Walk across Horseguards Parade towards St James’s Park and directly in front of you is the Guards Memorial, a portland stone monument with five bronze sculptures on a raised platform in front of the central obelisk. As troops leave the parade ground they march towards and past this commemoration of their fallen regimental ancestors.
This was, like most of the country’s war memorials, erected after the First World War. Unveiled in October 1926, the design for the structure was by Harold Chalton Bradshaw, and the sculptor of the statues was Gilbert Ledward. It commemorates the 14,000 men of the Foot Guard regiments who were killed in WW1. (The answer to the often-asked question at the Guard Change: ‘are they real soldiers or just ceremonial?’)
On the back (the west side, facing into the park) the Guards’ WW1 battle honours are listed – including Mons, Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele: the Guards were always in the thick of the action – while on the sides of the monument bronze plaques details the units involved in the fighting. The bronze of the statues and the plaques comes from melted down captured German guns.
To the front (facing into Horseguards Parade) are stone carvings of the badges of the five regiments (Coldstream, Grenadier, Scots, Irish and Welsh) and above these are the bronze sculptures, one for each of these five units, the soldiers ‘standing easy’ with their rifles, bayonets affixed.
(The statues are of actual guardsmen: Sergeant R. Bradshaw (Grenadiers), Lance Corporal J. S. Richardson (Coldstreams), J. McDonald (Scots), Simon McCarthy (Irish) Guards and A. Comley (Welsh), although the impatient McCarthy didn’t hang around for his sculpture to be modelled so the legs are of another guardsman, Lance Sergeant W. J. Kidd.)
Look at the inscription on the obelisk above the statues and you will see damage done in an air raid. There were several raids in this area during the war, and I’ve not been able to discover which it was that scarred the memorial, but it could well have been the bombing on the evening of 14 October 1940. In this raid bombs fell along Waterloo Place (the south end of Regent Street), where statues on the east side of the street show similar damage. An Admiral Tower was killed at the foot of the Duke of York’s steps, the Old Treasury building was hit and there was extensive damage to 10 Downing Street.
After WW2 a further inscription was added “This memorial also commemorates all those members of the Household Division who died in the Second World War and in the Service of their Country since 1918.”
Was the inscription written by Rudyard Kipling, whose son John, who was in the Irish Guards, had been killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915?
Apparently so. The link to the full inscription is here: https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/11359
Kipling’s grief at his son’s death (for which he felt responsible; he’d used his influence to help his son enlist after he (the son) had initially been rejected with poor eyesight) plays out in much of his post war work, the most famous of which is his short story ‘The Gardener’ (https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/78/521/TheGardener.html)