War Memorial Detail
Few English villages can be without a war memorial, but Port Sunlight's is unique. As early as 1916 Lever commissioned Goscombe John to design a war memorial, which was completed and unveiled in 1921 by two of his employees chosen by ballot. It consists of a granite runic cross with bronze statues and reliefs on the low surrounding walls. It has the theme "Defence of the Realm". On the memorial are the names of all of the company's employees who died as a result of both World Wars.
Seen above is one of the four reliefs, featuring an officer and two men manning a Vickers machine-gun clearly being used in an anti-aircraft role. It is interesting that one of the men is wearing a cap rather than the tin hats on the other two!
Note the defence theme, with a house on the far left, and houses and church on the right where a distant (and presumably enemy) biplane is clearly flying over them. I wonder how many other war memorials have any depiction of the enemy on them...
The memorial was designated as a Grade II listed building on 20 December 1965 and this was raised to Grade I on 28 October 2014. Grade I is the highest of the three grades of listing and is applied to "buildings of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important".
When the models for the memorial were shown at the Royal Academy exhibitions, it was their realism that most impressed the critics. But it was not to everyone's liking. Some thought that they were too real in appearance for their intended surroundings, the garden village of Port Sunlight. Nevertheless, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner considered that it is a memorial that is "genuinely moving and which avoids sentimentality".
War Memorial Detail
Few English villages can be without a war memorial, but Port Sunlight's is unique. As early as 1916 Lever commissioned Goscombe John to design a war memorial, which was completed and unveiled in 1921 by two of his employees chosen by ballot. It consists of a granite runic cross with bronze statues and reliefs on the low surrounding walls. It has the theme "Defence of the Realm". On the memorial are the names of all of the company's employees who died as a result of both World Wars.
Seen above is one of the four reliefs, featuring an officer and two men manning a Vickers machine-gun clearly being used in an anti-aircraft role. It is interesting that one of the men is wearing a cap rather than the tin hats on the other two!
Note the defence theme, with a house on the far left, and houses and church on the right where a distant (and presumably enemy) biplane is clearly flying over them. I wonder how many other war memorials have any depiction of the enemy on them...
The memorial was designated as a Grade II listed building on 20 December 1965 and this was raised to Grade I on 28 October 2014. Grade I is the highest of the three grades of listing and is applied to "buildings of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important".
When the models for the memorial were shown at the Royal Academy exhibitions, it was their realism that most impressed the critics. But it was not to everyone's liking. Some thought that they were too real in appearance for their intended surroundings, the garden village of Port Sunlight. Nevertheless, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner considered that it is a memorial that is "genuinely moving and which avoids sentimentality".