The Victorian Society in Manchester Registered Charity No

The Victorian Society in Manchester Registered Charity No. 1081435 Registered Charity No.1081435 Winter Newsletter 2013 history a mid-point between the was abolished in the decade following EDITORIAL Napoleonic Wars and the mechanized the conflict. CRIMEAN WAR: Commemoration carnage of the First World War. In and the adjustment to reality. common with that war, its causes are All the contemporary Times reports inexplicable if you leave out meticulous from the war front had immediate and observation of international treaty dramatic consequences including obligations. Essentially the Crimean the eventual fall of the then British War was a religious war between Government. One of the less the Christian Russian and Islamic exalted outcomes of these reports Ottoman Empires with Turkey having of the privations at the front was the as its allies the British and the French. appearance in the Crimea of an army Our involvement in the war was of black market privateers willing and strange enough but so was the war able to supply every need at a price. itself. It combined some up-to-date More famously, Florence Nightingale technologies with medieval chivalric and Mary Seacole fled to the war zone codes, for example, truces to clear to attend to the sick and the injured. the battlefields of the wounded and The chef Alexis Soyer went to improve the dead. It was the first war which the lot of the troops with his newly left a photographic legacy, images devised field stove and to bring a taken by mainly British and French more professional approach to military photographers. catering. The Crimean War was hugely significant because it further John Bell's Crimean War Memorial, established a number of firsts in the Waterloo Place, 1861. technology of warfare. It was the first conflict in which steamships, railways As we look ahead to 1914, powerful and the electric telegraph played an forces have decided that we should important part. Sections of railway commemorate in that year the were even constructed during the centenary of the outbreak of the First war itself to move ammunition and World War. Many believe it would be supplies. Battle orders were cabled more appropriate to wait four years from Whitehall directly to the theatres and commemorate only the end of of war. The same invention carried the war which claimed one million back almost real-time dispatches British lives. We are now in that from the journalist William Howard time of year deemed appropriate for Russell which were printed in The reflection on the losses arising from Times. These reports covered the originally the First World War and inadequacy of hospital facilities and the memorialisation of the dead in catering arrangements for the troops that and later conflicts. However, with along with deficiencies in their clothing, commemoration in mind, let us turn equipment and resources. More sensitively for Whitehall, they covered to an earlier war, the Crimean War Boer War Memorial, Manchester, the incompetence of the by-and-large which Britain entered in 1854 and Hamo Thorneycroft, 1907. was involved in until 1856. Despite aristocratic leaders of the campaign. 22,000 British deaths in a total of Some of these leaders had paid One of the most efficient military style three quarters of a million it is a war staggering sums of money for their operations of the war was a feat of that, apart from tangential references commissions. The Earl of Cardigan civil engineering: the construction of to Florence Nightingale, is largely who led the Charge of the Light a railway in a matter of weeks from forgotten in comparison with the two Brigade at Balaclava (immortalised in the port of Balaclava to Sevastopol great wars of the twentieth century Tennyson’s poem) had paid, it is said, to aid ending the siege. This was and more recent conflicts. The £40,000 – not money equivalent now, masterminded by Thomas Brassey Crimean War occupies in European but cash then. This astonishing system and recorded in his biography written 1 by his great-great-grandson Thomas Brigade’s charge exaggerated the off the Mall in London. (In 1914 the Stacey: 'By mid-December, the scale of the causalities and diminished monument was moved back slightly advance party of 54 of Brassey’s the importance of what was, at so that it could be flanked by statues navvies had embarked on the least technically, a military victory. of Florence Nightingale and Sidney clipper Wildflower each with his Queen Victoria echoed the nation’s Herbert, Secretary of State for War own waterproof bag, a 'painted' sentiments at the end of the war when during the Crimean campaign.) suit, 3 cotton shirts, 2 flannel shirts, she wrote in her journal 'I own that a flannel belt, a pair of moleskin peace rather sticks in my throat'. There The three Guardsmen depicted