ON our visits to Scarborough, my wife and I often have a coffee overlooking the sea on North Bay. The scene can be very dramatic with the waves shattering over the sea wall, but our attention is always diverted to the sculpture of an old man dressed in an overcoat and cloth cap, with a stick in his left hand and his right arm draped over the back of the bench. Thousands of people stop and gaze at it every year, but it is the children who clamber up onto his knee, their joyful faces looking up into his eyes, which make us smile. If ever a work of art was meant to fill onlookers with happiness, it’s this one. But very few people seem to know the more serious meaning behind it.

The sculpture is called Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers and was created in steel by the County Durham artist, Ray Lonsdale. The sculpture is based on a retired Durham miner,Freddie Gilroy, who became friends with the creator.

Freddie, at the age of 24, was one of the first soldiers to relieve Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April, 1945. Here he came face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust. Over 60,000 seriously ill and emaciated prisoners were packed into the camp without food, water and basic sanitation. Many suffered from typhus, dysentery and starvation. Thousands

of bodies lay unburied around the camp and some were thrown into pits. Freddie, and the other liberators, struggled to come to terms with this inhumane act which left a lasting, disturbing impression on him up to his death in 2008.

Ray Lonsdale sees his sculpture as a ‘war memorial’ because “it depicts the lives of all those who suffered during the World Wars.” Many ordinary people were thrown into extraordinary situations which were not of their making.

There is a plaque on the sculpture which reads:

‘They said for King and Country

We should do as we were bid.

They said old soldiers never die

But plenty young men did.’

This work of art took three months to create and was originally displayed in Gateshead before moving temporarily to Scarborough in 2011. A campaign was initiated by a Scarborough resident, Jacki Wilby, to keep the sculpture permanently in the seaside town. Another resident, Maureen Robinson, came forward with a donation of £50,000 to secure its permanency. It is situated on a favourite spot where she and her husband enjoyed looking out to sea, near to the Oasis Café.

Another of Ray Lonsdale’s sculptures, High Tide in Short Wellies, stands on the sea front at Filey, and is a memorial to the local fishing industry. It also owes its public display to the generosity of Mrs Robinson.

So next time you see the little children innocently sitting on the Freddie Gilroy sculpture, and the smiling faces of passers-by along North Bay, remember there is a serious message behind this iconic work of art.