Versia Harris’s memorial to Hugh Springer: a response to Black Lives Matter protests at All Souls College
by Marina Warner • June 2025 • Article commission
Abstract
On entering the antechamber of All Souls College Library, University of Oxford, the reader, scholar, student will see, set between the high windows, a tall pyramid reminiscent of the tomb of Gaius Cestius in Rome or a Neo-classical Masonic monument FIG. 1. Made of sleek black glass, it is funerary in mood. However, if the curious visitor pauses, its softly illuminated interior reveals a long golden quill suspended from the apex, beneath which a miniature diorama unfolds: a tree stump, sprouting bracket fungi, stands in the centre of a triple concentric ring of platforms edged with bristling grass FIG. 2. Roots extend outwards from this lopped tree, while all around it, books dot the scene – piled on top of the stump and scattered about the platforms – as though a library were magically growing from the ground. On closer inspection, small mushroom-like trees, shrubs and bushes made of newspaper also spring up alongside fences and hedges composed of pen nibs. The solemn, opaque outer form thus opens into a mysterious sacred precinct: an allegory of reading and writing filled with the irrepressible vitality of nature. The experience is akin to peering into an early optical artefact – a vista pinpricked against the light, made in the pre-digital past to record a wonder of the world.
The subject of this highly original, subtle and evocative monument is Hugh Springer (1913–94), a lawyer and civil servant who served as Governor-General of Barbados from 1984 to 1990; the artist is a fellow Barbadian, Versia Harris (b.1992). Springer read Greats (Classics) at Hertford College, Oxford, later becoming a Senior Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in 1962–63 and then an Honorary Fellow. Trained as a lawyer in the United Kingdom and called to the bar in 1938, he practised law in the Caribbean, where he was a committed labour organiser, the leader of the Progressive League and, from 1940 to 1947, General Secretary of the Workers’ Union. He then turned to education, acting first as Registrar and then as Director of the University College of West Indies between 1947 and 1966. During those years he witnessed the establishment and collapse of the West Indies Federation. It was a project in which he, like many others, had placed great hopes; he later chronicled its history in his melancholy book Reflections on the Failure of the First West Indian Federation (1962). He then moved into government service, becoming in 1964 the Acting Governor of Barbados, and later the Governor-General, holding office during the period when the island – one of the oldest colonies in the British Empire – gained independence.
Discussing the commission, Harris notes that, ‘from the start’, she did not want to ‘make a likeness’, but rather ‘a symbolic portrait’:
He is a national hero, but a different kind of hero, quiet and stoic. I wanted to catch that. Among the multitude of figurative busts and portraits at All Souls, I wanted this work to stand out as representative of more than a likeness.1
Moreover, a portrait of a young Springer in full academic dress FIG. 3 already hangs in the college hall among its other great historical luminaries. Painted by Hector Whistler (1905–78) in 1950, it is a sensitive portrait that catches the man’s modesty and sense of idealism, even while marking his worldly successes.
Harris initially explored possible heraldic imagery, drawing on the coat of arms conferred with Springer’s knighthood, as well as the shields of the new Barbadian nation and the universities that gave him honorary degrees. But that approach did not lead anywhere. Instead, while walking into Oxford along the River Cherwell, the artist came across a newly fallen tree FIG. 4:
Something clicked in my head. Peter Wohlleben talks about ‘tree friendship’, a beautiful discovery that when a tree dies and leaves behind its stump, that stump is not in fact a dead empty thing. Rather, it continues to be fed nutrients from its neighbouring trees. The stump doesn’t simply decompose and become fodder for scavenger organisms. It’s kept alive, in a sense, by its friends and its community, sometimes for centuries afterwards. This struck me as an apt metaphor for the death of a man whose work and legacy clearly remain today and is fed by those who are still here and by projects like these.2
She continued: ‘My work would be about a spirit who grew, bore fruit, served and ended not simply as a lone individual but amongst a circle of such spirits’. Springer in death could be represented by a stump, as his legacy is still forming a community of others, while the smallest pen nibs ‘represent the many individual students he helped’. The artist is also – in the medallic and indeed heraldic tradition – punning on the associations of his name.
