“So, who’s this guy up there” an American visitor once asked me looking up at the imposing statue on Waterloo Place. “He must have been pretty successful right, to be on top of such a tall column.”
Well actually no. The story goes that it was just the opposite.
The statue is a memorial to Prince Frederick, Duke of York who was the second son of King George III.
Due to his royal birth, Frederick was appointed to high command of the British Army at the comparatively young age of thirty, but it’s fair to say, his early campaigns were not very inspiring, presiding over a series of embarrassing defeats and withdrawals.
In fact his military setbacks of 1799 led to him being branded as ineffectual and he was mocked by the English nursery rhyme ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’:
The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up.
And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were only halfway up,
They were neither up nor down
Some of this criticism may have been a bit harsh as some of his failings as Commander in Chief could be attributed to the shortcomings of the British army as a whole, and during his time in the army he did some commendable things like supporting the foundation of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. But unfortunately for Frederick, he became a bit of the fool guy and the reputation for being ineffective stuck.
When he died in 1827, a proposal by senior officers was that every soldier in the army forgo one day’s wages to pay for a monument to the duke.
While this may have been a unanimous decision by the officer class, it wouldn’t have gone down so well with the rank-and-file soldiers. The story goes that soldiers visiting London on a day’s leave, would scratch not very flattering remarks into the statue of the duke, so the decision was made to erect a tall column with Frederick on the top, for his own safety.