Men on Horses, Redefined

European cities are replete with them: statues of generals, kings, emperors astride a horse. While no doubt it was flattering for the personages in question to see themselves thus glorified, to later audiences these statues all look much alike and are not really that interesting – a fact that one of the contributors to our website video took note of when he sarcastically defined culture as “a bunch of boring statues of men on horses.”

In Glasgow, one such statue burst well out of the constraints of boredom. It inspired first a fun tradition, and later a near civil society uprising, to stand today in renewed and updated punk glory as a symbol of city and citizenry.

The statue in question featured the Duke of Wellington. Late one Scottish evening, a group of Scottish students, returning home from ample drinking, decided to perk up the statue by placing an orange and white striped traffic cone on its head. The next day, the city cleanup crew removed the disrespectful token, but it was too late – a tradition had been born. Soon it became ritual – on your way home from the pub with your pals, you found a traffic cone and plunked it atop the Duke of Wellington, from where it was removed by the street cleaning crew. City authorities soon tired of the game, however. In just one year, they had been obliged to remove the cone on 100 separate occasions, which they might have taken as a sign of citizen resolve but instead chose to see as a civic annoyance. They came up with an idea. They would raise the statue, placing it high on a plinth to deter the drunken merrymakers. The drunken merrymakers, however, got wind of this and soon all of Glasgow knew that 65,000 pounds of their tax money had been allocated to the important cause of lifting the Duke of Wellington beyond traffic cone range. Within hours, a petition to stop this plan – to “Save Wellington’s Cone”as the movement called itself – was well into the multiple thousands of signatures. As the petition explained:

“The cone on Wellington’s head is an iconic part of Glasgow’s heritage, and means far more to the people of Glasgow and to visitors than Wellington himself ever has. Raising the statue will, in any case, only result in people injuring themselves attempting to put the cone on anyway: does anyone really think that a raised plinth will deter drunk Glaswegians?”

The logic was unanswerable, the momentum unstoppable, and the city authorities not only capitulated, but have since made their peace with the new aesthetic. Today, you can buy postcards, pins, T shirts and many other souvenirs all featuring the Duke in the traffic cone, his statue is one of the most popular photo-op destinations for tourists and an official stop on all city tours.

Pictures provided by Glasgow Life and BBC News