Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

Gutzon may have been right about most of these points, but he made an error in naming the club. It was probably the Fabian Club. Shaw denied that he had ever heard of the “Kingsley Society,” and mentioned that for that matter he had hardly heard about Kingsley.

Gutzon remained in England until the turn of the century which, considering the intensely modern impact of his life, seems like a long time ago. The days of quick success had become fewer in 1897, and they lessened rapidly thereafter. There was trouble on the horizon and the people of England were uneasy and crotchety.

In the controversy preceding the Boer War, which broke out in 1899, he was loudly critical of the British for their oppression of “the intrepid band in the Transvaal,” and freely forecast that they would pay for it dearly. And they did. General Baden-Powell, another of Borglum’s friends, was besieged with his troops in Mafeking, a little town north of Kimberley. There, holding what appeared to be a hopeless position, they came closer to starvation daily while England prayed.

Years afterward, in an article about the Boy Scouts, which Baden-Powell founded, Borglum recalled the turning point of that war:

I was in London. I was sitting in the New Globe theater. Duse, the magnificent, was giving one of her superb performances. And during one of the curtains the director came onto the stage with an announcement.

At first he said, “I hope that everyone will remain in his seat. I hope that you will be quiet and let the play go on.” The audience was dead still, trying to understand. And then the man said: “Mafeking has been relieved.”

The play ended right there. I never saw a sedate audience so completely surrender to joy. Believe it or not, every man everywhere in the theater kissed the others, kissed the women, shouted and cried. They poured into the streets and jumped up and down. They crawled onto the tops of buses and danced. And then and there Mafeking became historic.

Mafeking had been relieved, and that relieved the heart of Great Britain. The siege, with General Cronje commanding the Boers, had lasted about six months. It was lifted by Lord Methuen and sixteen thousand troops, and it brought a new day to England....

Gutzon’s work in England was widely talked of though little of it now remains. One of his principal commissions came to him after he had left the country, and the work was executed in the United States. A somewhat incongruous product of the Thirty-eighth Street studio, it was a series of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England, nearing completion with advertising accompaniments that said it would be the finest in the British Isles. The order, placed by the Midland Railway Company, owners of the hotel, was remarkable in that it broke what had long been considered an untouchable precedent. It was the first large order for fine art work ever placed by England in America, and brought the painter wide publicity at a time when it seems to have been considerably needed. Twelve panels were included in the series, and the Midland Railway Company agreed to pay $25,000, a sum almost incredible in those hard times; but the fee was payable on delivery.

The Midland’s art committee knew what it was getting. In 1898 Borglum had painted a series of panels for the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, another property of the railroad. They were a graceful, joyous group, and Gutzon admitted in his diary that he was a little proud of them.