The Royal Artillery memorial at Hyde Park Corner was unveiled on 18 October 1925 and is not only the finest British unit memorial of both world wars, but one of the finest war memorials ever created. It has sparked passionate debate and discussion ever since it was unveiled due to its precise site, scale and form. As evidenced by the November 2023 demonstration, during which some protestors climbed on top of it, few fail to notice it or can resist engaging with it.
During the course of the Great War the Royal Regiment of Artillery suffered nearly 50,000 casualties. Reflecting its corps motto, ubique (everywhere), it served in every theatre of war, on every battlefield and with an immense range of weapons. Given these experiences and its status as an ancient corps with a distinct sense of its own dignity and prowess, it was little wonder that a Royal Artillery War Commemoration Fund was established in 1918. Its members were very clear on its iconography: the memorial was to depict an artillery piece and the role of the artillery. This was going to be a memorial commissioned by gunners for gunners, not a memorial to comfort bereaved family members and friends. It was a distinction some misunderstood at the time, and which has never been dispelled fully.
Putting the scheme out to competition, some of the biggest names in British architecture and sculpture submitted designs, but only one entry met all the requirements, that produced by the architect Lionel Pearson and the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger. The essential quality that Pearson and Sargeant Jagger brought to the design was their status as veterans. Sargeant Jagger was commissioned into the 13 Worcestershire Regiment and severely wounded at Gallipoli before gaining the Military Cross in 1918. He had the war imprinted on him and brought that vision to his memorial design. Lionel Pearson followed a slightly different route. A practising architect in 1914, he joined the Graves Registration and Enquiries Unit-Red Cross British War Graves Commission in France and Belgium in 1916 and worked with his fellow architects, Charles Holden, Arthur Messer and W.H. Cowlishaw advising on cemetery layouts and plots and forming a core of ideas from which the Imperial War Graves Commission would emerge. By the Armistice, Pearson was a man who had considered the appropriate commemoration of the war dead very closely. His architect’s eye was allied with direct knowledge of military life, and death.
Delving into their experiences, this partnership produced a work of sublime genius. The memorial confronts us with both the reality of the war and an iconographic allegory of it. Here is a world of trench parapets and trench lines and gun pits with the sky above. The trench-like sides of the memorial form the frames on which Sargeant Jagger arranged his bas reliefs and statuary. Using this framework, he emphasised height by placing his statuary against the memorial sides. The figures themselves are well over six feet, and this sense of elevation is underlined by the eye being dragged up beyond their heads to the parapet line of the memorial. It was a technique and aesthetic Sargeant Jagger had observed in ancient architecture, particularly Egyptian temples. Inspiration from the ancient world can also be seen in the bas reliefs, which are like the stylised battle narratives on Assyrian temples and buildings.
Timelessness is further implied in these reliefs by the emphasis on muscle-power. Sargeant Jagger presents us with the cutting edge of military technology – guns and the chemical and metallurgical industries needed to supply their ammunition – and juxtaposes it with human and animal muscle-power. Horses strain on their harnesses. Men shove and push on wheel spokes while others put all their energy into hauling on ropes. War as physical work. War as sweat as much as blood. Every aspect of the gunners’ war is depicted in these reliefs including the moment of being wounded and the carrying away of the injured. A driver hit by a bullet is shoved bodily backwards by the impact in a scene of immense, horrific dynamism, while the gunner carrying away his wounded comrade is one of intense pathos. The bas reliefs are the Bayeux Tapestry of the Great War. They immerse us in its realities. This is a very rare war memorial indeed.
Very deliberately set against this storm of activity is the utter passivity of the statues. Three figures tower over us. Massive, immovable, a barrier between us and war formed by their bodies. They literally stand between us protecting us from it. We are left to observe and to try to learn because of what they did. All are men of immense power. The driver with his gas cape, arms outstretched almost like a crucifixion, has his horse bits and bridlery in his hands. Combined with the armour-like nature of the cape, it almost transposes him into a knight with some kind of medieval weaponry or gear in his hand. The shell carrier has his holsters with the great shell cartridge cases in them, and yet his yoke is easy, his burden is light. At the front of the memorial is an officer holding his coat and gear, head slightly bowed, as if contemplating the dead. And the dead are here, for at the opposite end of the memorial on a catafalque-like space is a recumbent dead soldier. This is an extreme rarity on a British war memorial, where the presence of the dead is usually implicit rather than explicit. Admittedly, this is a whole, perfect corpse, not a disfigured one. It is doubtful that Sargeant Jagger would have gone further than this, even if he felt he could push the boundaries of public taste. He wanted to dignify the dead. He felt they had earned that dignity and respectful commemoration.
Nonetheless, that figure is a challenge and an ambiguity. He lies immediately underneath the royal insignia of the Royal Artillery and around the base is carved a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V, ‘This Royal Fellowship of Death’. Covered by his cape, we can see his ear, a bit of jawline and hair. He is every dead gunner, and we must contemplate what he died for, and what that means for us and the way we live our lives.
Finally, and literally topping the whole thing, is the 9.2-inch howitzer. This is Wilfred Owen’s Sonnet On Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery being brought into Action in stone: ‘Be slowly lifted up… Great gun towering toward heaven’. Rather than being the idol that dominates and enslaves the gunners, this is the object of pride; it symbolises their work. As a trained metal engraver and a veteran, Sargeant Jagger created a piece of regimental silver in stone. Here is a trophy and a corps colour. The gun symbolises everything the gunners are and do.
The Royal Artillery Memorial is one which embodies the ethos and mentality of an enclosed world. It is little wonder that it has intrigued and been misunderstood. On its unveiling, some condemned it as hideous, a travesty of what a memorial should be, an anti-monument, even. But the community for whom it was erected recognised it. As a former Royal Artillery officer wrote a few days after the unveiling ceremony:
It is easy to write of all that the Memorial means – perhaps it means too much: but it is terrible in its actuality, terribly real, terribly powerful – a lasting memorial of horrible, bloody war, of what human flesh did, and can, endure: an enduring memorial that war means destruction. It is the memorial our fallen comrades would have wanted. They knew actuality. They would not ask for anything else.
Lionel Pearson and Charles Sargeant Jagger created reality from iconography. Like the work of all great artists, these fabrications, inventions, inspirations and visions capture the experience of gunners in the Great War whilst also making a timeless statement about all soldiers in all wars. The Royal Artillery memorial is very special.
See below for how to join me on a London walk around the capital’s war memorials to visit this memorial and for similar insights into others.
