Abraham Lincoln is everywhere, including England. In January the Dave Wiegers calendar took me back to Edinburgh, Scotland. Now that it is May, I head to Manchester, England for the first time to see a statue I’ve already seen.
Yes, you heard that right. I’ve never been to Manchester but I’ve seen the statue. Wait, that isn’t true. I have been to Manchester, or at least the airport. In 2005 I was returning to the United States after living and working for three months in Edinburgh. My flight first went to Manchester where I caught a connecting flight back to Washington, DC. My layover in the Manchester airport was anything but smooth. I had several hours to wait between flights, and if I recall correctly, the airport wasn’t such a great place to bide your time for long.
And then there was the taser incident.
As I waited, suddenly the airport went into a lockdown. A man was on the tarmac with a bomb in his briefcase, the spreading rumor said. They closed Terminal 1 (guess which terminal my flight was supposed to fly out of). There was no official announcement of why we were being held out of the terminal, although we could see news coverage on the television screens in the waiting area. Airport security chased a man carrying a briefcase, finally catching up to him a stone’s throw from the gate I now wondered if I would ever see. They tasered the guy, took him into custody, and carried out a controlled explosion of his briefcase, only to find there was no bomb. I never found out what happened to the man, but he was more psychologically distraught than any real danger. Eventually they let us back to the terminal and I made it home.
The incident was even more stressful when you remember that 2005 was also the year of the London terrorist explosions that killed 52 people and injured 700 others a few months before. The very day I was arriving in Edinburgh, the bombs went off in the London Tube stations and a bus. Also that very day, President George W. Bush arrived in Edinburgh for a G8 summit. It was a very anxious summer. [A few years later, on my first trip to Rome from my new home in Brussels, I got stuck in traffic caused by the arrival of the very same President Bush. I was starting to feel like he was stalking me; I had left Washington DC to get away from the politics, but here he was seemingly following me around the world.]
But let’s get back to the Lincoln statue. George Grey Barnard designed the statue, which was intended to be displayed in London. But London hated it. Robert Lincoln hated it. Most people, yup, hated it. The UK refused to erect it in London. Some called it the “belly ache Lincoln” because it appears to show him holding his stomach. The original statue actually stands in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is where I saw it a year ago. He is depicted as a working man’s Abe, with large hands wrecked by a life of labor and large feet seemingly more at home in the farm fields than the law and political offices he later held. For some in Cincinnati the statue is an eyesore, but most see it as a source of pride.
Meanwhile, back in England, with London out of the running (they would get a copy of a different statue), the city of Manchester said “Bring it here.” Manchester was happy to have it because Lincoln in January 1863 had written a letter to “The Workingmen of Manchester, England” in thanks for their support of the Union efforts and in acknowledgement of the strains of the workingmen in England and elsewhere in Europe.
I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis.
The people of Manchester never forgot Lincoln’s support. And so the statue nobody wanted was ensconced in Manchester. And there is remains, pensively, if not somewhat painfully, watching over visitors and working men and women in Lincoln Park.
[Photos: Calendar – David Wiegers; Lincoln statue in Cincinnati – Me, on a very rainy day]
David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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