Lovely warts

Award-winning sculptor Martin Jennings chats about the art and – with a nod to the toppling of statues – the pitfalls of immortalising the great and the good

- Gerald Heys

Oxford-educated Martin Jennings makes public statues, mainly in bronze, from his home in Stroud. Among the many indications of the man’s renown are past commissions from the likes of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster, and that three of his portrait sculptures (Sir Edward Heath, Philip Pullman, and Lord Bingham) are owned by the National Portrait Gallery.

Full-length works of Martin’s you might’ve spotted on your travels include John Betjeman in awe of the roof of his beloved St Pancras station; George Orwell on a fag break outside the BBC; and Norman Stanley Fletcher (aka Ronnie Barker) contemplating Aylesbury’s Waterside Theatre from a nearby bench. More about these later. But first, there’s the question (posed via Zoom) of what goes through a sculptor’s mind when a statue gets the bum’s rush on the TV news.

Back in June, at about the time Churchill’s plinth was defaced, protestors trussed up the Bristol merchant, philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston and turfed him into the drink. Martin’s feelings regarding the event are, he admits, mixed. Colston was “involved in a particularly awful trade” and even though the man was one of the city’s great benefactors, it was “blood money, earned on the backs of slaves transported from Africa to the Caribbean, many of whom died en route. Really, my heart didn’t bleed when his statue was pulled down.”