CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 70, 15 December 1928, Page 26

CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE

Visitors to London who admire that fine adornment of the Victoria Embankment, Cleopatra’s Needle, may be interested to know that it has just reached the jubilee of its erection above the gleam of the Thames. It never had anything to do with Cleopatra herself, for it is more than 3500 years old. It was one of twin obelisks set up at Heliopolis about 1600 B.C. Caesar Augustus probably thought of getting it to Rome, but he got it no farther than Alexandria. That it would ever be settled in London was for all those centuries the last word in improbability. But Sir Ralph Abercrombie was able to appropriate the monument in ISOL For more than seventy years after this the Needle lay prone in the sands of the desert. Then a wealthy, man, Sir James Erasmus Wilson, decided that it must be brought to England. The sea transport of such a granite obelisk was a most difficult problem, and, indeed, it went adrift in the Bay of Biscay, having parted with its tug. It arrived in the Thames in January, 1878, and was erected in September of that year. Long before this it was proposed, that the Needle, if it arrived, should be erected at the foot of Waterloo Place, on the spot where the Crimea monument stands. It may be remembered (says "John o’ London’s Weekly”) that when those weighty critics of “Life in London,” the Hon. Tom Dashall and Squire Tally-ho, were admiring the features of Waterloo Place, then kuowq as Regent’s Place, the aesthetic squire remarked that there was a vacuum on this spot. His friend agreed, but informed him that the column known as Cleopatra’s Needle was ’’destined to raise its lofty summit in Regent’s Place.” This idea remained in the air for many years, the Needle on its part remaining in the sands of Alexandria, where Thackeray saw it “desecrated by all sorts of abominations.” In the interval the disappointed shareholders of Waterloo Bridge asked in vain to have Hie Needle placed on the central arch of their bridge as an attraction to tollpaying passengers! It lias been suggested as fairly certain that Moses saw tlie monument which now rises on the Embankment between Westminster and Waterloo bridges, and that Plato also gazed at it. When this relic of remote anti(|iiit,v was erected it was thought proper to lay under it a copy of “Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.” a feedingbottle. some Victorian hairpins, and a portrait of Queen I jetoria I