WHY DOES SOUTHPORT HAVE SUCH A MASSIVE WAR MEMORIAL?

If you ever pay a visit to the seaside resort of Southport, situated on the Lancashire coast between Liverpool and Preston, it’s impossible to miss a set of structures - an obelisk, two large pavilions and formal gardens with ponds - known as ‘the Monument’.  These structures collectively form Southport’s war memorial, originally built to commemorate the town’s dead from the Great War (1914-1918) but still in use today, as names are added from each subsequent conflict.

So how did Southport come to acquire one of the largest and most impressive war memorials in Britain?  This article will attempt to answer this question through analysing the process by which the Monument was commissioned.   

The idea of a war memorial for Southport began to be floated soon after the signing of the Armistice in November 1918.  It was estimated that of the town’s population of 72,500 (it had grown massively over the last seventy years, from a population of only 4,200 when the Town Hall was built back in 1852), 10,000 volunteers had served during the war, of whom 1,133 had died, including two recipients of the Victoria Cross.  A War Memorial Committee was formed and a public appeal was launched with a target of £30,000 (about £1.5 million in today’s terms).  The fundraising appeal exceeded its target; the extra money was used to fund memorial scholarships and to build a new wing for Southport Infirmary.  

The Committee’s first decision was the site for the new memorial: London Square.  The photograph below shows how the square looked before the building of the Monument.  It was a large open space, paved with wooden blocks, with a hut for hackney carriage drivers in the centre, a transformer station (for the tram network) and some public toilets. 

Here is a slightly later picture with the drivers’ hut removed, although the public toilets are still visible.     

In May 1919 the War Memorial Committee announced an architectural competition, to be judged by Sir Reginald Blomfield RA.  Blomfield was asked to judge the competition because of his work with the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission).  He had designed the Cross of Sacrifice – a stone cross incorporating an inverted bronze sword – which formed a focal point, along with Edwin Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance, for many of the larger British cemeteries created on the battlefields of France and Belgium.  Blomfield’s best-known work, however, is probably the Menin Gate at Ypres (completed several years after the Southport Monument).    

Designs for the Southport memorial were invited from all over the country, with competitors being asked to work to a budget of £14,000.  The top prize was worth £250 (about £11,250 in today’s terms) with runner-up prizes of £200 and £150.  Forty-five designs were submitted, which were exhibited to the public at the Atkinson Art Gallery, taking up two whole rooms.  In December 1919, Reginald Blomfield announced the winners.  The third-placed design was a cenotaph, to stand in the centre of the square; in second place came an arch, with memorial urn, which would also have stood in the centre of the square.  First place, however, went to a very different design, one which made use of the entire space of the square: a central obelisk flanked by two pavilions, all carved from Portland Stone.  The winning architects were a local firm: Grayson & Barnish, based in the Liver Building in Liverpool. 

Although the winning design was adopted at the end of 1919, work was delayed by two factors: the price of Portland Stone had shot up, due to the surge in demand for war memorials, and there was also a shortage of skilled stonemasons, as they were already employed on other memorial projects.  The War Memorial Committee therefore rejected the first tenders they received, in 1921, but rather than reducing the scale of the scheme (which I suspect would happen if this decision were being made today), the Committee decided to wait for a year.  They were right to do so: by 1922 the price of Portland Stone had fallen, and more skilled labour had become available.  Work was again delayed, though, as insufficient stone could be obtained from a single quarry.  Using stone from other quarries would have meant a variation in shade, so the Committee (clearly made up of perfectionists) again wisely decided to bide their time and wait for the right stone to become available.

The really significant decision made in 1919, then, was to opt for a large-scale architectural memorial, rather than the sculptural monuments or cenotaphs chosen by most towns.  Comments in the local newspaper, the Southport Visiter (if you’re not from Southport, then yes, that is the right spelling!) suggest some public feeling that the judge should have picked a more sculptural design, and this may have been the reason why additional relief sculptures and inscriptions were added to the original design.  All the lettering and carving on the Monument was the work of the Liverpool sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith (1883-1972), whose studio was in the Bluecoat School building (he also designed the sculpture on the cenotaph outside St George’s Hall and the Merchant Navy War Memorial on the Pier Head in Liverpool). 

