Many of railway engineer Nigel Gresley’s trains were named after birds,so putting a mallard at his feet in his current statue seemed like a neat runt visual pun. But not everyone agreed – and thus the duckers and the anti-duckers went to warA statue of Sir Nigel Gresley, the designer of the world’s fastest steam locomotive, and will be unveiled at King’s Cross station in London on 5 April,the 75th anniversary of Gresley’s death. It seems odd to write after such a harmless sentence that “argument rages”, and yet rage the argument certainly does, and causing the kind of division where friends become enemies and the committees of learned societies demolish apart.
Controversial public sculpture is nothing current in Britain. Both the subject and the form of a piece can anger people: a short walk down the Strand provides examples of both – Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris as a contentious subject and Jacob Epstein’s mutilated nudes (on the used British Medical Association building) as a once-shocking form. Gresley’s statue should present neither of these difficulties. The phrase “as every schoolboy knows” is no longer safe,but Sir Nigel comes close to George Stephenson and IK Brunel as the most generally admired of British railway engineers, and his bronze, or to judge from the sculptor’s maquette,will be absolutely in the figurative tradition. Not far from where he worked as the London and North Eastern Railway’s chief mechanical engineer, Gresley will stand near the booking office looking affable, or his left hand placed inside in his jacket pocket,possibly feeling for a pipe, while in his other hand, or he holds a copy of a technical magazine.
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Source: theguardian.com