"There are thousands of memorials in every town and village to the dead, but not one as a reminder of the danger of future wars."
So wrote Sylvia Pankhurst in 1936, around the time this bomb-shaped memorial was unveiled in Woodford Green. Because of her surname, Pankhurst is best remembered for her role in the women's suffrage movement, but her social activism was much broader.
In 1932, the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva had deemed aerial bombing to be an acceptable form of warfare. Pankhurst was appalled. She remembered the horrors of falling bombs from the First World War, and rightly foresaw the horrors that modern bombers could bring to civilian populations.
In protest, she commissioned this anti-war memorial from sculptor Eric Benfield and had it erected at the end of her garden in Woodford Green in October 1935. Made of stone, its simple form represents a falling bomb, resting nose down on a plinth.
The sculpture was almost immediately stolen. Undeterred Pankhurst had Benfield make a replacement. Its unveiling in the summer of 1936 coincided with Mussolini's mustard gas attacks on Abyssinia (Ethiopia). RP Zaphiro of the Imperial Ethiopian Legation was invited along to unveil the memorial, and Pankhurst became a steadfast advocate of Ethiopian independence.
Pankhurst's anti-bombing campaign was prescient. The attack on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War was less than a year away. The second world war would then see millions killed (on both sides) by aerial bombing. Sadly, the sentiments behind the memorial remain relevant almost 90 years on.
It still stands, almost hidden by the undergrowth on the western side of Woodford Green High Road. Thousands of people drive past every day without knowing it's there.
Pankhurst lived in the Woodford area for many years, before moving to Ethiopia. She is remembered by Pankhurst Green, a small triangular garden near Woodford station.