The memorial was commissioned by All Souls as part of the college’s response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, which had blazed in Oxford and focused on the statue of Christopher Codrington (1668–1710) that stands in the centre of the library. Alongside Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), the chief actor in the British colonisation and exploitation of South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Codrington emerged as a pre-eminent symbol of slave ownership, the source of British wealth and power. Both men are commemorated in Oxford by statues, and statues, being a mark of honour designed to provoke admiration and even emulation, can draw furious indignation and disgust depending on the histories of which their subjects have been part. BLM demonstrators demanded an end to honouring men whose gains were so ill-gotten and whose bequests were therefore tainted. All Souls became a major target, alongside Oriel College, where Rhodes is remembered by a mediocre statue overlooking the high street FIG. 5.
Codrington was a third-generation sugar planter with huge estates in Barbados and Bermuda, where enslaved men and women laboured. He was a former Fellow of All Souls, as well as a soldier, poet and bibliophile, who at his death bequeathed £10,000 towards a new library at the college, as well as £6,000 worth of books. The architect chosen to design the new building FIG. 6 was Nicholas Hawksmoor, and the result, a serene, soaring, pinnacled, eleven-bay edifice, an idiosyncratic and happy fusion of Gothic and Classical styles, closes the north side of the Great Quad and the east side of Radcliffe Square, completing Hawksmoor’s remarkable scene-setting. As a legacy, the library was never going to be inconspicuous.
In 1734 the Fellows decided to honour their benefactor with a statue. The commission was awarded to Henry Cheere (1703–81), who cast Codrington in the guise of an ancient Roman general FIG. 7, wearing a body-moulding cuirass, celebrating his career as a soldier (although this was of modest prowess) with a pile of books by his side for his poetry, also not altogether admired, and his bibliophilia. Malcolm Baker, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century sculpture, has a high opinion of Cheere’s work, and has expressed appreciation of the nobility and assurance of the pose. ‘It continues a tradition’, he writes, ‘established in the Renaissance, following antique models and most commonly employed for figures of absolutist rulers in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’.3
My own sense is that the statue is horribly overweening and that the head is awkwardly joined to the body by an overlong neck. It is also not a portrait. Codrington was dead when it was carved, and the symbolism – imperial and military Rome – jars with the bookish associations. However, the placement is marvellous: the statue anchors Hawksmoor’s luminous arrangement of bookcases, tiled pavement, glazing and gallery. Many argued that its crucial position in the ensemble meant it could not, or should not, be removed; it was in any case unlikely that permission would have been granted, as the library is a Grade I listed building. But the aesthetic values of the work became a line of defence only when demands to pull down the statue, or at least remove it, from its glorifying position grew – both among the Fellows and protestors outside the college.
In a 1927 lecture Robert Musil suggested that there is ‘nothing in this world so invisible as a monument’.4 ‘Fiendish malice’, he noted, might have motivated their erection. ‘As one cannot harm them [great men] any more during their lifetime, one has chosen to hurl them, with a memorial stone hung around their neck into the sea of oblivion’.5 That is, until something happens: a jolt, a shift in the tectonic plates of the received history and the pantheon comes into focus and suddenly, that municipal effigy with the pigeon on his head leaps out of the thick cloud of obscurity into the arc lamps of public scrutiny – and outrage. No longer invisible, no longer unnamed, the ‘great’ figure is treated as though alive and dangerous and then symbolically executed: nothing left of Joseph Stalin’s proud colossus but his boots; Queen Victoria has lost her head; Joséphine de Beauharnais has been daubed, disfigured, beheaded and finally destroyed; and Edward Colston ducked like a witch. It turns out that civic memory, laid down in the built environment, matters and that the story – as it is told in bronze or stone – may lie dormant for decades before erupting in a fierce and unignorable outcry.
Denunciations of the statue of Codrington in the library were growing and in 2016 – on the feast day commemorating founders and benefactors of All Souls – Edward Mortimer, a long-time Fellow of the college, delivered a sermon in the chapel. He invoked the protest movement Rhodes Must Fall, which had begun in South Africa the year before, and asked how All Souls would deal with the college’s historical links with Codrington: ‘Should we continue to benefit from his bequest? And if not, what should we do about it?’ he asked.6 His impassioned speech added to a growing clamour that was to become a rallying cry – one for recognition that this celebrated architectural marvel, this unique library in a unique research centre, was funded by a man who owned plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies.
