LONDON’S OBELISK

Southland Times, Issue 22010, 9 May 1933, Page 11

LONDON’S OBELISK

CLEOPATRA’S DIRTY NEEDLE. CORROSION OF HALF A CENTURY. Somebody has been complaining about Cleopatra’s Needle on the London Embankment. The London County Council has been told that the winter fogs have made it dirtier than usual, and the architects’ department of the council has promised to send somebody to look at it. Cleopatra’s Needle has sustained more corroding during the 55 years in which it has been watching London’s river tugs go by than during all its 3500 years in Egypt, says the New York Times. 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 Jlouse of Commons. Perhaps one of the difficulties involved in returning the Needle would be the problem of what to do with its pedestal. It must be one of the fullest pedestals in 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 prettiest Englishwomen of 1878, and a set of daily and weekly newspapers. The Germans came 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 the Englishmen have been killed beside the Needle. Mehemet Ali offered it to the British Government in 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 68ft shaft of granite, weighing 183 tons, was to enclose it in 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 (the other is in New York) which Thothmes 111. set up about the year 1500 B.C.