Page 645 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Britten as a Boy statue
Best of Britten: Lowestoft deserves its own statue of the composer

If a campaign led by the broadcaster Zeb Soanes is successful, a statue of the composer

Benjamin Britten will be erected in Lowestoft, the Suffolk coastal town where Britten was born

in 1913. Its sculptor will be Ian Rank-Broadley, whose statue of Princess Diana, unveiled at

Kensington Palace last year, was received with something less than ecstasy. Our own Rachel

Campbell-Johnston declared it “horrible”.

Broadley has chosen to depict Britten as a schoolboy in short trousers, which could be deemed
appropriate for various reasons. Not only did the composer spend his first 14 years in Lowestoft;

in later years he always seemed to be psychologically stuck, like Peter Pan, in boyhood. That

may explain why the adult Britten constantly sought the company of real schoolboys without

apparently having any overtly paedophile inclinations.

Indeed, after Britten died in 1976, a Letts’ Schoolboy Diary was found among his documents.

He had filled the diary with details any 12-year-old boy might have put in: height, weight,

school timetable, sports statistics and so on. There was just one odd thing: the diary was for

1954. Britten was 40 when he bought it.

Despite all this Freudian murk, I hope the statue goes ahead. Working-class Lowestoft, which

includes some of East Anglia’s worst pockets of deprivation, has been virtually excluded from
the Britten heritage industry by posh, smug Aldeburgh, just 25 miles down the coast but a

universe apart. Indeed, in 40 years of going to the Aldeburgh Festival that Britten founded, I can

remember it mounting only one big Britten event in the town where he was born — and that was

a performance of his children’s opera Noye’s Fludde with none other than Zeb Soanes playing

the role of God. Let’s hope that God can pull some divine strings and get Lowestoft a belated
monument to its most famous resident.
New Bletchley gallery is disingenuous

Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where Alan Turing and 9,000 other codebreakers helped

the Allies win the Second World War, has always been a fascinating museum to visit. I have
mixed feelings, however, about its new gallery, called the Intelligence Factory. There are plenty

of snazzy digital screens and interactive maps bringing Bletchley Park’s wartime role to life, but

the gallery also includes various gadgets uncritically extolling the present-day work of GCHQ,

Bletchley Park’s successor. What’s more, it is sponsored (as several other Bletchley Park