From Marble to Iron

April 1983

I remember photographing the Albert Memorial on a clear spring day, fascinated and horrified by that assemblage of confidently imperial Victorian kitsch with the gilded presence of the universal ‘Renaissance Prince’ seated at its centre. If the monument is an ode to expense and excess, it reflected the fawning deference with which Albert was viewed, at least among those wanting to court the Queen: the ‘enthroned effigy’, as the Memorial’s designer put it, had only the Cross above him while Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and other luminaries paraded below. The element in the photograph, sculpted in marble by John Foley, represents Asia. The continent’s avatar (naturally seated on an Indian elephant so that viewers know exactly where to place their minds) unclothes herself for the eyes and prurient imaginations of passersby. The other figures are equally cliched—a potter is seen sitting beside the elephant, for example.

While at this time a critical view of empire was common on the left—as against the mainstream of British opinion—the dawning of my own was due to Eduardo Galeano; staying with a friend in Paris who had a copy of Open Veins of Latin America, I read far into the night until the book was done. As for so many readers, this detailed, eloquent, passionate and abrasive work showed not simply that there were the world’s poor, geographically and racially divided from the rest, but that they had been made and kept poor by the old imperial powers. So it was that this apparently pacific monument took on a sinister and uncanny presence in the sharp spring light, having as its shadow presence the violent exploitation of the East India Company, the barbaric suppression of the 1857 revolution, the manufactured famines, the Opium Wars and all the rest. And this is to leave aside the looting of the subcontinent for extravagant jewels that would lend their lustre to the modernising monarchy, as it wrapped up domestic banality, the nuclear family, religious observance, vast wealth, opulent spectacle and hidden power in an effective, if frequently absurd, performance of social seduction. (Tom Nairn, in his book, The Enchanted Glass, offered a caustic analysis of this compact of opposing elements; and I recently drew on it in writing about photography of the Royals.)

All of this was open to those Victorians who chose to see it, as a reading of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone  clearly shows: the stolen Indian jewel, looted first by the Mughals and then by the British, cursing those who possess and surround it as it spreads a miasma of immorality and corruption, until it is finally restored to its original place in Hindu religious ritual.

The awkward character of the sculpture—and the Memorial as a whole—was noted by some of its first viewers who criticised the odd assembly of elements, so diverse in style and clumsy in their joining. One wrote of it as ‘organic nullity disguised beneath superficial exuberance’. Even Foley’s Asia, generally considered one of the more successful sculptures, was criticised for its ‘incongruity and barbarity’, and the unease caused by rendering the elephant as if it was about to rise, disrupting the group’s coherence and repose. If compositional harmony is supposed to suggest social order and peace, the strangely stilted gestures and poses, along with the evident lines and cracks that delineate the component marble blocks and weathering, may prise open countervailing thoughts. And if, as the official account of the Memorial says of the elephant, ‘the prostrate animal is intended to typify the subjection of brute force to human intelligence’, then the feeling that it might rise up is indeed dangerous. (For all sources, see https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol38/pp159-176 )

At the time when I visited, people could wander behind the railings to see the details of the Memorial’s various elements: the personified continents, the parade of male genius, the allegorical renditions of the sciences and the arts, of engineering, commerce and industry, and the paragon of enlightened manhood at its Gothic heart. Yet in another allegory of the nation’s decline, and of the ideology of private wealth and public squalor, the monument was leaky and decaying. It would be closed later in the year and put under scaffolding where it would remain, mouldering, until it was finally restored and reopened in 1998. There was some debate—less on the grounds of its reactionary character than its bad taste—about whether it should be restored or dismantled. It is telling that the gates in the railings that surround it are now locked, keeping viewers at a safe distance.

Brunswick Dock grain silo

In that Easter break, I also went to Liverpool, photographing other—equally imperial—near-ruins, emanations of the vast wealth in spices, sugar, slaves, timber and other commodities that had passed through the city, and of its abandonment.

In his writings on the Paris Salons, Diderot offered various thoughts on the attraction of picturesque ruins in painting: they should be grand (a ruined palace being far more affecting than a ruined cottage), their fragments should be of the highest artistic merit, and they should be occupied by a single figure, or only a few, since crowds tend to vitiate their effect. Then the viewer will enter a state of ‘sweet melancholy’ in which to dwell on ‘the ravages of time’, as in imagination ‘we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is now more.’ The decoration of these Liverpool buildings was often perfunctory, and their purposes prosaic, yet the city was certainly solitary, many of its areas being strikingly empty, and offering huge vistas, if not of ruin, then of abandonment and desolation. The imaginative leap to their destruction was a small one.

Gradwell Street

Indeed, both of these buildings were demolished in Liverpool’s redevelopment, following the 1981 Toxteth uprising, which was first to bring in the Tate Gallery as a cultural salve and tourist attraction, and then to transform the city centre into a colossal open-air mall. Bernd and Hilla Becher’s acidic remark comes to mind: that their photographs of defunct industrial buildings were only complete when their subjects photographed had been destroyed. (See Paris, Centre National des Arts Plastiques/ Prato, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Un’altra obiettività/ Another Objectivity, Idea Books, Milan 1989, p. 57.)

Aberdare Park Fountain

In Aberdare, the mining town where I was working, I photographed in its park, a typical Victorian amenity with a boating lake. It also contained a very strange fountain, although the only water that ran through it at that time was the persistent valley rain. Its scale, proportions, figures, decoration and material all seemed uncannily dislocated. It had at some point been gaudily and crudely painted, and that paint was now flaking off.

Another royal monument, the fountain was donated to the park by a local aristocrat to celebrate the Coronation of George V in 1911. Appropriately for this area of coal, it was cast in iron. Cherubs blowing shell-trumpets ride on grotesque dolphins, even more awkwardly than ‘Asia’ sits on her elephant. That motif is found in Roman art, and is one of the regular classical repetitions with which the British Empire attempted to gild itself with the glory of the ancients. Another cast of the fountain sits outside the Raffles Hotel in Singapore where perhaps it sat clumsily under the gazes of Kipling, Conrad and Maugham. With a fine sense of irony, the fountain is topped with an allegorical figure representing Liberty.

I have before me another image, taken that April, which I cannot show. It is of a boy from the children’s home who is wearing a cheap blue sports top, seen against the blurred greenery of Aberdare Park. His head is bowed, and his mouth held in a slight grimace, while his hands are knotted together, the fingers twisted in apparent pain. I search for details in the photograph to remind me of this boy: his dark hair catches the light, his complexion is unhealthily sallow, and dirt is ingrained below his nails. They do little to prompt further memories. I do recall his deep air of unhappiness and abandonment, and some of the things we did together (trips to the gym, for instance) to try to push them to the back of his mind. And I imagine us in the park together, looking at the royal fountain, a cheap, tawdry and decaying attempt at civic distinction. This, the monument seems to say, is good enough for the likes of you.