The main figurative carvings created by Tyson Smith were the two large reliefs on the seaward side of the Monument, entitled ‘Mourning’ and ‘Victory’.  The ‘Mourning’ relief shows Britannia paying tribute to the war dead by placing a garland above a Corinthian helmet, with a Roman-style military standard saying PATRIA (‘Fatherland’) in the background.  I would suggest this design may have been inspired by a Classical source: a relief stele from the Athenian Acropolis, dating from the mid-5^th century BC.  It is usually assumed that it shows the city’s patron goddess mourning for the Athenian dead in the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), leaning on her spear as she reads the names carved on a war memorial.  

 
'Mourning' relief, Herbert Tyson-Smith                               Relief stele from Athenian Acropolis

The ‘Victory’ relief also owes a great deal to Classical Greek models.   The official booklet produced to mark the unveiling of the Monument in 1923 claims that this is an image of Britannia, but this image doesn’t contain any of Britannia’s traditional attributes, such as her trident and large oval shield.  Instead, this sculpture incorporates the iconography of the Greek war-goddess Athene and her sidekick Nike, goddess of Victory: her helmet, spear and shield can all be seen on this reconstruction   of the forty-foot tall chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Athene created by Pheidias as the cult image for the Parthenon.  To give you some idea of the scale of the original statue, the figure of Nike was six feet tall – so if you can imagine standing on Athene’s outstretched hand, that’s how big she was.  

 

           'Victory', Herbert Tyson Smith                      Athene Parthenos (modern replica)                                                                                 

                                     Britannia with trident & palm-leaf              winged Nike with wreath & trumpet

The architects of the Parthenon had decided to break with convention by mixing two architectural orders, Doric (associated with mainland Greece and the Western Greek colonies) and Ionic (associated with the islands of the Aegean and the Greek colonies on what is now the coast of Turkey), in order to make a political statement about the reach of the Athenian Empire.  The Monument also combines the two orders, as the exterior columns of the two pavilions are Doric (with a base, unlike Greek Doric), whereas the interior columns marking off the cenotaphs are Ionic.  The four cenotaphs were dedicated to the fallen from different campaigns: the Somme, Cambrai & Salonica, Ypres and Mesopotamia.  

                     Exterior of one of the Monument pavilions showing paired Doric columns

                 Cenotaph inside the same pavilion, marked by Ionic columns with voluted capitals

The drums inside these cenotaphs feature some more Classically-inspired carvings, including ‘Death & the Soldier’ (with the soldier depicted as a Greek hoplite from the 5^th century BC) and a scene from the Trojan War showing Achilles tending his wounded comrade Patroclus, a popular subject on Greek painted vases.   

 

                                                 Death & the Soldier                                Achilles & Patroclus

The inscriptions for the Monument were chosen by a special sub-committee set up for this purpose, headed by Councillor Hartley.  They selected their inscriptions from a range of sources, including Biblical texts, contemporary poems, and other war memorials; we can see the influence of the War Graves Commission on some of their choices.  The Cambrai cenotaph, for example, carries the inscription used on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey: FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE.  The Somme cenotaph features a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘The King’s Pilgrimage’, ALL THAT THEY HAD THEY GAVE.   The Ypres cenotaph features the quote chosen by Kipling from Ecclesiasticus for the Lutyens-designed Stone of Remembrance, THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVER MORE, whilst the Mesopotamian cenotaph features the line ON THE DECK OF FAME THEY DIED, adapted from Thomas Campbell’s ‘The Battle of the Baltic’.  The text THEIR PORTION IS WITH THE ETERNAL was suggested by the poet Lawrence Binyon. 

The two most prominent texts, however, were adapted from ancient Greek sources.  Firstly, there is a quote from Pericles’ Funeral Oration for the Athenian troops who fell in the first year (431 BC) of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and her allies, from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War:  TO FAMOUS MEN ALL EARTH IS SEPULCHRE.  The second is an adaptation of Simonides’ epitaph for the Three Hundred Spartans who died defending the pass at Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BC. The original text, addressed to travellers crossing the pass, reads:     

                   STRANGER, GO TELL THE SPARTANS,

THAT WE LIE HERE, HAVING OBEYED THEIR ORDERS

The adapted version on the Monument reads:

