Brampton Park First World War Sculpture

On November 11 2014 a First World War memorial sculpture was unveiled on Brampton Park in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Artist Andrew Edwards worked with the Borough Museum and Art Gallery and its Friends group, Aspire Housing and PM Training to produce the sculpture.

The writer and pacifist, Vera Brittain, was born a stone’s throw from the park. In her greatest work ‘A Testament of Youth’ she includes the following passage

‘I had been over to Newcastle-under-Lyme to visit the family dentist, and afterwards sat for an hour in a tree-shadowed walk called The Brampton and meditated on the War. It was one of those shimmering autumn days when every leaf and flower seems to scintillate with light, and I found it “very hard to believe that not far away men were being slain ruthlessly, and their poor disfigured bodies heaped together and crowded in ghastly indiscrimination into quickly provided common graves as though they were nameless vermin…It is impossible,” I concluded, “ to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French or German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilisation.’

With her links to Newcastle and the reference to the Brampton it seemed a perfect opportunity to use this as the inspiration for the artwork.

The sculpture is a slightly larger than life size woman seated on a bench in the way that Vera Brittain describes. She is holding a letter. She woman represents, not Vera herself, but an everywoman figure representing the experiences of all women left behind – mothers, daughters, lovers – during wartime. This also has relevance today as wars and conflicts still rage overseas. Visitors to the park are able to sit next to her on the bench, it is hoped it will be a place for reflection. The bench is situated near a copper beech planted some years ago for Vera Brittain by her daughter Baroness Williams of Crosby.

The paving at her feet incorporates an abbreviated version of the quotation above.

Funding for the project came from the Realise Foundation and Travis Perkins.