Cork In 50 Artworks, No 28: Statue of George II on the Grand Parade
A pre-1962 photograph of George II and his 'Yellow Horse' statue at the corner of Grand Parade in Cork. Picture: Cork Camera Club collection, Cork City Libraries
In Cork, as much as anywhere, public artworks can polarise opinion, but only one - John Van Nost the Younger’s statue of King George II on the Grand Parade - has ever been destroyed.
”The statue was torn down in 1862,” explains local historian and councillor Dr Kieran McCarthy, who has written 24 books on Cork and organises walking tours of the city.
“But the story really begins a century earlier, when it was commissioned by the Lord Mayor, Thomas Newenham. At that time, Cork was enjoying a period of prosperity. John Rocque’s map of the city, which dates from 1759, shows how it had undergone a process of Georgianisation. The old town walls were mostly gone, and there were new buildings like the Theatre Royal, the House of Hanover, and what we now know as the English Market. People were really proud of the new streets and bridges; Prince’s St dates from this era, and there were even coffee houses in the western marshes.”
Though he never set foot in Cork, it could be said that at least some people in Ireland had benefited from George’s reign as king, which lasted from 1727 until his death, aged 77, in 1760. That same year, 100,000 barrels of butter and 60,000 barrels of beef were exported from Cork. Much of it went to Britain, or supplied its military forces on the continent.
It was July 1762, and George II’s grandson George III had succeeded to the throne, by the time Van Nost’s sculpture was hoisted into its original position on Tuckey’s Bridge, spanning what was then a river channel on the present Grand Parade.
“The bridge was named after Timothy Tucker, who had property on the western side, on what is now known as Tuckey St. He and Capt Dunscombe, who had land on what is now Oliver Plunkett St, built the bridge between them. It was wide enough for carriages to pass either side of the statue.” This period of Cork’s history, when the city centre was a network of river channels, would later see it romanticised as ‘the Venice of the North’.
“You could imagine the statue of George II being reflected in the crystal clear waters of the river,” says McCarthy. “But that was not the case at all. By the 1780s, the channels were full of silt or gulch, and people were dumping their rubbish in on top of it. Everyone complained about the smell.”
At this point, the statue of George II had begun turning green, and the Corporation had it painted a bright yellow. Locals knew it as the Yellow Horse, or George-a-horseback. It is represented in several paintings, including James Beale's Skellig Night on South Mall - part of the collection of the Crawford Art Gallery - and an early photograph also survives of the statue.
By the turn of the century, the river channel was filled in, and replaced with a street. The statue of George II was moved to a new site at the southern end, nearer the River Lee.
Thereafter, it was poorly maintained; at one point, both horse and rider were supported by wooden crutches. The statue was finally toppled in 1862, in an incident that seems to have loosely coincided with the hundredth anniversary of its unveiling. “This was five or six years before the Fenians, but pressure was brewing in the city. During the Famine, a million people had departed the country, many through Cork harbour. There was no money around, and people were fed up.
“On 3rd March 1862, a mob climbed over the railings, and one guy got up on the pedestal and hacked the head off the statue. Others helped him smash up the rest of it; the next day, George II and his horse were in pieces on the ground. People took bits of the statue away as souvenirs, more of it was flung in the river, and the head is said to have been put on display in a window on the Grand Parade. It was there for years, but no one knows what happened to it after that.”
On the day after the decapitation, the Cork Examiner wrote: “The trunk is lying on its back, something in the position of a man lolling about in a 'jolly spree', and seems to be the object of considerable curiosity to a large crowd, who amuse themselves with running remarks on the misfortune that has for ever destroyed the glory of the celebrated George, and with curious and entertaining anecdotes of his past history.”
On St Patrick’s Day 1906, a new sculpture, the National Monument, was unveiled on the Grand Parade, near where the statue of George II once stood. Nothing remains of Van Nost’s sculpture but the plaque on its pedestal.
“That’s in the City Museum now, in a room at the back,” says McCarthy. “But there’s also another legacy, in that the Grand Parade is known in Irish as Sráid an Chapaill Bhuí, the Street of the Yellow Horse, from the years when the statue was painted a bright yellow.”
