Unleashing the Lion’s Roar: A Grassroots Countercampaign and the Memorialization of the “Glorious” British Empire

Abstract

The recent boom in studies on colonial statues bears witness to the global “statue wars” waged in response to the unfinished business of decolonization and civil rights campaigns for racial and social justice. However, the focus of scholarship on iconoclasm and “fallism” has resulted in a relative absence of research into cases where fallism has failed in the face of grassroots campaigns to preserve colonial statues and monuments. This article helps to address this gap by exploring the aims and motives of the countercampaigners, the anti-fallists, who defended the reputation of British colonists in Africa and succeeded in preserving a memorial honoring their legacy: the Lendy Memorial in Sunbury-on-Thames. Using untapped original sources from the National Archives, the article exposes the controversial history behind the Lendy Memorial and argues that the key to the countercampaign’s success was to revive a gilded view of British imperialism by deliberately distorting and censoring historical evidence while tapping into nationalist rhetoric and public and political objections to progressive political and social activism, ridiculed as “woke.”