YEARS IN FOCUS

LOCAL NEWS AND EVENTS FROM THE 1940s

PONTEFRACT IN 1946

11th JANUARY 1946
LANDMARK DISAPPEARS

A familiar structure to Pontefract people for generations, the Waterloo Monument, Swanhill Lane, which was another 'leaning monument', has disappeared.

Interfering with provision of houses by the Pontefract Corporation, it was brought to grief quickly but not gracefully by a bulldozer.

Nearly three years ago a stone urn which surmounted the monument crashed to the ground during heavy gales - luckily into the field in which the monument stood.

As already recorded in 'The Express', the monument created much speculation in the course of the years. It was not, however, public property. It belonged to Mr. C. Pease. J.P., on whose land it stood until the Corporation bought the land. It was erected privately by a Mr. Edward Trueman, who was Mayor of Pontefract in 1818, and bore the following inscription;

"This monument was erected September,1818, in commemoration of the splendid and decisive victory of Waterloo, achieved by British valour under the immortal Wellington, June 18th, 1815''.

It was supposed to be a memorial to Mr. Trueman's son, who was killed in the battle, and to have been erected by a mason named Heseltine. Much conjecture also has been aroused about the reason of the monument leaning. There was not, as was previously thought, a steel rod running the length of the column; and qualified men do not claim to explain the 'twist'.

There have been many arguments about the direction which it was supposed to lean, and the official version is that it was towards the South-West .The material with which it was built is to be used on the building estate.

[ 1946 Index ]

Years in Focus is researched by Maurice Haigh and reproduced
with the kind permission of the Pontefract and Castleford Express.