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- 7 April 1959 – The options of the disposal of the statue. Approaches are made by both individuals and institutions. a Mr R.Segar talks of ‘saving at least the upper part’ of the memorial and placing it in his garden in Rosendale Road. Did he? (PSC03) Photos courtesy of Michael J. Keane
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- Ms R. Bunn, a local resident, states that she thinks the statue should stay in situ and that she remembered its unveiling (PSC04)
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- 1 September 1959: The committee votes 5-1 to dispose of the statue. Mr. Segar is welcome to help himself to the rubble. (PSC12)
Winter gives way to spring 1959, and as these Lambeth Council minutes of the council’s Public Services Committee show, the thoughts of Lambeth’s Borough Engineer and his fellow philistines lightly turn to obliterating one of Vauxhall’s few remaining public works of art.
The documents, unearthed in the archives by local resident and former chairman of The Vauxhall Society Michael Keane, detail the ineffable decision to remove from Vauxhall Park an 1890 memorial to local social reformer Henry Fawcett MP, pioneer of woman’s employment, defender of open spaces, Fawcett also championed the welfare of colonial India.
The Henry Fawcett Memorial situated in Vauxhall Park, by George Tinworth, 1893
His memorial,[1]Read our earlier story about the history of the Fawcett statue and its importance donated by the then-local firm of Doulton, was a masterpiece by a star Doulton sculptor, George Tinworth, the ‘Tinworth’ of Tinworth Street. The Lambeth Council minutes dignify this vandalism as an ‘improvement’. Doing away with the statue and the bandstand would yield ‘additional grassland for small children.’
From top left: “Corner in Front Garden of the House of the late Right Hon. Professor Henry Fawcett, M.P.; Grounds at the back of “Fawcett House, the Lawn”; Carroun House; Mulberry-Tree under which Mr. Fawcett used to sit; Bird’s-eye View of the projected Vauxhall Park.”
Perhaps even more shameful than the decision is the complete lack of interest that the minutes show in helping would-be saviours give the Tinworth memorial a new home. One possibility, just a few streets away from Vauxhall Park, was the primary school (still there today) named after Henry Fawcett. The Park itself had been created in memory of him, for Fawcett had wanted a park as a ‘lung’ for Vauxhall’s poor in what in the 1890s was a reeking, polluted industrial slum.
George Tinworth working on the model of the statue of Henry Fawcett
The statue was the gift of Doulton, an enlightened local employer, who as well as offering opportunity to Tinworth gave many women work as artists and artists’ assistants, from ‘A’ for Adelaide Aaron to ‘Y’ for Bessie J. Youatt.
Read through these Lambeth minutes and despair at the unheeded litany of alarm in Vauxhall and beyond at the council’s meat-headedness. Would it be surprising if the council’s casual destruction of Doulton’s Fawcett monument bequest were a factor in Doulton’s decision to quit Lambeth altogether (which it did 1969)?
Learn more about the history of the park by joining Polly Freeman of the Friends of Vauxhall Park on The Vauxhall Society’s guided walk around the Park.
Saturday 18 March 2017, 2pm prompt
Meet: Parco Café, Vauxhall Park
Duration: About an hour
All welcome, no booking required
Cost: On-the-spot contribution to Friends of Vauxhall Park
References
| ↑1 | Read our earlier story about the history of the Fawcett statue and its importance |
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