[Extract from the Banbridge list by C E B Brett and Lady Dunleath, published by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society in 1969.]
1862, designed by W.J. Barre of Newry; cost £700; statue
and carvings by Joseph Robinson Kirk, of Dublin. Monument to Captain
Francis Crozier (d.1848), a native of Banbridge, frozen to death
in the ice with Sir John Franklin's expedition in search of the
North-West Passage. Barre's biographer, Dunlop, says: "The
monument is in the form of an octagonal pedestal, rising from
a square plinth, and carries a colossal statue of Captain Crozier.
The octagonal portion of the shaft is treated as a niched arcade
in which it was originally intended to place a series of bas-relief
carvings illustrative of the career of Captain Crozier as an Arctic
explorer. The idea was, however, abandoned, in consequence of
the funds at disposal being too limited. The junction of the octagonal
shaft with the square base is effectively managed by the introduction
of open spur buttresses at each angle. On the weathering of each
of those buttresses is placed an Arctic bear. The character throughout
is that of the Gothic of the thirteenth century. The carving has
been used as far as possible to symbolise the work of the expedition"
- it includes scallop-shells, foul anchors, bears' heads, a sort
of Arctic otter chewing a salmon, and convolvulus.
The four grieving polar bears on the buttresses, now rather weather-worn,
rear their hind-quarters in salute to the Captain.
The two small panel carvings in the niches, with the larger Crozier
Memorial (also by J.R. Kirk) in Seapatrick Church, are of considerable
merit. All display the Erebus and Terror (the ships
of the expedition) starkly embedded in great chunky three-dimensional
ice-floes, exciting and near-abstract triumphs of the imagination,
as weird and poetic as the rockery mountains invented by Joachim
Patinir, and for the same reason: neither artist had ever seen
what he sought with such intensity to portray.
Refs: Apollo; Linn; Dunlop.
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