Presidents and Princesses – Who Makes a Better Statue?

Given that it is ten years today since Princess Diana’s death, I wanted to write a post in her honour… but to be honest I never really felt must kinship with the People’s Princess.

Her influence on public and political thought always seemed to be overshadowed by her glamorous outfits, famous friends and lurid love life. As the Evening Standard’s royal correspondent Robert Jobson said, “I don’t think you will ever match the fame, impact and notoriety of Diana.”

Yet she is repeatedly added to lists of the “most inspirational women on the modern age”, so perhaps she deserves to be up on a pedestal, standing among other iconic figures.

A Bronze Box on Parliament Square

There is something inspiring about a nine-foot hero in bronze. In the last couple of days Nelson Mandela has been unveiled as such in London’s Parliament Square. Described by Gordon Brown as “the most inspiring, the greatest and the most courageous leader of our generation”, it got me wondering about the timing of the event, given the important anniversary of a figure who is still imprinted on the minds and hearts of Londoners.

And I am not the only one drawing comparisons. Tony Benn, a famous Labour politician and WWII veteran who was at the statue’s unveiling, commented, “If Diana was the people’s princess, Nelson Mandela is president of the human race.”

That seems fair. After all, every little boy dreams of being the president one day and every little girl a princess. That way the boy can play with armies and decide the fate of nations and the girl can marry into a pampered life and be blessed with eternal happiness…

Predictable Icons

Nearly ten years ago I went to London in search of history and inspiration. I remember wandering through Parliament Square and gazing up at the rain-drenched statues, but now I can only recall a few of the famous figures.

Winston Churchill’s statue, erected in the 1970′s, is massive and brooding and the representation of Abraham Lincoln, a copy of an American statue, is suitably sombre, but who are the gaggle of Prime Ministers on their bronze boxes?

Disraeli, Derby, Palmerston, Canning and Peel – it is hard to tell one from the other. It is as if the selection jury got into a rut and could only get their inspiration by loitering outside Downing Street. It seems as disappointingly predictable as Miss Venezuela scooping the crown in the 1980s!

Which leads me to an obvious question – So where are the statues in dresses?

Okay, so most of the statues were erected long before women even had the vote (FYI: until 1928 it was acceptable for women to give birth to Prime Ministers – just not to vote for them) so there weren’t exactly an abundance of female heads of state to choose from.

But when I look at what the statues have in common, I have to wonder if it isn’t something else. Richard Attenborough, one of the champions of the Mandela statue, described Churchill as “a great man of war.” Was that the reason for so few female statues? That not enough of us girls have buckled on a sword?

The Warrior Queen

But of course there is a female representative – you just have to go a little further to find her.

On the corner of Westminster Bridge and Victoria Embankment lurks Boadicea, the warrior queen of the Iceni people in eastern Britain. She is of course displayed in her war chariot, her arms pointed skyward in a typical military pose. She looks surprisingly content to be so close to the centre of British power, given that she burned London to the ground…

So while military might is celebrated here again, at least it is in female form. But I’m not sure that I can feel particularly inspired by the rebel queen. Maybe I need to see the Boadicea movie – with Cate Blanchett revisiting her scary Lord-of-the-Rings persona – and then I’d be able to feel some stirring of sisterhood.

Looking further afield, another female statue appears: Emmeline Pankhurst looms large in the Victoria Tower Garden. Like Mandela, Pankhurst was no stranger to imprisonment or hunger strikes for her views.

But then of course with the breakout of WWI she turned her suffragette efforts into a pro-war and pro-conscription movement. She toured the country making recruiting speeches and terrorising men in civilian dress with white feathers.

Hmmm… Another tick for war-mongering…

A Statue for the People

So who could we rally behind, as a statue of the people? Gordon Brown has said of the Mandela sculpture that “It sends around the world the most powerful of messages – that no injustice can last forever, that suffering in the cause of freedom will never be in vain.”

Talk of people and causes brings me back again to Princess Diana. The one thing I remember most about her good works was watching her walk the fields of Bosnia in a flack jacket as she campaigned against landmines. I know she championed many other causes, like Centrepoint (young homeless), National Aids Trust (Aids and HIV), and the Leprosy Mission, but it was her quiet dignity – that seemed both so out of character and so out of place on the scarred fields of battle – that captured my attention.

And maybe that’s why she doesn’t have a statue on the square. Not only did she miss becoming a head of state by quite a long whisker, but perhaps she was also too peace-loving for such a serious square.

Female Inspiration in Parliament Square

Speaking of peaceful protest, earlier this month the Greater London Authority decided to forcibly remove dozens of peace protesters from Parliament Square. Camping there for the past year in support of the veteran peace campaigner Brian Haw, they have set up a sort of women’s retreat on the lawn.

Max Pemberton, writing for the Telegraph, commented on the fact that “their tents are spotless. A kindly woman called Maria shows me neatly stacked Tupperware in which they keep their daily provisions, and their rubbish is collected each day. They move the tents around so as not to damage the grass.”

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the little people, but it warms my heart to think of these middle-aged women in their anoraks sorting their Tupperware in the shadow of all those important statues.

While the noble men gaze off at the wars (past, present and future) from steely, bronze brows, the women calmly go about their business in their temporary homes and do what women have become so good at: protesting in the shadow of silent, unmoving men.

PS. In Googling some of this story, I thought maybe I could make an amusing reference to the Tupperware Queen. Surely the revolutionary inventor of Tupperware deserves to be recognised in bronze? But I was quickly disappointed, for the apron-clad, kitchen queen I imagined turned out to be a New England inventor called Earl Tupper. More disheartening still, Tupper’s invention was born not because of his love of crisp shortbread biscuits but because demand for his plastic gas mask parts plummeted at the end of World War II!

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