The white marble figure on the grass beside the Avon stands with his back
to the river, facing north toward the old Municipal Chambers, an
alpenstock in one hand. He is Robert Falcon Scott, carved by his own widow
— a 2.6-metre, 2.5-tonne block of Carrara marble shipped from an Italian
quarry in 1916. The statue tells two stories at once: the man it
remembers, and the woman who made him.
The man was brought to grief by the South Pole. Robert Falcon Scott was
the most famous polar explorer of his age — a Royal Navy captain who had
already reached further south than anyone before him on his first Antarctic
voyage. Christchurch and Lyttelton were his base for the Discovery
expedition of 1901 and the later Terra Nova of 1910, and the city waved him
off from Lyttelton in November 1910, stocking his ships as he set out to
be the first man to stand at the South Pole. In January 1912 he reached
that pole and found a Norwegian flag already there — the explorer Roald
Amundsen had beaten him by a month. On the return, starved and frozen, he
pitched a tent and died — probably the last of the five, on 29 March 1912.
When the Terra Nova finally reached Lyttelton in February 1913, the city
was in mourning, flags at half-mast.
Within a week, Christchurch had a memorial committee. A bishop proposed a
great monument on the summit of the Port Hills, visible from Lyttelton and
the plains alike; it never came to that. Instead the committee wrote to
Scott's widow, Kathleen — a sculptor — and asked her to carve her own dead
husband. She agreed, travelled to the marble quarries at Carrara in March
1916, and finished that May. It was meant to be bronze, but the First World
War made bronze too costly, so Kathleen cut her explorer in marble. On 9
February 1917, a crowd by the river watched the Governor unveil Kathleen's
idea of her husband: polar dress, alpenstock in hand.
The inscription on the plinth is not her hand, but his last words: "I do
not regret this journey, which shows that Englishmen can endure hardships,
help one another, and meet death with as great fortitude as ever in the
past."
For ninety-four years the statue stood here. Then, in February 2011, the
earthquake threw it from its plinth. Not bolted down, it toppled, hit the
ground and broke below the knees, its head driven into the earth. It sat
in the red zone until April, when it was craned onto wooden supports and
put on display — at an ice festival in Hagley Park in 2012, then in the
Earthquake Museum from 2016, lying like something awaiting burial.
Restoration cost six hundred thousand dollars. Stonemasons drilled through
the granite plinth and marble base, threaded carbon-fibre rods up through
the legs to hold the mended figure, and set the statue on a spring
mechanism — a shock absorber, so the next time the ground moves, the
captain can ride it without breaking. On 26 October 2017 he was lifted back
and unveiled a second time in the same spot, by Scott's own descendants and
the city's former mayor. Weeks later, someone snapped the bronze alpenstock
off his hand; council staff later found it lying in a nearby garden — a
century-old memorial vandalised the same week it came home.
Kathleen Scott carved her husband returning again and again from the thing
that killed him. She is here too, in a way — the lower inscription says it
plainly: "This statue was sculpted by Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain
Scott, and was unveiled in 1917." She survived him by thirty-five years,
and her marble Scott has now outlived an earthquake as well.
Source
Wikipedia