Anonymous said:
It's a bit of a cheat but the birds that I can mostly see from my office are entirely wrapped up in myth and legend. They are the Liver Birds on top of the Liver Building here in Liverpool. As I said, bit of a cheat, sorry.
But there is an interesting story behind them, all the same:
Liver bird sculptor rehabilitated by city that tried to forget
Liverpool honours Carl Bernard Bartels posthumously, nearly a century after he was imprisoned and his plans destroyed
Martin Wainwright guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 July 2011 16.31 BST
Liverpool seldom forgets an injustice. But for almost a century, the city has harboured one of its own, which will now be put right during a weekend of 3D projections and free concerts.
They will mark the centenary of the famous Liver building on the Mersey riverfront, topped by its pair of extraordinary birds, half eagle and half cormorant.
They were made by a talented artist who won an international competition for the commission, but was then airbrushed out of history.
Although a naturalised Briton, who had fallen in love with the country on honeymoon in 1887, Carl Bernard Bartels was arrested in 1915 at the height of anti-German feeling during the first world war, and imprisoned in an internment camp on the Isle of Man.
At the end of the war, he was forcibly repatriated to Germany, separated from his wife, children and the home in London where they had lived for 20 years.
Worse was to come, as Liverpool city council admits in citations accompanying the posthumous award of citizen of honour to Bartels during the centenary celebrations between 22 and 24 July. "We are setting the record straight," said Wendy Simon, the city's cabinet member responsible for culture and tourism. "There was very strong anti-German feeling at the time, especially when the Lusitania was sunk in 1915 on her way to the port. It didn't last, even with the second world war, because we're a very multicultural city and famously welcoming. But it was too late by then for the man who gave us our famous Liver birds. He just got forgotten."
Rehabilitating the artist proved tricky, even in the last decade, because the 1915 xenophobia saw his drawings and blueprints for the 5.5-metre (18ft) copper sculptures destroyed, while false trails appeared to have credited foundry designers or the architect of the Liver building, Walter Aubrey Thomas.
Bartels himself accepted the cold-shouldering after a long and difficult struggle to return to the UK, where he eventually resettled and carried out commissions for Durham Cathedral and a number of country mansions.
"He also made artificial limbs for servicemen in the second world war," said his great-grandson Tim Olden, a graphic artist from Southampton who is one of 13 family members travelling to Liverpool to receive the award. "But it's only very recently that he has started to get real recognition. My mother took a 'let things lie' attitude, but one of her last wishes was to go and see the birds, and Liverpool gave her a warm welcome."
The visit in 1998 began Liverpool's rediscovery of Bartels, including his skill as the first person to sculpt a nonexistent bird only previously portrayed in drawings and paintings. He also managed to create a male and female, giving rise to the scouse legend that one or the other flaps its wings if a virgin or an honest man walks along Pier Head.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/1 ... ed-bartels
