The flurry over whether London's statue to F.D.R. should show him sitting or standing (TIME, Nov. 25) was building into a williwaw. In typical British fashion, most of the wind was blowing up & down the letters-to-the-editor columns in short, violent gusts.
Sir William Reid Dick, "King's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland," who thinks Roosevelt should stand, had spent the past six months modeling him that way. His design for the statue in London's Grosvenor Square had already been approved by the Royal Fine Arts Commission. But now the squawks from the thousands who had chipped in five shillings apiece (total: £40,000) for the statue were being heard. Sir William's Roosevelt is shown in his flowing cape and a double-breasted suit, with the trouser cuffs flopping over his shoes and the top coat button characteristically undone. He leans on a walking stick.
Wrote opinionated old Portraitist Augustus John: "To have him portrayed permanently on his legs or somebody else's (even without walking stick!) would be an intolerable solecism, dishonoring to a great and unvanquished spirit, and a lasting monument to British ineptitude only." Opera Singer Marjorie Lawrence, like Roosevelt a polio victim, asked "Why not present him as he was. . . ?"
London Times Associate Editor Donald Tyerman, another polio sufferer, wrote a letter to his own columns, disagreeing with the complaints. Said he: "The protest . . is surely based on a misconception. The ambition and pride of the disabled, as I have some reason to know, is to stand on their own feet."
About the only interested party who refrained from writing the newspapers was Sculptor Dick. Last week Sir William, who has modeled the King and Queen, Queen Mary, Churchill and Halifax without raising anybody's hackles, implied that it was all a matter of artistic license, good-naturedly explained that "a sitting figure of Roosevelt would be all wrong in the general arrangement. It would look squat and dumpy alongside the tall trees that will surround it."