Berwick, allegory and the face of Victory

Berwick war memorial, unveiled 16/11/1923

For Berwick on Tweed Carrick modelled the figure of a winged victory. The famous Athene Nike has inspired artists for centuries encapsulating the Greek heroic ideal. The heroic was inappropriate for the remembrance of the Great War however and most sculptors adopted a more restrained approach. Some memorial artists moved to the other extreme creating delicately fragile and beautifully balanced Victories. Carrick had witnessed the carnage of the western front at first hand and I think that for him such an image was equally inappropriate. By contrast his ‘Victory’ at Berwick (known to locals as 'the Angel') can only in comparison be described as solid and restrained. Carrick's daughter Anne told me that he used for his model a nurse named Miss Hunt. She was also a physiotherapist and he described her as a 'big –boned, strong woman with a good carriage'. War movies have often created the image of the nurse as objects of romantic interest for the hero. The reality was that these women worked in horrific and often dangerous conditions. They had to be strong, both mentally and physically, lifting gassed soldiers in and out of beds and baths as a matter of routine. When Carrick looked for a model to represent the allegorical image of ‘Victory’ he could think of no one more suitable than one of these same nurses. While other artists 'Victories' seem to have fluttered down from the clouds, Carrick's rose up out of the trenches of Flanders.