2 minute read
The guide
Hamilton memorial drinking fountain
A tour of Marylebone’s most notable memorial sculptures
JOHN F KENNEDY MEMORIAL After the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, an appeal in the Sunday Telegraph led to more than 50,000 readers making individual donations of up to £1 to create a memorial. The bust, commissioned from Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, was unveiled on 15th May 1965 by the late president’s brothers, Robert and Edward Kennedy, outside the new International Students House on Marylebone Road. In 2017, the sculpture was attacked by vandals, who caused significant damage to the plinth. It was returned to public display on a new plinth and in a new location – inside the lobby of International Students House, but viewable through the windows.
THE TRITON FOUNTAIN This ornamental fountain, a bronze sculpture of the Greek god Triton, which stands in the middle of a pool in Queen Mary’s Gardens, Regent’s Park, was erected in memory of Sigismund Goetze. Goetze, now largely forgotten, was once a renowned artist—his 1904 painting Despised and Rejected of Men, was an “artistic sensation” at the Royal Academy, and the vast patriotic murals he created for the Foreign Office are a sight to behold—but it was as a donor of public art, including the park’s ornate Jubilee Gates, that he is best remembered. In 1936, he commissioned the sculptor William McMillan to design the Triton Fountain, but the outbreak of war meant it was not finished until 1950, when it was installed by Goetze’s wife Constance.
HAMILTON MEMORIAL DRINKING FOUNTAIN The Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association was set up to improve access to clean drinking water in public places. Rendered in pink Scottish granite, the imposing Hamilton memorial in Portman Square was one of its installations – and among the finest, the grandeur of its design rendering it as much a work of public art as a functional piece of infrastructure. Donated by Lady Hamilton in memory of her late husband, this Grade II listed memorial was recently restored to full working capacity by The Portman Estate.
THE RAOUL WALLENBERG MONUMENT Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who helped save the lives of more than 100,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary toward the end of World War II. The Great Cumberland Place monument, which depicts Wallenberg against a 10-foot bronze wall, made up of 100,000 Schultz Passes – a pseudo-legal document that made Hungarian Jews honorary Swedish citizens, thus exempting them from wearing the yellow star and, in many instances, being sent to concentration camps – and draped in the Swedish flag, is the work of Scottish sculptor Philip Jackson. It was unveiled by the Queen in 1997 in a moving ceremony attended by Holocaust survivors.
WILLIAM PITT BYRNE MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN This elaborate drinking fountain in Bryanston Square was erected in 1862 in memory of the journalist and newspaper proprietor William Pitt Byrne, who inherited responsibility for The Morning Post newspaper from his father. Designed by his wife, the novelist Julia Clara Pitt Byrne, it includes a plaque with a wordy and rather breathless testament to Pitt Byrne’s qualities as a man (“noble disinterestedness … forgiving temper … unobtrusive piety”) that sits somewhere between touching and embarrassingly over-egged.
