Most of the people that a person encounters in relatively high trust societies like that of the UK are likely to be OK individuals and who are unlikely to be complete and utter morons. However that should not blind us to the fact that there are some utter and complete morons out there and what’s more they are quite willing to demonstrate to the world that they are morons.
A good example of a person who is not only a moron but also a person who shows the world that they are a moron and who knows the square root of sod all about history and society is the man who recently climbed up on scaffolding to vandalise a statue of Prospero and Ariel that is displayed on the front of BBC Broadcasting House.
The BBC report into this incident said:
A man has been arrested after allegedly hitting a controversial statue outside the BBC’s HQ in London with a hammer.
Police were called at 04:15 BST on Saturday to reports a man had climbed scaffolding outside Broadcasting House and was damaging Eric Gill’s Prospero and Ariel.
There have been calls for it to be removed because the sculptor recorded abusing his daughters in his diaries.
It is the second time the 1930s work has been targeted.
The man was brought down from the scaffold shortly after 18:00 BST.
The Metropolitan Police said he had been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and going equipped and that he would be taken into police custody.
The man was attacking the statue, which is a representation of characters from The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare, as part of some vague and unhinged protest about paedophiles. The statue itself is not particularly controversial, but the sculptor Eric Gill who died in 1940, later became controversial following the publication of his diaries that showed that he had not only sexually abused his daughters but also the family dog.
The gist of the protest was that this man believed that the statue represented a culture of paedophilia in the BBC. Now I’m not exactly the BBC’s greatest fan but this is bollocks. Yes of course the BBC has had some issues with dodgy talent in the sixties, seventies and eighties,such as Stuart Hall, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile. However this was a time when attitudes to child sexual abuse and child safeguarding were not as enlightened as they are today. It was much easier back then for high profile talent that were big ratings draws and who were up to no good to intimidate lower level staff and sometimes even management into silence and the concept of child safeguarding was almost non-existent. There was also the matter of legal issues if claims were made by journalists that could not be backed in court with watertight evidence*. You can’t, quite rightly in my view, claim that someone is a nonce without having enough evidence to meet at least the civil standard of proof which is that the evidence proves a case because of a balance of probabilities and a higher standard of proof, that of beyond reasonable doubt, is required for a criminal conviction.
But the key point that the statue smashing morons, both this most recent one and the one in January of 2022, is that by attacking the statue they have shown that they know bugger all about history and also bugger all about the BBC.
It helps to remember here that at the time when the statues on Broadcasting House were commissioned in the 1930’s from Eric Gill that the Corporation was run by Lord John Reith who held the post of Director General of the BBC. Now Reith was a man of uncompromising morals. He lived his austere Presbyterian Christianity fully. He hated sin, the appearance of sin and the expression of it. Under Lord Reith’s governorship the BBC used to cease radio broadcasts at certain times on Sundays in order that the nation could attend Church. Lord Reith also had a policy that any BBC employee who got divorced would get fired from the BBC and even the sight of two opposite sex employees kissing in the workplace could result in termination of employment.
It is unlikely in the extreme that had Lord Reith known about Eric Gill’s disgusting incest and bestiality proclivities that Gill would have been employed by the Corporation to produce such a high profile and public set of artworks. At the time when the Broadcasting House statues were commissioned all that was known about Eric Gill was his talent. He had built a formidable reputation for designing church interiors and windows, typefaces such as Gill Sans and Perpetua along many of the numerous war memorials that honour the nation’s dead from World War One.
Knowledge of Gill’s incest and bestiality activities were not well known during his lifetime. They were kept as secrets within the Gill family and among very very few close friends. Details about Gill’s sexual life only became public knowledge in 1989 when a major biography was published and where the author had access to Gill’s diaries. These proclivities of Gill’s were unlikely to have been discovered in the 1930’s even by such an accomplished sin hunter as Lord Reith. There was no public or even semi-public knowledge of Gill’s twisted sexual life therefore Lord Reith and the BBC could not have known about it. Also as there’s never been to my knowledge any suspicion that Gill’s activities and artistic contacts represented a national security risk which might have prompted MI5 to have discreet words with the BBC to get them to commission someone else other than Eric Gill to produce the Broadcasting House sculptures. To anyone considering Eric Gill at the time when he was producing art, he would just have been considered as a great artist but a bit of a religiously driven oddball. Few outside of his immediate family circle would have known anything else about the man.
