Royal Tank Regiment Memorial

The Royal Tank Regiment Memorial is a sculpture by Vivien Mallock in Whitehall Court, London. It commemorates the Royal Tank Regiment.

Royal Tank Regiment Memorial

The sculptural group depicts the five-man crew of a World War II-era Comet tank at 1½ times life size.[1] General Sir Antony Walker, who was in charge of fundraising for the memorial, described it as "a memorial to the men of the regiment, rather than the machines".[2] It is an enlarged version of a maquette by George Henry Paulin in the Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, which dates to 1953. Mallock's husband had been an officer in the RTR in the 1960s.[2] A resin cast of Mallock's group also stands outside the Tank Museum.[2]

The memorial was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II, Colonel-in-Chief of the RTR, on 13 June 2000. She was escorted to the ceremony by an armoured Rolls Royce from 1924, a precursor to the tank. The date was the centenary of a battle in the Second Boer War in which the tank pioneer Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton first realised the value of using armoured machines in warfare.[2] Other memorials to the RTR are in Newcastle-upon-Tyne[3] and the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire.

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References
  1. "Royal Tank Regiment Memorial", Vivien Mallock Bronze Sculptor, retrieved 8 July 2016
  2. Ward-Jackson, Philip (2011), Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster: Volume 1, Public Sculpture of Britain, 14, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 430–32, ISBN 978-1-84631-691-3
  3. Historic England, "Royal Tank Regiment War Memorial (1355210)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 8 July 2016

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