Designer Edwin Lutyens Material Stone Architect Edwin Lutyens | Type Sculpture Completion date 1925 | |
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Location Horse Guards Parade, London, United Kingdom Dedicated to 45,000 members of the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division who died during the First World War Address Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2PA, United Kingdom Similar The Barbican Muse, Statue of James Outram - L, London Troops War Memorial, Big 4, London and North Western | ||
The Royal Naval Division Memorial is an outdoor war memorial located in the northwest corner of Horse Guards Parade in London, United Kingdom. It stands on a corner of the balustrade outside the Old Admiralty Building, and commemorates the 45,000 members of the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division who died during the First World War.
The memorial was commissioned by surviving members of the Division and designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It comprises a white Portland stone fountain with two circular basins surmounted by an obelisk standing in the upper basin. The obelisk bears the carved insignia of the Royal Naval Division. The square plinth is decorated with carvings of military subjects by Eric Raymond Broadbent, and several inscriptions. Water issues from the mouths of carved lions heads.
The memorial also features an inscription from the 1914 collection by Rupert Brooke using the first eight lines from the third poem which is titled "The Dead". Brooke wrote the poems in 1914 after the outbreak of the war, later dying on active service with the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division en route to the Dardanelles in 1915.
The memorial was unveiled in its present location by former First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill on 25 April 1925, the 10th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the memorial was dismantled in 1939 and moved to storage, to allow for construction of the Admiralty Citadel, a bunker at the west end of the Admiralty building behind. In 1951, it was installed at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, but the memorial was returned at Horse Guards Parade in 2003 when the Royal Naval College moved away from Greenwich that year. It was rededicated by Charles, Prince of Wales, on Beaucourt day, 13 November 2003. It received Grade II listing in 2008, upgraded to Grade II* in October 2015.
There are other Royal Naval Division memorials at Beaucourt near the Somme – a Portland stone obelisk with bronze plaque, commemorating the Battle of the Ancre in November 1916 – and at Gavrelle – a 3-ton anchor surrounded by a broken wall of red bricks, commemorating the Battle of Arras. The Collingwood Corner memorial near Blandford Camp commemorates the men of the Collingwood Battalion who lost their lives in the Third Battle of Krithia at Gallipoli.