Mortimer, who died in 2021, was a brilliant political journalist, who had served as speechwriter and chef de cabinet to Kofi Annan at the United Nations. Elected to All Souls in 1964 through its famously difficult Prize Fellowship, he was a man of conscience and causes. The son of a bishop and an Eton scholar, Mortimer was an unlikely radical or firebrand, but so it turned out. Before his stirring sermon, he had worked with other Fellows on the commemorative plaque at the entrance to the library FIG. 8, honouring those who ‘worked in slavery on the Codrington plantations in the West Indies’. However, this expiatory statement was not enough; several BLM protestors argued that words without action were no more than dead letters. Mortimer agreed, and called on the college to take steps to redress the ancient historical wrong: ‘We should look for ways of making a more than symbolic collective reparation to the descendants of African slaves, both in the West Indies and in this country’.7
The future of the statue divided the college bitterly, and not always along expected lines: some of the most passionate advocates for redressing the past opposed moving it or even covering it up. There were meetings, webinars (the controversy raged through COVID-19 lockdowns) and much diplomacy. Ultimately, the Fellows voted to keep the statue. But the strength of feeling led to many actions that – although the word ‘reparation’ has never been used – have moved towards addressing the legacies of historical injustice. The name Codrington has been dropped from the library; a donation was made to Codrington College in Barbados; and support given to the CaribOx initiative, which seeks to encourage and support students from the region. In addition, funding continued for the All Souls Hugh Springer Graduate Scholarships, which cover course fees and living costs for students from Caribbean countries studying at Oxford.
The statue has also been ‘contextualised’ with historical panels and commentary in the antechamber; the names of former enslaved workers on the plantations have been retrieved from the archives and projected onto the statue; and an annual lecture has been established on the theme of ‘Atlantic Slavery and its Aftermaths’. Paul Gilroy was the first speaker, followed by Dionne Brand and, in 2025, Simon Gikandi.8 Brand’s and Gikandi’s lectures took place in the library, and it produced quite a frisson to hear these incisive and passionate analysts of the colonial legacy speak their minds in a setting both contentious and magnificent, with the statue still standing in situ.
A further decision was also taken: to honour Springer with a portrait bust to stand in the library, near the imposing sculpture of the jurist William Blackstone and the bust of Stephen Lushington, a former Fellow of the college who campaigned for abolition. The contemporary tribute to Springer would offer not exactly a counterweight or a direct challenge to Codrington’s swagger, but a historical memory of an alternative past, speaking up for different values.9 An advisory group was formed. Chaired by the Fellow Librarian, Peregrine Horden, it included the Barbadian art historian and curator Jessica Taylor, Roger Malbert, Cora Gilroy-Ware and myself. Guided by Taylor, we reviewed different artists’ work and invited brief submissions from four very different sculptors. Harris was chosen, perhaps surprisingly, as she had principally worked with animation and dioramas, exploring Disney imagery in a spirit of contestation. It was the first time, since perhaps the choice of Hawksmoor as the architect for the Great Quad and the library, that the Fellows of All Souls had taken such a bold aesthetic step.
Harris’s practice has, she remarks, ‘been mostly about fantasy and the deconstruction of imagination, and ideals and desires within the landscape’:
I work mostly with found objects and create comparisons and associations between objects. This commission asked me to do something different. I was building everything, I had to make everything – to create the environment. I wanted the roots to look strong, still somewhat alive, to capture the texture of the grass.
She used clay to model the stump, roots and mushrooms that the dead tree is feeding, and left the material unfired in the interests of a softer texture. Otherwise, all the materials are paper, pen and ink, evoking Harris’s assertion that Springer’s ‘weapon was not a sword but the pen, with which he wielded his intellect, opinions and governance’. The work also reflects his effort to further the educational endeavours of others across the Commonwealth and beyond. To remember Springer’s role as Registrar, special registrar’s ink provided her with all the paint she needed, and she emptied Oxford’s specialist stationers of their range of pen nibs. Reflecting on her choice of the pyramid form, she explains ‘He was a man of strength, with backbone, forceful. I wanted a form to express that kind of strength and support’.
