Lancashire Fusiliers War Memorial, Bury

Lutyens was invited to design this war memorial to the Lancashire Fusiliers, and because of family associations, he charged no fee for his services. His father, Charles Henry Augustus Lutyens, had served with the 20th Regiment of Foot which became the Lancashire Fusiliers after the 1881 restructuring of the British Army. Previously, a great uncle, Captain Englebert Lutyens had served with the regiment in the Peninsular War, but perhaps the relative uppermost in Lutyens’s mind was one of his nephews, Captain Charles Graeme Lutyens, who had been killed during the Fusiliers’ campaign at Gallipoli in 1915.

The memorial was unveiled on 25 April 1922, the seventh anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, by Lieutenant General Sir Henry de Beauvoir De Lisle. It originally stood outside Wellington Barracks on Bolton Road, but in 2009 it and the regimental museum were moved to a new location opposite the Art Gallery and Museum in the centre of the town. The monument consists of a tall obelisk mounted on a rectangular pedestal with convex ends. There are two painted stone flags – the King's Colour and the Lancashire Fusiliers’ Colour. [Richard Fletcher]