The Paisley War Memorial was commissioned after the First World War in memory of the 1,953 Paisley men who had died in the First World War.
The design was selected following an open competition which attracted 195 entries. A public subscription raised funding of £14,000 to build the memorial. The memorial was unveiled on 27 July 1924, before a crowd of 20,000 people, by Mrs Macnab, a widow who lost three sons in the Great War. Prayers were led by Rev. Dr A M MacLean, of Paisley Abbey, accompanied by the Provost Glover and the former Provost John Robertson who was chairman of the War Memorial Committee.
The bronze sculpture at the top was by Alice Meredith Williams (1877 – 1934) who had entitled it “The Spirit of the Crusaders”. It depicts a medieval knight in armour mounted on a horse, accompanied by four infantry soldiers in First World War battledress. The war memorial structure itself was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer, who had been appointed Principal Architect to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1918. Between 1919 and 1927, he designed over three hundred war memorials in Britain and abroad.
The memorial became a Category B listed building in 1980, and was upgraded to Category A in 1997.
Towards the bottom of the south face of the plinth, the stone bears an inscription which reads:
“TO THE GLORIOUS MEMORY OF THE 1,953 MEN OF PAISLEY WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES ON LAND AND SEA IN THE GREAT WAR”.
After World War II the following was added:
“AND IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THIS BURGH WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WORLD WAR 1939-1945”.
The sculptor Alice Meredith Williams had attended Liverpool School of Architecture and Fine Art and in 1990 she won a travelling scholarship tomove to Paris where she worked and studied for five years, attending the Académie Colarossi and learning from, among others, Jean Antoine Injalbert, René Prinet, and Emmanuel Frémiet. It is said her work received positive criticism by the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It was in Paris in 1902 that she met her future husband, artist Morris Meredith Williams. The pair lived in both Edinburgh and Devon in the years that followed. An interesting photograph shows a model of the Paisley war memorial in the sculptor’s studio. She was also one of the early women members of the Royal Scottish Academy. As well as the sculpture for Paisley War Memorial, Alice Meredith William’s work featured on the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle where she again collaborated with Sir Robert Lorimer.
