A couple of weekends ago, I was in Ely, telling people that Reading was a little dismal compared to their leafy city with its rich history and quiet atmosphere. I felt that I should be more of an ambassador of my hometown than a dismissive critic, and I resolved to find those places in Reading that we Readingenzians should be proud of. That was where the idea of my Tour of Reading's Interesting Places began.
There's no better place to start than the Maiwand Lion. This is the Questionably Sculpted Statue. Here's a little history:
Back at the end of the 19th Century, our country was trying quite hard to fulfil its role as Ruler of the Waves, conquering distant lands and dividing the spoils. The Russians weren't particularly fond of us (they thought they should have some spoils of their own) and didn't agree that that's what we should be doing. Squabbles ensued, as they always do. One hotly disputed part of the world was a country called Afghanistan, which was big business if you liked opium. A lot of people liked opium in those days, and Afghanistan was the place to produce it. War, as it still is today, was mostly about business and national economies.
In 1878, Britain engaged in a difficult war in Afghanistan, after the Aghans sided with their Russian neighbours. One of the most famous battles of that war (the Second Anglo-Afghan War in fact), took place at a village called Maiwand.
It is this battle, and the heroic deeds of the 66th Berkshire Regiment that the Maiwand Lion commemorates. The statue is one of the world's largest cast iron memorials, weighing 16 tonnes. It stands proudly at the centre of the Forbury Gardens on a pedestal displaying the names of the men who bravely died defending Maiwand at that famous battle of 1880.
I was there today. The Forbury Gardens I mean, not Maiwand. I looked up at the questionably sculpted statue as I've done countless times since I first saw it as a small boy. It's quite frightening from the underside.
It's not really questionably sculpted. There is an urban legend that the sculptor, George Blackall Simmonds committed suicide when he realised that he'd crafted the legs in the wrong formation. Wracked with guilt, the story goes, George threw in the towel and took his own life. It is tough to believe when George Blackall Simmonds lived for another 40 years and even designed later memorials that you can still see... in Reading. Somehow that myth persists.
But if you thought that the wonder and mystery of the Forbury Gardens starts and stops with a cast iron lion on a terracotta pedestal, you would be dead wrong. There's an older treasure here that you might miss if you spend too long by the victorian bandstand.
For somewhere beneath the luscious green grass and delightfully cultivated flowerbeds, there lies a medieval king, the fourth son of William the Conqueror who probably birthed the idea of English law and founded Reading Abbey in the long-forgotten Twelfth Century. More about him I think on my next Tour of Reading's Interesting Places...
Today, I sat on a quiet bench for a while in front of the lion until the light faded. Those men died standing up for what they believed in. They were men of resilience, capturing the guns that the enemy had taken from them. The lion: brave, bold and silently growling for one hundred and twenty five years was a perfect picture of that fighting spirit, woven into the hearts of our Berkshire-born forebears. The men of Reading, I speculated, stood firm when the time came, growled proudly at their enemy with teeth bared and a roar of national pride behind the Queen's uniform. What would I have done?
The light always fades. In a strange way, those men, long-dead; George Blackall Simmonds; Victoria and King Henry Beauclerc, buried, unaware of the Britain they helped to forge; of the Reading which sprawls across the Thames Valley. I wonder what they would make of it. I gathered up my shopping and made the short walk to the station. Queen Victoria stared sternly down at me outside the town hall. A pigeon fluttered down and sat on her head. She didn't move.
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