In 1935, the socialist suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst commissioned and erected the Anti-Air War Memorial in Woodford Green, London. The monument was raised as a protest against war in the air and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a Grade II listed building.
On 20 October 1935, R.P. Zaphiro, secretary of the Imperial Ethiopian Legation, unveiled the memorial. It bears an inscription dedicated to those who in 1932 upheld the right to use bombing aeroplanes, an ironic reference to participants of the 1932 World Disarmament Conference who voted to maintain that right. The sculptor, Eric Benfield, described those who preserved bombing as being politically and morally dead.
The original monument was vandalised and stolen on its first night. A replacement was built by Benfield and unveiled on 4 July 1936, attended by representatives from Germany, France, Hungary, Austria, Guyana, and Ethiopia. The memorial is designed as a plinth topped by a pyramid with a stone bomb mounted on top, as if it had fallen vertically onto the tip of the pyramid.
Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons
Written by Nicolo Ciampini
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