THE STONE BOMB: Introduction

Sylvia Pankhurst wrote, 'There are thousands of memorials in every town and village to the dead but not one as a reminder of the danger of future wars. The purpose of the monument was to create a lasting reproach to those whose morality was untouched, whose consciences were unmoved and whose emotions were unaffected.'

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COUNCILLOR GEORGE MILES

'Sylvia was a smasher, she was. She was a real one-hundred-per-cent woman who knew everything, and knew what she wanted to do – and who could be relied upon.' Interview with the late Cllr George Miles, who was present at the unveiling of the anti-airwarfare monument in 1935
PATRICK WRIGHT

'Benfield had started out as a quarrier and stone-worker at Worth Matravers, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. By the late 1920s, the stone trade was dying, squeezed by the war-sped advance of concrete…' Article about the monument's sculptor, Eric Benfield
SYLVIA AYLING

'This monument remains what W.H. Auden, in his poem "September, 1939", has called one of those "ironic points of light, that flash out, wherever the just exchange their messages"…’ Article by Sylvia Ayling, who has been influential in seeing that Sylvia Pankhurst was appropriately remembered in Woodford