WHATEVER HAPPENED TO QUEEN VICTORIA?
About two years ago, I came across a photograph in the
Toronto Public Library Archives, showing a statue of a young-looking Queen
Victoria. The only hint to the history
of this statue was the photograph’s caption which read “Victoria, Queen,
monument, Queen’s Park, at head of University Ave.”. I was intrigued. If you’re familiar with the area, then you’ll
know that there is a large statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on that spot, and it’s
been there for years.
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| This photograph from the Toronto Public Library Archives shows the statue of a young Queen Victoria that once stood on the south lawn of Queen's Park, gazing down University Avenue. |
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| Sir John A. Macdonald would eventually usurp the Queen's place on the front lawn of Queen's Park. This picture shows him peering down University Avenue about 1914. |
I forgot about the mysterious statue for a while, until my
interests were revived over this past weekend.
With another Victoria Day here, and all the talk about Canada 150, and
recognition of Queen Victoria as the “Mother of Confederation”, I once again
looked into finding out whatever happened to this statue.
The location of any such statue of Queen Victoria at Queen’s
Park is appropriate enough, at least in terms of geography. The area was opened as a park almost forty
years before the legislative assembly building first went into use. It was opened on September 11, 1860, by none
other than the Prince of Wales, eldest son of Queen Victoria and the future
King Edward VII when he was in Toronto as part of a Royal Visit to Canada. The young prince named the park “Queen’s Park”
in honour of his mother. Apparently,
there are more schools, streets, parks and public spaces named after Queen
Victoria in Canada than in any other country in the world. Queen Victoria had a long reign of nearly
64-years, and Canada is a pretty big country.
Here in Toronto, we had a few things named after her during
her lifetime. There was Queen’s Park, as
I’ve mentioned. Lot Street was renamed
Queen Street in 1844, and Upper George Street became Victoria Street that same
year. The University of Victoria College
moved to Toronto from Cobourg, and the old Victoria Hospital for Sick Children
opened on College Street in the 1890s.
But there was no statue of Queen Victoria for a considerable length of
time.
Then, along came a man named Marshall Wood. He was born to a family of sculptors in 1834,
just three years before Victoria came to the throne. Some critics seemed to think that Wood’s work
wasn’t really high art, but instead, he made a living by selling his work. It seems he was something of a door-to-door,
or perhaps, a nation-to-nation statue seller.
Queen Victoria had a lot of loyal subjects, given how extensive her
empire was, so he probably guessed that she would make a profitable “subject”
for his sculptures herself. He ended up
selling statues of Queen Victoria to other cities in Canada, Australia, and
even India.
Marshall Wood brought a statue of Queen Victoria to Toronto,
and our city council gave him permission to put up the statue at the base of
the lawn at Queen’s Park, at the top of University Avenue, as noted. It was installed in April of 1871. The statue portrayed Queen Victoria as a
young woman, which is a bit of a refreshing change for those of us today who
are used to seeing her portrayed as an older woman in constant mourning for her
beloved consort Albert. The statue was
made of bronze, and stood on a wooden pedestal.
Of particular interest are the cannons that flank her statue. They seem to be the same cannons that are now
positioned on either side of the main entrance to the legislative assembly
building. These were captured Russian
cannon, taken by the British during the Crimean War. The metal from other similarly captured
cannons would go on to be used to make each Victoria Cross, which remains the
highest military honour both in Canada and throughout the Commonwealth.
Marshall Wood had been in Canada to attend the unveiling of
a very similar statue of Queen Victoria that he had produced for Victoria
Square in Montreal. So, he extended his
trip to include Toronto, brought the statue that was located here as a sample
of his work, and put it up in Queen’s Park, which would have been a suburban
idyll near the north end of the city back in 1871.
The municipal committee responsible for such things
recommended buying the statue for $3,000.
The cost was debated in City Council for some time, but a consensus was
never reached. Some of our more pragmatic
aldermen of the day thought the price was too high, or that it wasn’t a very
good likeness of the Queen. About two
years after the statue was installed, city council finally voted against paying
for it. They asked Wood to take his
statue away in 1874. It was thrown into
storage for about twenty years before it was taken to Quebec City and put into
that city’s Victoria Park in June of 1897.
Queen Victoria was celebrating her sixtieth anniversary, or Diamond
Jubilee, as sovereign, and there were celebrations the world over (or, at least
in the parts she was in charge of, which were plenty).
Queen Victoria’s statue would regally reign in Quebec City for
just over 66 years, which was a couple of years longer than the reign of the
actual Queen. Then, at about 3 o’clock
in the middle of the night of July 12th, 1963, a blast rocked the
city. It was the height of the Quiet
Revolution, the Sovereigntist movement in Quebec, and the FLQ crisis. Someone had planted explosives at the base of
the statue in Quebec. When the smoke
cleared from the bomb blast, Queen Victoria’s head was lying about 90 metres
away from her body. In something almost
reminiscent of poor old King Charles I, the statue of Queen Victoria was
decapitated. Uneasy lay the head of
anything that the most fervent FLQ members regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a
symbol of British colonialism.
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| The decapitated head of Queen Victoria's statue after it was blown apart by separatists in Quebec City. |
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| Art historian and museum curator Vincent Giguere checks out Queen Victoria's body. |
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| Here's another detail of the Queen's head. |
The two main pieces of the statue, head and body, were
gathered up and since 1988, the body has been on exhibit at Canada’s Musée de
la Civilisation, as part of a display on Quebec’s darker days. The head remained hidden away in a museum
warehouse. There was talk of restoring
the statue and putting it on display again for Quebec City’s 400th
anniversary in 2004, but the last I heard, the damage done to the statue was too
extensive.
There is of course a statue of Queen Victoria at Queen’s
Park these days. It’s at the southeast
corner of the building, so she no longer gazes straight down University
Avenue. That boulevard was rather more
majestic in the 1800s anyway, being a tree-lined promenade for carriages and
stroll-prone pedestrians, instead of the hectic office and hospital lined
street that it is today. Celebrations
were held in Toronto, too, for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and there
was talk of a statue commemorating the long-lived Sovereign. However, the current statue at Queen’s Park
wasn’t installed until September of 1902, about a year and a half after the
Queen died.
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| Victoria Regina : the current statue of Queen Victoria at Queen's Park in Toronto wasn't installed until 1902. If you look at the postcard on the bottom, you'll note the houses in the background. The area around our legislative assembly was largely residential until development through the early 20th-century. |
