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Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 390, 15 April 1902, Page 3

Most satisfactory and pleasing results were the outcome of the competition for the Buckingham Palace Memorial to the late Queen Victoria. The competitors were noted English, Irish, aud Scotch architects, and the successful competitor was Mr Aston Webb, an Englishman, whose general design was selected for the architectural treatment of the immense space in front of Buckingham palace allotted for the memorial. The central monument, with the statue of the Queen for its principal feature, had already been entrusted to Mr Thomas Brock. There is an air of classical beauty about tho design. The whole is wisely planned, and, solidly wrought, it will be a scheme of harmony, and not an assemblage of compromises, a chance muddle. Mr Webb’s scheme and Mr Brock’s statue are happily wedded. Passing to a matter of detail, in which the latter is essentially right, his statue of the Queen herself, upon the monumental fabric, is put in the true place. It is not at the top, as in one at least of the big schemes in the architectural competition, it was suggested it should be. It is not high up. In Mr Brock’s group, a symbolical figure—not the Queen at all, but the emblem of her glory trumpeted to all the winds—crowns the edifice ; and, at no great height above the people who will pass, the Queen, as of old sits —as she sat and moved of old—with her face of homely wisdom and profound feeling. It is what the nation most wanted —a record of the virtues and triumphs, of the gathered years and weighted meditations and orowning wisdom of the great Queen.