Flowers have been left at the feet of what remains of the Teddy Baldock statue in Poplar in East London.
Thieves wriggled the statue off its plinth two weeks ago and carted it away on a three-wheel vehicle, with the whole incident being caught on camera.
The statue of Baldock, Britain’s youngest ever world champion, was installed in 2014. He passed away in 1971.
“It was a tough watch when I saw the CCTV, when it’s toppled,” said Baldock’s grandson, Martin Sax.
It certainly is.
It was believed the bronze statue, prised off its Portland Stone plinth, was stolen to be melted down for scrap, but the public outcry and media attention the theft has subsequently received means there are concerns that the statue could have been dumped or, by now, be on the floor of the River Thames.
“Just my tweet on it – and I’ve got no followers really – it got shared something like 9,000-odd times, which is nuts really. And then all the public and media support and everything else, it’s blown me away. I couldn’t even fathom the support from the media and I always said to people, ‘There’s plenty of busts of politicians from the 1800s dotted around London, if one of them got nicked, it would just probably wouldn’t make the news and no one would really care.’ But this just seems to have really taken off with a British sporting icon, and you’ve got the neck to come and rip it down.”
Most of the major media outlets picked up on the story and the video of the vandals at work has been shared far and wide.
Of course, until the statue is back where it belongs, the good intentions of others count for little.
Sax is now unsure what to do. It took a titanic fundraising effort in the first instance to erect the statue – valued at around £100,000 – and he doesn’t want to do the same thing again in case he doesn’t reach a target and is left with surplus money.
If that happened, he said it would be donated to worthwhile charities, including the Ringside Charitable Trust – that helps ex-fighters in Britain – and the Spotlight Youth Centre in Poplar, which is close by to where the statue was situated.
There is another problem.
The sculptor who made the statue, Carl Payne, passed away from Covid – aged just 52 – and neither Sax nor Payne’s relatives know where the moulds of the statue were kept.
Offers have been made by kind members of the public to 3D scan miniature versions of the statue in a bid to recreate the original, but if it is rebuilt, nothing would be more helpful than the original moulds, and Sax has made enquiries with the local authorities.
“Carl Payne did the most amazing job because I think when you’ve seen sporting statues, some aren’t great, some are,” said Sax. “But he just captured him. My biggest worry going up to his studio was he’d just worked off black and white pictures and that it was modelled off a poster from the magazine, Boxing [Boxing News] at the time issued on my grandfather. Then my biggest worry is what happens if you walk into the studio and your first impression is ‘it’s not good, it’s nothing like him’.”
But it was so lifelike that Sax’s mother broke down in tears. The last time she had seen her father was when she was a 14-year-old girl.
Now Sax isn’t sure that the thieves would even get £100 ($130) each from scrap.
“I’d give them five grand [£5,000, approximately $6,500] if they bought it back,” he sighed.
Until the statue was taken, Sax’s chief concern had been that it might be tagged with graffiti. But that never happened.
That the bronzed feet of Baldock still stand is at least a starting point for the statue to be rebuilt.
“The statues are made in lots of little compartmented bits and then get welded,” Sax explained. “So the statue can be repaired. I suppose plan B is to try and find the moulds because again, to get it recast, it will be covered by insurance because people have asked me about crowdfunding and they even got in touch with me having seen the story. But, my difficulty is, if I would say let’s crowdfund it at this stage, I don’t know how much it's going to cost and I [don’t want to be in the situation where] I’m suddenly I’m left with this fund, the money that all these generous people have like submitted, paid into and it doesn’t get used, and I’m left with all this surplus.”
Which at least goes to show that there are good people out there still. The flowers that were left by what remains of the statue prove that, too, and they proved uplifting for Sax.
“That’s pretty amazing,” he said, having noted that members of their public still wanted to pay their respects to “The Pride of Poplar” in the face of something so disrespectful.