Eric Gill was a great and talented artist but also a terrible and abusive human being. But the same could be said for other great and talented individuals. The painter Carravagio was a superb artist who was also a murderer, Pablo Picasso a prodigious artistic talent who allegedly treated his muses, wives and girlfriends like crap and Charles Dickens a person about whom it is possible to describe as a literary genius, was also man who had extra marital affairs and tried to get his wife unjustly confined to a mental asylum. All human beings are imperfect in some way, some more imperfect than others and this applies not only to the metaphorical ordinary man on the Clapham omnibus but also to those who make great achievements in the service of humanity.
The man who attacked the Prospero and Ariel statue on Broadcasting House is not a hero, he’s not as one of his supporters have described him as, ‘striking a blow against the paedo cabal’. He’s a man quite unabashed about showing the world that he’s a moron and that he knows sod all about history and in particular the history of the BBC under the staunch and uncompromising moral leadership of Lord Reith.
To those tempted to support the latest Broadcasting House moronic vandal I will ask you this: Are you prepared to see the National Gallery and National Portrait galleries emptied of works of any artist whose life and views were bad or even those who lived their lives subscribing to what were then contemporary ways of thinking and which differ greatly from views held today? Are you prepared to see someone like Winston Churchill removed from the history books because he was a drunk who wasn’t exactly kind about what he sometimes said about other races and other nations? Do you want to see statues of Cromwell removed because he was a regicide and because of his actions in Ireland or have the body of Edward I disinterred in disgrace and reburied in some obscure churchyard because of his treatment of the Welsh and the Jews? If you think like that then not only are you little better than the disgusting Leftists and fake ‘be kind’ types who want to rewrite books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to make them fit with metro-left mores, but you are also a person who wants to live in a boring and sanitised society.
Life, politics, art, culture and society and those who contribute to these things are not either good or evil or black or white, all these things along with those who have created them are a wide spectrum of shades of grey. If we are not prepared to accept that the often odd or abusive lives of artists are separate from the art they create then we will have no culture, no history and no future to hand on to our children.
Very well written. I have a friend who is a Professor in the field of the History of Fine Art. He commented similarly last time this statue was damaged.
If we were to judge every painting, sculpture, book, building, piece of music, play or even some inventions by the behaviour of its creator/artist we’d have very little left.
Unlike a statue of an evil perpetrator, this is no memorial to him, this is a work of art and it is essential that the work is separated from the person who created it.
By all means reference it, educate the viewer, but don’t just smash it up, or cancel it or consign it to a vault.
Thank you so much for your kind compliment. Your professorial friend is correct, if we judged every creation of humanity by their flawed creators then we would have nothing left.
I’m even prepared to forgive Lord Reith’s flirtation with fascism as when he was admiring German and Italian strongmen the world had no idea about how the regimes headed by these men would turn out.
I’m terrified of where this retrospective cancel culture will end up. Already we have younger people who do not know of the life of people like Robert Falcon Scott because the haven’t been told about him, because those who’ve taught our young have classified him as a relic of the imperial age. I can increasingly understand why there is a move in the United States to ‘teach children from old books’ because the books that the schools are working from are packed with denigrations of America.
Your characterisation of Winston Churchill as “a drunk” also sounds like a Metro-Left sneer.
Well he did have a prodigious appetite for alcohol. He could certainly be classed as a drunk on the grounds of consumption level alone these days. I can see what you mean but I was trying to get the point over that you can have brilliant people who also have flaws.
To add: Mr Churchill did have a reputation for drinking as shown by Bessie Braddock’s exchange with him ‘Bessie Braddock to Churchill “Winston, your drunk!” Churchill: “Bessie, you are ugly, and tomorrow morning I shall be sober”
I agree! But an argument for the removal of the Eric Gill statue has been also brought about by female survivors of familial sexual abuse who are pleading for recognition of their traumas and are regarding the BBC’s preservation of Gill’s statue as symbolic of their belittlement.
