Former City of London School for Boys, Victoria Embankment EC4

Right on the outside, bottom of the list of priorities in Victorian education, are science and engineering. To the left, G.W. Seale has placed Geometry, with her drawing board and dividers, and Mathematics with her...er...drawing board and dividers. She also balances a globe on her other hand, presumably in tribute to her vital contribution to navigation.
To the right, Chemistry holds a test tube and Mechanics has one hand casually draped over a gear wheel and the other holding a device that I cannot identify - possibly a limited slip diff for an early model Ford. An Archimedian screw completes the composition.
Of course, everything is different now. Technology is still bottom of the educational heap, of course, but today's high-flying students shun the classics and poetry in favour of law and, god help us, media studies.

Former City of London School for Boys, Victoria Embankment EC4

The central arch of the school is graced by the Classics and Poetry, and they are supported on either side by Art and History.
To the left G.W. Seale has carved Drawing and Music, as lively a pair of girlies as could be imagined being turned away by the porter for not being properly dressed for a Victorian educational institution. Drawing is doing a quick sketch of the bust of a bearded Greek philosopher. Music is blowing a strange flute thing, with a harp ready at her feet for the next item on the programme.
To the right is History, represented by girl scribes from ancient and modern times.
Ancient girl is carving some sort of lettering on a monument. What language is it? The letters look vaguely like cuneiform, but that may just be my ignorance. The girl's costume doesn't help identify what civilisation she comes from (there is not much of it) and her hairstyle is generic 'exotic ancient civilizations style', as worn by Elizabeth Taylor in so many movies.
Modern history is represented by a properly dressed female angel, with wings, writing on a scroll. The lamp of Holy Scripture provides illumination.
Looking back through the kaleidoscope of the 1960s, can we see the origin of many hangups and traumas here?

Former City of London School for Boys, Victoria Embankment EC4

Between the statues of giants of poetry, drama and science, the arches of the City of London School were filled with allegorical figures by G. W. Seale, a member of the Seale dynasty of architectural sculptors that included Gilbert Seale who carved the merfolk in Kingsway.
The figures represent the areas of knowledge that the unfortunate boys were expected to study, and their positions form an interesting commentary on the prestige the various subjects enjoyed in Victorian education.
In the prime position, at the centre over the main entrance, are Classics and Poetry. Classics wears a crown and holds a laurel wreath in her hand, presumably ready to bestow on the boy who got the Classics Prize on speech day. Her right hand rests on volumes of Virgil, Ovid and Homer.
Poetry sits beneath a tree and holds a shepherdess's staff, to indicate her pastoral inclinations. In her lap is the gaping mask of tragedy.
On either side are the arts and history.
But relegated to the outside arches are the subjects that would actually have been most use to the students in the rapidly changing technological world of the 1880s, mathematics and science. It took more than a century for the pecking order to change in British education.
I will post pictures of these in the next few days.

Former City of London School for Boys, Victoria Embankment EC4

J Daymond & Sons contributed a tremendous number and variety of sculptures and carvings to many prominent Victorian buildings, but little seems to be known about them. Even the incredibly well-informed Bob Speel calls the firm 'obscure'.
All I can find out about them is that in 1902 they had a workshop in Vauxhall Bridge Road and a showroom in Victoria Street. They may have come from Bovey Tracey in Devon which was home to a large clan of Daymonds who were stone masons.
Perhaps that is the clue to their obscurity - they were craftsmen rather than artists. Their work is excellent but completely predictable, as if architects would visit their showroom and order sculpture out of the catalogue, like Argos.












The Daymonds' mag. op. was a set of statues of English worthies on the main facade of the City of London School for Boys, built in 1880 by Davis & Emmanuel, for whom they did a lot of work.
The figures are of Bacon, Shakspeare (sic), Milton and Newton (and another of Sir Thomas More round the side). They are lively and poised, each holding a book except for Newton who is holding a telescope. Surely it is the wrong type - a Newtonian telescope is a short fat reflecting telescope with the eyepiece coming out of the side, whereas the one shown looks more like a standard 19th century marine pattern.
The representative sculptures under the arches are by G. W. Seale, of which more anon.