Significantly, the composition of the garden reverberates with sacred symbolism, as appears elsewhere in contexts that align with the artist’s intentions. The emblem FIG. 9 of the Warburg Institute, London, for example, envisions cosmic harmony through an interlace of circles, with the four elements placed in the cardinal quarters.10 This chimes with Harris’s ecological metaphor for the spirit of her memorial and Springer’s ongoing influence. The memorial also retains the deep connection to landscape that is characteristic of her other work. While making the garden, she recognised a connection between books and trees – one that persists in the production of paper, of course, but also reaches further back. The word ‘book’, which comes from Germanic, is related to the word for ‘beech’ or, possibly earlier, to the Sanskrit for ‘birch’ – the semantic connection being that runes were scratched into wood or bark. Kathryn Sutherland, who kindly pointed out this association, praised the memorial for ‘its revisionist ecological imagining of the relationship between books, power, and knowledge’.11
The memorial also reverberates with ancient forms of sacred architecture that, as Henri Focillon argued in The Life of Forms in Art (1942), recur independently across cultures and epochs: the tetrahedron, the mandala, the wind rose, the tree. Most strikingly, perhaps, the work echoes the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, where the emperor performed an annual ritual to ensure fertility on earth and the protection of heaven. The ceremonies took place on the Circular Mound Altar FIG. 10, a triple concentric platform open to the sky, designed according to ancient cosmological principles to symbolise heaven.
Although Springer is a well-known figure and a beloved founding father in Barbados, there was not a lot of information for Harris to work from. She relied on speeches and the memories of his son, Stephen, who provided her with some material, including an unfinished memoir and a copy of the lecture ‘Barbados as a Sovereign State’, which Springer delivered in London in 1967, the year after his island won its independence. It is a vision and manifesto, culminating in the words:
Education must be of the whole community and of the whole man, intellectual, moral and spiritual; encouraging creativity and independence of judgement, and directed to the ideal of quality in all phases of life, especially family life and the raising of children. All must share an inspiring yet realistic vision of the future of the community and of its place in the world.12
Springer’s words ring with high hopes and deeply felt ideals for his new country – indeed, their resonance has not dimmed. Harris wanted to capture the immediacy of Springer’s own hand – an analogue medium closer to his voice than printed text – but she did not have a manuscript of the speech. She improvised: ‘I copied his handwriting from the biographical manuscript he started, scanned his writing and then built the quote in his handwriting by digitally piecing letters together in order to inscribe his words on the sculpture at eye level’ FIG. 11.13
As we puzzle out the words on the dark glass, we see ourselves reflected; we become part of the monument, giants stepping into the garden. The black-tinted glass is a deliberate rejection of traditional white marble. But Harris also intends, she explains, for ‘the colour of the glass to create the lens through which Springer, a Black man who faced racism throughout his time, was perceived’. She continues:
This did not diminish his value. As a son of an independent country during a period when postcolonial identity was forming, it was most significant to embrace his race at the forefront of his generation forming this new identity.
It is important that the glass mirrors all who look into it, implicating each viewer in the historical conditions that surrounded Springer, and that continue to affect many Black lives today. The sculpture also casts a shadow on the wall behind it, the trees, grass and pen nibs coincidentally forming an image of dreaming spires – an echo of the wider world, touched by the aspirations and legacy of Springer.
I have provided this background to the memorial to Hugh Springer because it offers, I think, a quiet, sensitive response to the turmoil surrounding disgraced historical figures. Although I was one of the Cheere statue’s adversaries, I believe the solution – hard-won through much conflict – has been eirenic, helping to repair some of the soreness and anger caused by the original dispute. Harris’s strikingly original memorial draws on traditions of tapping beneficent powers through imagery of cosmic balance and natural energies unstemmed. It is never the time to be complacent – much still needs to be questioned, explored and enacted – but Springer’s memory is now honoured by a work of care, artistry and originality, which connects his achievements to an ongoing commitment to the arts, to learning and to equality of access.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Versia Harris, Paul Hobson, Peregrine Horden, Kathryn Sutherland, the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College and the members of the advisory group.