I’m not arguing any points here, just reflecting…..
Did Gill abuse any of those women who are making these calls for the statue’s removal? Of course not. It’s just a group of campaigners using a controversy to gain support for their campaign. Rather than going after the statues of a long dead artist and an artist whose abuse was not uncovered until 49 years after his death, wouldn’t it be better to campaign for stiffer sentences for abusers or better support for those who have suffered from abuse? If the BBC was currently employing lots of people who had been the perpetrators of familial sexual abuse then their claims of the statues being ‘symbolic of their belittlement’ might be valid but that’s not the case.
As Julian Le Good has said further up the comments tree, it’s not as if the Broadcasting House statues are representations of a perpetrator of evil, they are artworks by someone who decades after his death was revealed to be an abuser.
Whenever I go to the big Tescos in the centre of the town where I live I have to pass through what was once the centre of the town’s Jewish Quarter and I’ve drank in a pub there where the cellar regularly floods because it is built over the spring that once fed the Mikvah used by the Jewish community before Edward I confiscated the Jews property and destroyed it. I don’t wail and gnash my teeth over this aspect of history or see what’s there now as a symbol of belittlement, I accept it as a part of history, a nasty bit granted, but still long ago history. It also makes me smile ironically to know that a supermarket started by Jack Cohen is now slap bang on top of an area where the Jewish community was once destroyed by the monarch.
For the record there should be more help for those who have been the victims of abuse but the way to get that help is by using the political process and campaigning about stuff happening in the hear and now, not about an artist who died decades before his abusive behaviour was uncovered.
It’s vital to separate as far as possible art from artist. For example I adore a lot of the photography of Alexander Rodchenko but I’m repulsed by his revolutionary socialist politics.
** Whoops! Should have explained for non-Jewish readers what a Mikvah is. See https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-mikveh/
While I agree with you point about judging an artwork separately from the artist, I would note that when I visited the National Museum of Wales a few months ago they were doing the typical self-flagellation of most institutions these days over works with links to colonialism and slavery, while a work by Gill made no mention of his crimes. Bit of a double standard IMO…
That’s interesting. Does seem to be a little like double standards doesn’t it?
Yes, but we could also support artists who have acted decently around their family values, and just common decency. I have no idea who they are atm but there must be some.
Nice idea but how would it work? Do you have state investigators doing the equivalent of Developed Vetting checking out the artist, their partners, their family, any comments they’ve made or writing they’ve written, going through their sketch books or initial artistic studies checking out the parents and investigating whether or not the artist is socially and politically sound? I believe that the Soviet Union tried something like this and although some artists, such as Rodchenko, managed to survive and didn’t get sent to the Gulag, lots of other creators did not.
I’ve worked, back in the late 1990’s in community art and I saw too many people get employed not because they were fantastic artists or could bring their talents to the community, but because they had the right politics, could recite the funder approved buzzwords or had contacts with / had ‘intimate contact’ with well connected councillors or council officers.
Re artists with decency. I had the extreme privilege to meet, at the Photographers Gallery in London, the photographer Bert Hardy a couple of years before his death. He was a lovely man and one of the best photographers in the news/features field in Britain in the 40’s / 50s.
Abusers will always exist and because such abuse is often kept secret, especially familial abuse, it’s not something that any sort of vetting would uncover, in the Gill case it was hidden for nearly half a century after his death.
“Rather than going after the statues of a long dead artist and an artist whose abuse was not uncovered until 49 years after his death, wouldn’t it be better to campaign for stiffer sentences for abusers or better support for those who have suffered from abuse?”
This applies equally to those who bang on about slavery. Slavery is happening now in many parts of the world. Putting a stop to modern slavery should be a much bigger priority than going on about what did and didn’t happen in the past.
A very good point there. It’s far more effective and morally correct to tackle modern slavery rather than bang on about slavers who are now dead and gone and those for whom slavery might have been a tiny part of whatever businesses they were involved in. The past is gone, we cannot change it, therefore we should look to the future and work to improve that.