STORY OF THE “NEEDLE” OBELISK

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 11 June 1932, Page 11

STORY OF THE “NEEDLE” OBELISK

gOMEBODY has been complaining about Cleopatra’s Needle again, says the “New York Times.” The Needle is a sister of the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park, New York, but it has had a far more adventurous career than New York’s obelisk. Just now the London County Council has been told that tfie winter fogs have made it dirtier than usual, and the architects’ department of the L.C.C. has promised to send somebody around to the Embankment, where it stands, to take a look at it. The L.C.C. inspects it once a year, but this year the annual inspection is being pushed forward, and it is possible that it may be cleaned of its present grime and returned to its original pink before summer.

Cleopatra’s Needle has sustained mpre corroding during the fifty-five years in which it has been watching London’s river tugs go by than during all its 3500 years in Egypt. But this has been only part of the bad luck which has overtaken it since it left Alexandria. Proposals to return it to Egypt have frequently been made, and on a few occasions have got as far as a question in the House of Commons. Perhaps one of the difficulties involved in returning it would be the problem of what to do with its pedestal. It must be one of the fullest pedestals in

No Connection with Cleopatra

London, for it contains a set of English coins, copies of the Bible in various languages, a razor, a box of hairpins, pictures of the twelve prettiest Englishwoman of .1878, and a set of daily and weekly papers. The Germans camp very near to bombing it .during the war, but all that they actually succeeded in removing was an Embankment tram which was creeping past the Needle with its lights out. It was not the first time that Englishmen have been killed’ beside the Needle. Meliemet Ali offered it to the British Government as far back as 1819, but nobody would look at it until 1877, when Sir Erasmus Wilson offered to bring it to England at his own expense. Wilson’s method of transporting the Needle, a 08ft shaft of granite weighing 183 tons, was to enclose it m an iron cylinder, fitted with a keel and a deck for towing. The steamer Olga towed it from Alexandria, but the ballast of the odd craft shifted in the Bay of Biscay, and six of the Olga’s crew were drowned. The obelisk is not a needle, and it has never had anything to do with Cleopatra, but it was jokingly referred to as Cleopatra’s Needle when it first reached London, and the name has stuck ever since. It was one of a pair of obelisks (New York’s is the other one) which Thothmes 111. set Up about the year 1500 B.C.