E.J. Smith Statue
Around 1972 a television programme had a piece on the E.J. Smith statue in Beacon Park, Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. It said the statue had been commissioned by Stoke City Council to mark Smith's captaincy of the world's finest ship. When the ship sank they no longer wanted the statue and it lay in the foundry, in Lichfield, where it was cast. Eventually, in 1922, Lichfield Council were persuaded to raise the statue in Beacon Park. Of further interest to me was the sculptress, widow of Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic) and mother of Peter Scott, one of my heroes. Surely nobody would want to glorify Smith for doing the wrong thing, while vilifying Stanley Lord for doing the right thing (heaving to). A good story, I thought, until going to a Titanic talk last year. It was stated that the statue was unveiled in 1914, of course I thought this was a mistake, surely I hadn't been barking up the wrong tree for forty years.
Doing some digging I found that Lichfield Council received a letter dated 28th May 1913, from a Mr. F.S. Stevenson of Playford Mount, Nr. Woodbridge, Suffolk saying it was proposed to raise money (£20,000 by public subscription) for a memorial to E.J. Smith, and since he was a Staffordshire man request that it be erected on land belonging to the city. Who F.S. Stevenson was I do not know, there was an elderly woman with the same name and initials at the same place, maybe his mother. The statue was unveiled by Helen Melville, Smith's daughter, on 29th July 1914, six days before war was declared on Germany. I would have thought the nation would have had more to worry about than statues at this time, but it seems that Europe was, like Smith, steaming blindly to disaster.
There was no shortage of VIP's at the ceremony: Lord Charles Beresford Member of Parliament for Lichfield; Rt. Revd. William Perrin Bishop of Willesden who presented the statue to the city; Dowager Duchess of Sutherland; Lady Kathleen Scott and F.S. Stevenson. Perrin was in service in Southampton for twenty-three years before becoming Bishop of British Columbia and then returning to become Bishop of Willesden. He would have been in contact with seamen and maybe knew Smith. He may have been contacted by Stevenson about having the memorial in London. A 1958 article in the Lichfield Mercury seems to imply that a place for the statue in London was sought.
There were two metal founders in Lichfield, both adjacent to Beacon Park, in those days, Woodroffe and Perkins and Chamberlin and Hill. The later made large precision castings for machine tools, a very possible contender for casting the statue in bronze, not that I can find any evidence of this. There were seventy-four objections to the statue mainly on the grounds that Smith had no connections to Lichfield. So what would be the point of transporting the statue across country particularly if nobody wanted it. The reasons for the statue being in Lichfield are, I think, weak: Lichfield is mid way between London and Liverpool and convenient for anyone to stop off to see the statue. Why would anyone travelling between these places want to see the memorial, why not between London and Southampton or Glasgow come to that. The main line at Lichfield Trent Valley Station is two to three miles from Beacon Park, Nuneaton would have been better and more central. The other reason was that Hanley is in the Diocese of Lichfield. Anyone have any comments or information?
