Fit for a prince

The late Duke of Edinburgh, as passionate about collecting as he was a ruthless haggler, would have enjoyed a crop of paintings on offer at the forthcoming Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair

- Huon Mallalieu

THIS is going to be what Fleet Street editors and subs called 'a long drop ' indeed, a very long drop. A couple of days ago, an Instagram post introduced me to a sculptor whose name I had not encountered before: Arthur George Walker (1861-1939). It was a photo of a First World War memorial that was particularly striking because of the bronze relief below the principal figure, which showed a stretch of no-man's land filled with corpses. By the time that these memorials were going up, wartime censorship of depictions of casualties was long past, but this was still unusual and powerful.

Today, I realise that I have known several examples of Walker's work almost all my life, without ever wondering who had sculpted them. As well as a number of memorials, some for the Boer War, he was responsible for Florence Nightingale in Waterloo Place, London SW1, William Morris on the exterior of the V&A Museum, SW7, and Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Gardens, SW1, by the Houses of Parliament, where I played as a child (and please say 'No' to the plan for a Holocaust Memorial to be sited there).