Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/209

 n s. ix. MAR. 14, 1914.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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of the Blue-Coat Charity School, looking down upon St. Philip's Gardens. These are the work of a local sculptor, Edward -Grabb (who died at Stratforid-on-Avon in 1816), and were executed in 1770, being paid for by voluntary subscription. William Hutton the historian writes of them as possessing " a degree of excellence that a Roman statuary need not have blushed to own." The institution is about to be removed to one of the suburbs, and with it, it may be assumed, Grubb's boy and girl.

It may, perhaps, not be out of place here to recall a long-lost statue of Edward VI., about which little is known, though it cer- tainly occupied a very conspicuous position in the principal street of the newer town for a considerable time, and may have held it for well over a hundred years, or even longer. It stood in the centre of the facade of the tower of the Grammar School in New Street, erected in 1707. The statue, and with it the upper part of the tower, was removed in 1824 ; but the rest of the building of Queen Anne's time remained until 1832, when the whole made way for Charles Barry's present erection. The 1824 alterations are said to have been necessitated by the dangerous state of the statue. School buildings for, perhaps, 320 years had occupied approximately the same site prior to 1707. Hutton (who first paid a visit to Birmingham as a boy in 1 741 ) wrote many years later of the statue as " a sleeping figure " (it is pictorially shown as standing), but both its origin and fate are conjectural. It may have adorned some niche of the pre-eighteenth-century school in its later years, possibly even going back to Tudor times. On the other hand P. Scheemakers's ' Edward VI.,' now at St. Thomas's Hospital, Lambeth, was first erected at St. Thomas's Hospital, Southwark, in 1737, and was thus almost new when Hutton settled in Birmingham in 1750. The. Birmingham and London statues might well have been contemporaneous, and pos- sibly by the same hand.

It is known from pictures that the King's statue stood within a very large niche of the 1707 tower of the school, and formed beneath a clock the distinguishing architectural feature of the main structure. It was not a chance adornment of the frontage : its niche was obviously designed for the reception of an imposing wall statue or mason's effigy of considerable size ; the statue was of a king ; the school was the principal public secular institution of the place ; it would appear improbable that a shabby statue would be tolerated ; the

Royal monument would, therefore, be one of which a growing town would be proud. Many surmises may be made concerning this- public memorial to a Royal benefactor domi- nating a fine building of an architecturally fastidious period. It could scarcely have been of painted wood. If of stone, so huge an effigy could not have disappeared into space in the ordinary course of things. We must assume that it was a long-lived, weighty, and not unworthy work of art. What happened to it ? My own theory is that, before being taken down, it was found to be of value in a town where metal foundries abounded that it went (for a price) to the melting-pot, and reappeared in the form of " coins " (or tokens), fo? which Birming- ham was once famous and often notorious. 'Twas coined by stealth, like groats at Birmingham,. is, it will be recalled, a memorable line of Dry den's.

Closer inquiry into the taking down, or the taking off, of this Royal me- morial, might prove interesting ; it is just possible, though very improbable, that Edward VI. of 1824 became in part George IV. of 1823, the occurrence of the apparently impossible being explained by a slight con- fusion of recorded dates. The fact remains to be faced that a large public statue has disappeared, after causing the insecurity of the lofty tower of an historic building. Views are before me of the school both before and after the event. I have never read of any serious discussion of the reasons for the loss of this statue, and it has ap- parently always been assumed that it had no intrinsic value. There is surely room here for a fuller inquiry. It may not be generally known that Mr. (Sir) Charles Barry's original 1832 design included a lofty central tower. The idea of a tower was, however, abandoned, its cost being considered at the

time prohibitive.

WILMOT COBFIELD.

(To be continued.)

JOHN WILKES AND THE < ESSAY ON WOMAN.'

(See ante, pp. 121, 143, 162, 183.)

WE have seen that Walpole wrote of Wilkes's bons mots at Lord George's expense -too gross t-o repeat being all over the town just after Sandwich's attack in the Lords had made the ' Essay ' public pro- perty. Now, turning to Kidgell and to Add. MS. 22,132, f. 230, we find the parson writing that the frontispiece contained