The Leicester Mercury in 2017, asked their readers to vote on which additional statue should be added to the list of Public Art. They gave their readership options of David Attenborough, Richard Attenborough, Martin Johnson, Kasabian, Daniel Lambert, Gary Lineker, Nelson Mandela or Claudio Ranieri. There was no option for readers to nominate others. The newspaper justified the absence of woman and the absence of ethnic minorities, in one of the most diverse cities in the UK, on the basis the poll was a “bit of fun”.
Leicester already has statues of Gandhi, Thomas Cook, Arthur Wakerley, King Richard III, William Shakespeare, Cardinal Wolsey, John Wycliff, Hugh Latimer, John Biggs, Robert Hall, John Henry Manners and a statue depicting three sportsmen, Sporting Success, created by Martin Williams to celebrate Leicester City Football winning the Coca Cola Cup, Leicester Tigers Rugby Club winning the Pilkington Cup and the Leicestershire County Cricket Club becoming Britannic Assurance County Champions in 1996 and 1998. Leicester’s textile industries are represented by The Little Seamstress created by James Butler which is in Hotel Street. A mini-version of the Statue of Liberty was commissioned in 1919 and made by local sculptor Joseph Morcom for the Lennards Shoe Factory, which was demolished in 2003, but the statue was kept and is now on the Swan Gyratory roundabout near the King Power Stadium.
There is a statue to Queen Æthelflæd, a replacement for the one created by Benjamin Fletcher in 1922 following a commission by Edith Gittins (1845 - 1910) who left provision in her will. Her sister, Mary Catherine oversaw the project. Gittins’s intention was that Æthelflæd would stand on the High Street as a counterpoint to the four men on the Clock Tower. Stonemason Samuel Barfield intended the Clock Tower to be a memorial to Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester in 1239, William Wigston who founded Wigston’s Hospital and left money for a Free Grammar School after his death, Sir Thomas White who established a trust fund in 1542 to help local men set up business and Alderman Gabriel Newton who set up a trust to establish the Alderman Newton School, now the site of the King Richard III Visitor Centre. The original statue of Æthelflæd was stolen in 1978 and a replica now stands in The Guildhall’s courtyard.
Since Edith Gittins’s attempt to draw attention to the imbalance, a statue of Alice Hawkins, created by Sean Hedges-Quinn, was erected in Green Dragon Square in 2018.
Do statues matter? Pippa Catterall, Professor of History and Policy, argues on the LSE Blog,
“The database of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association suggests that only 2.7 per cent of the civic statues in Britain are of non-royal women. Statues carry the Matilda Effect of overlooking the achievements of women into a public realm from which the Victorians who created much of Britain’s public spaces saw them as excluded.”
Statues are not the only source of historical knowledge and achievement, but they make a good starting point. They represent the people that previous generations thought worthy of acknowledgement and respect. The toppling of the statue of Edward Colston (1636 – 1721), whose ships took 84,000 people as slaves to the Caribbean, was the culmination of years of frustration over repeated petitions for its removal. As a counterbalance, the pedestrian bridge over the Floating Harbour was named Pero’s Bridge after a slave, and the Colston Hall changed its name to Bristol Beacon in 2020. The statue was rescued from the harbour and is now displayed, complete with graffiti, in the M Shed museum. The actions of the activists triggered a discussion around statues and what values citizens want to represent them.
Women’s achievements and contribution to the abolition movement were often undermined or diminished. William Wilberforce argued,
“For ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions, these appear to me unsuited to the female character as delineated in scripture.”
Ironically, for women like Elizabeth Heyrick, religion was one of the key drivers of their support for the abolitionist movement.
In 2015, Historic England put together a series of three podcasts
“celebrating the women instrumental in the abolition of slavery. From the Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick, the first campaigner to call for an immediate end to slavery (years ahead of better-known male campaigners), Mary Prince who escaped from slavery and delivered a petition to parliament, to Sarah Parker Remond, a free Black American woman who toured the country encouraging support for an end to slavery in the USA.”
Yet Elizabeth Heyrick is little-known in her home city. She does not have a gravestone, she lies in a communal grave that accommodates those moved from the Gallowtree Gate graveyard to Welford Road in 1923. Her childhood home on Shambles Lane, also known as Applegate, has been demolished. Her marital home, Bow Bridge House, was demolished in the 1960s, although a heritage panel stands on the junction of Fosse Road North and the A47, a busy thoroughfare not much used by pedestrians.
Elizabeth Heyrick deserves to be better known and the women’s contribution to the abolition campaign should not be forgotten or diminished.
