From 'The Herald' a couple of months ago.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/life-style/real-lives/a-fight-to-remember-1.1055692
A fight to remember
Keith Bruce 17 Sep 2010
On the shore at Leith, in front of what is now the Malmaison hotel, site work is beginning for a new memorial to mark the sacrifice of a neglected number of the war dead, and also to educate people now about the shipping heritage of Scotland.
In a month when the effects of the Blitz in the Second World War and the heroism of the airmen in the Battle of Britain have been remembered, this project casts light on another area of the conflict altogether. The Merchant Navy Memorial Trust was set up just last year, but, with remarkable speed, its mission “to commemorate the sacrifice of Scottish Merchant Navy personnel in the two world wars, other previous and subsequent theatres of conflict, and in peacetime service along the trading routes of the world” will be completed in November, when the memorial in Leith is unveiled by the trust’s Patron, the Princess Royal.
A public appeal to fund the project was launched only in April of this year, but the flood of donations from around the world has ensured that the memorial is fully funded before the unveiling. Long before that launch, the trust had set up an open competition for sculptors to submit proposals for the monument, whittled a long list of 17 entries down to a shortlist of four, and made a final selection of Jill Watson’s work. In an era when arts projects, up to and including the reinvention of a national funding body, can be bogged down in development for aeons, it is a remarkable achievement.
Just as importantly, Watson’s work looks set to be an important landmark on a well-chosen location, and one that will reward attentive, and repeated, visits. Although she may not be known by name, arts lovers will have seen her small figures that decorate The Hub, the home of the Edinburgh International Festival. That project introduced her to her husband, the architect Ben Tindall, who was responsible for the redesign of the Highland Tolbooth Church.
At 5.5 metres, the Merchant Marine memorial is the largest piece of work Watson has made, but her signature will still be recognisable in all its details. The monument, which is faced in light-coloured, grained Beryl sandstone, has four distinct tiers and four sides and each of the panels bears a bronze relief – being manufactured locally at Powderhall foundry – designed by the sculptor to tell at least some of the story of Scotland’s relationship with the sea.
Those distinctive figures are, therefore, present, on a shelf at somewhere a little over a metre off the ground: a child’s eye level. There it will be possible to see navigators with charts, a ship’s cook, stokers, engineers, and seamen hauling lines. Below them a life ring, floating, tiny on a vast sea, was the universally suggested symbol for the loss of life that the work commemorates.
Watson has clearly been captivated by the research she undertook for the project, and interviewed retired merchant captains and shipping line marine superintendents as she formulated her ideas.
“The more you know, the more you are sucked in – but eventually the sculpture has to be made,” she says.
Professor Gordon Milne has been the moving force behind the trust since it began, having realised that there was no such memorial in Scotland. It is, indeed, a surprising omission. Many more British seamen were lost in the Second World War than the First – unlike soldiers – and a huge number of them were not servicemen at all.
IT is also true that a disproportionate number of Scots worked at sea, so a disproportionate number of those lost (some 15%) were from Scotland. And while the Arctic convoys had a memorial, the Atlantic convoys, with much higher losses, had none. Milne feared that younger generations would not know the story of the sacrifice of Scotland’s merchant seamen. Just as surely as the famous few RAF fighter pilots bravely saw off the Luftwaffe, the unarmed merchant fleet brought supplies to the United Kingdom when, in 1942, it was just a few weeks away from facing the reality of starvation, according to Winston Churchill.
Just telling that story was not enough in 2010, however, and the trust determined that the sculpture must have elements that referred to seamanship in peacetime as well, when, as in many potentially dangerous professions, lives are lost. So while one level of Watson’s work concentrates on the war years with geographical information, a fleet in convoy formation and the outlines of flying boats, the level above attempts nothing less than a history of shipping. Here, careful to respect the extensive knowledge of everyone in her commissioning body, Watson can happily date each vessel depicted by the style of its bow. From pre-Clipper sailing ships, via transatlantic steamers, the history of the Scottish merchant fleet progresses to the state-of-the-art drill ship Ben Ocean Lancer, built by Scotts of Greenock and launched in 1977.
On the top of this informative column will sit a crown of bows and sails, Watson’s translation of the crest of the Merchant Navy Memorial Trust expressed in three dimensions, carefully formed so that light can filter through on to the work below.
Professor Milne stresses that it will be a Scottish monument, and as concerned with the sea-faring traditions and wartime losses of Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow – and linked to Scotland’s Fisheries Museum in Anstruther. Nonetheless, he is more than happy with the location the trust settled on for the memorial, owned by and donated by Forth Ports.
THE waterfront is the old inner harbour at Leith, a port for 700 years, and the Malmaison was previously the seaman’s mission and a home for generations of sailors. Now it is at the heart of the regenerated Leith, a popular leisure destination with plenty of passing pedestrian traffic. When the unveiling takes place it will be preceded by a service at South Leith Parish Church, a kirk still more famous for its links with the sea than as the baptism-place of one of Rod Stewart’s offspring.
Families from all over have, however, made contributions to the cost of the memorial, and Milne, who has made presentations about the plan across the country, has become used to people pressing banknotes into his hand. At which point I should really declare an interest, because the Bruce bawbee is in there too – my grandfather was lost on the Currie Line ship SS Courland in 1941 and my late uncle was the first master of the Ben Ocean Lancer. I am certain that my family will, however, be far from the only one making a pilgrimage to Watson’s memorial when it is finally unveiled.
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