To my statue,
You are still here. How extra-ordinary… but then I did make you to last. You look as good as you did on the day you were unveiled.
Extraordinary too – there was a time you nearly didn’t get made at all. The committee was impossible, they could not decide what they wanted. I think they were worried your presence would attract crowds and they asked for a different design, something that would not stand out. I lost patience then. But I couldn’t help going back to that memory of when I was lying wounded in hospital and the nurse brought me a packet of letters from home. They were the first I’d had for weeks and it made me cry.
I am so glad I didn’t give up on the idea – and here you are. Your plinth contains a scroll with the names of the 3,312 men and women of the Great Western Railway who were killed – but of course, you know that.
There will be nobody left who remembers them – and yet I’ve been reading all these letters which you have received. Who would have thought you could inspire such an outpouring of concern and affection all these years later.
I can see looking at you now I gave you hands the same shape as mine and the way you wear your scarf reminds me of Metcalfe. I put something of myself and all the men I fought with, into every one of my statues. “Am I your favourite?” you might ask – but that I cannot answer. They criticised me for upsetting people with the others – with my brutal realism – but as I said a war memorial ought not to make war attractive. Far more important than my pieces of art is that people should think about war and about what it means to send men out to die, although we went willingly enough.
Will people still be coming back to see you on your hundredth birthday? I do believe they will. I think of your birthday as being the day you were unveiled, 11th November 1922. I didn’t even make it to fifty but you will endure. I am sure of that now.
Charles Sargeant Jagger
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