Forres, a highland cairn

The Forres war memorial committee were so impressed with the Dornoch soldier when visiting Carrick's studio that they asked Carrick if he could reproduce the memorial for them. He refused feeling that the Dornoch concept was too specific and the towns too close to be copied. He therefore produced another simple and balanced figure for Forres based on his statuette 'Jock', exhibited at the R.S.A. exhibition of 1919.

Carrick could be a stickler for detail and wrote to the Forres committee requesting the loan of a Seaforth Highlander’s kilt from a local battalion to ensure that he got the pleating and the way in which the kilt hung exactly right.

Carrick had a more subordinate role at Forres with the overall conception and design of the memorial handled by the Aberdeen architect L. Marshall MacKenzie. Carrick was clearly concerned over the height of the pedestal even including the cairn in the sketch model which he sent to the architect, suggesting to MacKenzie that he saw a section off at the base to see how it would look when lowered. Carrick wrote to the architect ' My own opinion is that the cairn should not exceed eleven feet in height...if I may say so a cairn seems to be in good proportion at one and a half times the height of the figure'. In the end MacKenzie held to his original design with the tall cairn of blue whinstone from the Califer quarry, itself standing on a raised mound in the park. The memorial was unveiled in 1922 and the local authority has won awards over recent years for the exceptionally high standard of the gardens around the monument.

Above left - 'Jock', Carrick's original bronze figure. There have often been claims that war memorials were based on a specific individual, a local man killed in the Great War. This is extremely unlikely as artists would not have used a local serviceman as a model as such use would have been innapropriate for a memorial which was erected by the whole community to commemorate all of the men and women who had served and died. It was also contrary to the classical ideal which most artists of the period pursued, aiming to portray the typical or ideal scottish soldier rather than an individual. However the model for 'Jock' was almost certainly Jock Souter, one of Carrick's masons who worked in the yard. Carrick used Jock Souter as a model for many of his soldiers since, as Anne Scott explained to me, Carrick said he was 'the typical big sergeant major type figure who could strike a pose and hold it for hours'.