Giles' Grandma - Princes Street/Queens Street - Ipswich, Suffolk - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

"In 1993, a statue of Grandma & several other Family members was erected. Sculpted by Miles Robinson, the statue stands at the junction of King Street, Queen Street, Princes Street & the Buttermarket; just yards from the office Giles had once rented. With Giles in attendance, it was unveiled by his old friend, actor Warren Mitchell (best known as Alf Garnett in ‘ ‘Til Death Us Do Part’). The junction has since been renamed Giles Circus & in 2010 the area has been renovated & the statue moved a few yards & raised onto a three-tiered plinth. Grandma now gazes up in the direction of the window of Giles’ former studio."

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"Grandma is shown with her long coat buttoned down to her feet wearing goggle-like glasses under the brim of her hat decorated with flowers. She holds an umbrella in one hand and her handbag-padlocked for security - in the other. She is accompanied on one side by droopy Vera and on the other by the twins pilfering sausages from her bag, notable for its bottle of Gordons Gin, to feed the dog at her feet.

The site was chosen since the cartoonist Carl Giles (1916-1995) looked down at it from an office in the Express building where he prepared his cartoons for the Daily and Sunday Express. In 1943 Giles had been recruited by Lord Beaverbrook to the Express Newspapers as a war correspondent and as deputy cartoonist to Sidney Strube. Beaverbrook wanted the best cartoonists regardless of politics and allowed them to convey an independent viewpoint. So Giles remained a Socialist throughout his life and an ardent supporter of the trades union movement, yet Beaverbrook could call him ‘a man of genius’. Giles produced two cartoons a week for the Daily Express and one for the Sunday Express, so allowing him to work from his farmhouse at Wittlesham near Ipswich. On 5 August 1945 Giles introduced into a cartoon what would become known as members of his immortal lower middle-class family comprising a work-shy father, a sensible mother, their son George and his thin sad wife Vera and a number of children including the diabolic Eric and the Twins. Over these ruled Grandma, described by Keith Mackenzie as a ‘bleakly menacing figure drawn from [the] dark subconscious, bird in hat umbrella in hand and reeking of bombazine’. The statue was commissioned by Express Newspapers in 1992 - three years after Giles left because he felt unappreciated."

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URL of the statue: Not listed

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Date Logged Log User Rating   04/30/2022 Master Mariner visited it