1. William Thomas Trethewey was a sculptor and monumental mason from Christchurch, New Zealand.
17 Facts About William Trethewey
1. 2.
William Trethewey's best known work is the Citizens' War Memorial in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, where the city's annual Anzac Day service is held.
3.
William Trethewey attended Christchurch East School and left school at the age of 13.
4.
William Trethewey trained as a wood carver and studied under Frederick Gurnsey at the Canterbury College School of Art.
5.
William Trethewey cited family and study commitments to avoid military service in World War I His daughter Pauline was a model for the figure of Peace in his best known work, the Citizens' War Memorial in Cathedral Square.
6.
William Trethewey submitted the sculpture to the annual Canterbury Society of Arts exhibition in 1919 and the piece aroused great interest.
7.
William Trethewey's first commission was a St Andrew's Cross for Elmwood Normal School in the Christchurch suburb of Merivale.
8.
William Trethewey received only one more commission for a war memorial in those years, from the community in Kaiapoi.
9.
William Trethewey's next commission was a memorial in Waimate for Margaret Cruickshank, the first registered woman doctor in New Zealand; she had died from the 1918 flu pandemic.
10.
William Trethewey worked from photos and sculpted a 3 metres tall statue from a five-ton piece of Carrara marble.
11.
William Trethewey won a competition and was chosen as the sculptor; this was his biggest commission in his career so far.
12.
William Trethewey was a director of The Press from 1903 until his death with one brief interruption.
13.
William Trethewey took the sketch to architect George Hart and from this, they produced the design.
14.
The design was accepted in June 1933, after which William Trethewey refined it before carving the figures in clay, boxing them up, and forwarding them for casting to Arthur Bryan Burton's Thames Ditton Foundry in Surrey.
15.
William Trethewey travelled to London and supervised the casting of the bronze figures.
16.
William Trethewey was commissioned to produce a sculpture of Maui Pomare, a prominent Maori political figure, which was erected in Waitara in 1936.
17.
William Trethewey passed his company on to his children and grandchildren, and these days William Trethewey Artisan Stone is a major supplier of stone kitchen bench tops in the South Island.