on the trousers, a serge-lined moleskin vest, was a feeling that the victory had been main face of the monument represent a Fearnaught slop (a kind of loose incomplete and less than ideal. The the Grenadier, Fusilier and Coldstream overgarment), a woollen coat, a pair of British Imperial Lion had been shown regiments. They stand in solemn pose drawers, 2 cravats, a pair of leggings, possibly to have feet of clay. Some of in front of their regimental colours stockings, regular boots, waterproof these feelings would be replicated in holding their rifles and wearing their long boots, fisherman’s boots, and the twentieth century arising from the greatcoats and bearskins against the hob-nailed boots, a bed, a pillow, Suez Crisis one hundred years later. Crimean cold, a less than accurate 3 blankets and a rug, 2 pounds of picture of the real circumstances tobacco and a portable stove'. The year following the end of the of the campaign. Above them on Crimean War saw the introduction the top of the monument stands of the Victoria Cross – the supreme an allegorical figure holding laurel award for valour under fire which, wreaths aloft. Interestingly, when the uniquely for the time, could be sculpture was erected, this figure was awarded to any recipient regardless called Honour, perhaps reflecting of their rank or class. The medals, uncertain views about the outcome struck from metal from a Russian of the war. It is now usually referred gun captured at Sevastopol, were to as the figure of Victory in common awarded to 62 veterans of the Crimean with many later representations of its campaign in a ceremony presided type on war memorials. The figures over by Queen Victoria. In a twist were cast in bronze from Russian that appeals to the 21st century, it is guns captured at Sevastopol and now thought that the bronze cannon some of the actual guns are placed that produced the medals was on the back of the monument. The actually an antique Chinese model. substantive part of the memorial, Queen Victoria also commissioned the emphasis on the depiction of photographs of injured soldiers ordinary soldiers in uniform bearing convalescing at Chatham military arms, arguably became an influential hospital. The most famous of these model for many Boer War memorials shows three veterans, one injured and such as the examples in Manchester, two having suffered leg amputations Salford and Bury. Later this style due to frostbite. As is well-known, was copied for many First World more lives were lost to disease and the War memorials although in that severe cold of the 1855 winter than to case it was largely overtaken by the Boer War Memorial by George gunshot. convention for cenotaphs (the empty Frampton Bury 1905, tombs of classical antiquity) especially One of the results of all the post-war following the erection of the Edwin The navvies’ equipment and soul-searching was that, when the Lutyens model in Whitehall. The organization made a sharp contrast Government came to commission a nation, overwhelmed and stunned by to the efforts of the military. Major- memorial from John Bell the sculptor the scale of the losses in the Great General Sir Henry Clifford wrote in a to mark the victory and its sacrifice, the War, could not merely follow previous letter home that the navvies had the style and substance of that monument commemoration responses. appearance of 'unutterable things' was unprecedented for the time. Whilst David Astbury David Harwood yet, 'did more work in a day than a both Trajan’s column in Rome and November 2013 regiment of soldiers did in a week'. Nelson’s column in London depict photographs courtesy David Astbury ordinary troops and their actions, there The Government (influenced among can be no doubt as to the heroes The Victorian Society Manchester others by Prince Albert) dispatched the being commemorated. However as c/o Portico Library photographer Roger Fenton, in what Richard Barnes, the biographer of 57 Mosley Street we would call today a public relations John Bell, points out, the Guards Manchester M2 3HY campaign, to produce images to Crimean War Memorial was the first to counter the impression of The Times' depict the ordinary soldiers as heroes. The Victorian Society is the champion reports which presented the military Unveiled in 1861 it commemorates for Victorian and Edwardian buildings in a very bad light. Modern research over 2,000 Guardsmen killed in the in England and Wales indicates that the reports of the Light war and stands in Waterloo Place, just 2 Ancoats Hospital Victorian mills would be transformed NEWS As members may have read in the into luxury living spaces which it was A Chromatic Revolution: the press, there is renewed hope for the assumed would sell like hot cakes. search for affordable colour conservation of this building.

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