News / Edward Colston
‘I helped drag Colston’s statue into the water’
“I just felt compelled to make sure it was disposed of. I didn’t believe that it should be saved.”
Al Doggart is remembering the time one year ago when he arrived on the centre from Castle Park just minutes after the Colston statue had been toppled from its plinth.
“I elbowed my way onto it, put my hands on it, started pushing it,” Al told Bristol24/7.
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“Very quickly I realised that it wasn’t working very efficiently, the moving of it. Without the base and the weight of the base, the head was actually the heavy part and it was clunking around like a clock hand.
“It got to the point where it was stop-start. We had to adjust the direction of it and keep doing it. It was just awkward.”
Al, who works in the building trade, said that his “natural foreman instincts” then took over.
He saw the rope still tied around the statue’s feet and then used some of that rope to tie around the statue’s neck in order to create a handle to drag it down St Augustine’s Parade towards the docks.
Hear more from Al talking about the part he played in the events of June 7 2020 in the latest episode of Bristol24/7’s Behind the Headlines podcast:
Main photo: Martin Booth
Read more: BBC Two documentary ‘Statue Wars’ follows Marvin Rees after Colston toppling
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