             TELL BRITAIN, YE WHO MARK THIS MONUMENT

FAITHFUL TO HER WE FELL AND REST CONTENT

The inscription on the Obelisk (LOOK UPWARD/ STANDING MUTE /SALUTE) was taken from the last two lines of an Armistice Day poem, ‘The Army of the Dead’:

‘The Army of the Dead/goes by, and still goes by –/ Look upward, standing mute /Salute’

After the various delays in its construction, the Monument was officially opened by the Earl of Derby (assisted by the children of the war dead), on Remembrance Sunday, 1923.  (Much of the information in this article is taken from a lavish commemorative booklet produced for the occasion).  It was considered important that the service should be an ecumenical one, with each of the four cenotaphs being dedicated by a chaplain from a different faith: Anglican, Roman Catholic, Free Church and Jewish.  My favourite story from the unveiling ceremony is that the ‘Victory’ relief (the one of Athene and Nike) wasn’t actually carved in time for the ceremony, so the design had to be drawn onto the stonework in crayon, to show what it would look like when it was completed. 

The photograph on the left shows the crowds packed into London Square and the surrounding streets. The photograph on the right shows the base of the obelisk, covered in wreaths during the 1923 dedication ceremony.  The dimensions of the obelisk went through several alterations during the planning process, before settling on a height of sixty-seven feet and six inches.

The Monument, I think, is also the key to an architectural conundrum: why did Classical architecture continue be favoured on Lord Street, long after it had fallen from fashion elsewhere?  Until I started researching Southport’s Neoclassical buildings in earnest (for a talk I gave on the history of Lord Street), I had always assumed that most of them were built in the late nineteenth-century, with the Monument added as a final flourish.  This would be consistent with the architectural history of other towns and cities in the area – for example all the major Classical buildings in the ‘Forum’ in Liverpool (St George’s Hall, the Walker Art Gallery, the Picton Library, the Museum) had all been completed by 1885, and it’s a similar story in Preston. 

In Southport, however, Classical buildings were still being constructed well into the twentieth century, and indeed right into the 1920s: the former bank premises currently occupied by Pizza Express (Ionic, 1920-24), Waterstone’s bookshop (rusticated Doric, 1927) and the Prezzo restaurant chain (Ionic pilasters) were all constructed during the 1920s.

The reason for this surprisingly late flowering of Classical architecture on Lord Street has to be that decision taken in 1919 to create a large architectural war memorial, as opposed to the smaller sculptural memorials in other towns.  Reginald Blomfield, in his speech announcing the winning design, said that the Monument should become the focal point for any future town planning decisions.  Even though it wasn’t completed until 1923, anyone designing a building in the vicinity of London Square from 1919 onwards would have been aware of the architects’ drawings.  The Monument established a Classical theme for the central space of the town, and gave new symmetry to London Square.  It’s probably no coincidence that all the buildings on three corners of the square were replaced over the course of the 1920s (although the NatWest bank building, which predates the building of the Monument, is still there). 

Corner of Neville Street and Lord Street.  The buildings on both these corners were replaced with grander buildings in the Classical style, following the construction of the Monument (buildings now occupied by Waterstones bookshop and Bistro Pierre).

So, to come back to the question posed by the title of this article – why does Southport have such a massive war memorial – the answer is that it’s because it can.  As we’ve seen the design created by Grayson & Barnish utilised the whole space available within a large square on a grand boulevard.  Lord Street’s grandeur is a product of its history: the street was created in the 1820s from a boggy track running between two lines of sand-hills; because the track flooded in the winter, the building line had to be set sufficiently far back to avoid problems with flooding – thus inadvertently creating the world’s first grand boulevard (there is a story about the future Napoleon III being inspired to create the boulevards of Paris after lodging on Lord Street for a few months, but we won’t go there now). The width of the street makes it unusually well-suited to grand Classical architecture, as it allows for tall, buildings, complete with columns and pediments, without creating a claustrophobic feel.

In the summer the main function of the Obelisk sometimes seems to be to act as a giant way-marker, directing visitors from the railway-station down to the pier and beach.  But in the autumn, on Remembrance Sunday, the Monument really comes into its own: that’s when it serves the purpose it was designed for, to house a collective act of remembrance for a town’s war dead. 

                                                                                        Town crest (Salus Populi) on base of obelisk