Sculptor and medallist, born on 11 November 1871 at Cheam, Surrey, the eldest of four children of Charles H. Binney, a merchant born in St John’s, Newfoundland. The family moved to Ilford in Essex and in the 1891 census Binney is recorded as an art student. In 1893 he showed for the first time at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions and in January 1894 entered the Royal Academy Schools where he was awarded a first prize silver medal for a model of a statue or group; he left the schools in March 1895. On 28 May 1898, now living and working in St John’s Wood, London, he married Agnes Hume, but the union was short-lived, for on 24 July of the following year Agnes filed for divorce. He remarried at an unknown date but by 1911 was not only a widower but a boarder in someone else’s house. The little evidence we have of Binney’s active years as a sculptor suggest early promise unfulfilled. Between 1893 and 1907 he showed only sporadically, contributing to the Walker Art Gallery Autumn Exhibition once (in 1896), the Leeds City Art Gallery Spring Exhibition three times (1897, 1901 and 1907), the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society once (1899), the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists once (1904) and the Manchester Art Gallery Autumn Exhibition once (1906); he submitted eight pieces to the Royal Academy between 1893 and 1906 and then nothing until 1920 and his final appearance in 1921. Given that this final exhibit was a model for one of his few commissions, a figure entitled Rest, the bronze cast of which had been erected in the courtyard of a group of almshouses at Reydon in Suffolk in 1914, his intention may have been valedictory. His retirement from sculpting as a profession is also suggested by the termination of his membership of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1920 (he had been elected a member in 1905). By 1921 he was in his third marriage and although in the census for that year he still described himself as an ‘artist (sculptor)’, in the 1939 England and Wales Register his occupation is given as ‘poultry farmer’. He died on 12 October 1951, survived by his third wife, Ida.
The two commissions for which Binney is remembered both came from the architectural practice of Runtz and Ford. The first was for the Gaiety Theatre and Restaurant in the Aldwych, London (1902–03), which Runtz and Ford designed in collaboration with Norman Shaw. Though the theatre (on the Aldwych-Strand corner) was demolished in 1957, the restaurant, which stood behind it, with elevations overlooking the Aldwych and the Strand, was retained and is now Marconi House. For the theatre, Binney produced sculptures of Music and Dancing for the proscenium arch and a gilded teak figure of The Spirit of Gaiety for the dome. While the former are lost, the latter is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. For the uppermost storey of the restaurant he carved a figural frieze, populated by Frampton-esque women in medieval dress representing, inter alia, Tragedy and Comedy, War and Peace, and various Shakespearian heroines. Binney’s second commission from Runtz and Ford was for the Norwich Union building in Piccadilly (1906–08), the main sculptural decoration being a colossal bronze group of Justice, standing, holding aloft scales and sword, flanked by seated figures of a young woman cradling ears of wheat on her arm and a young man looking intently into the distance.
Ancestry website: (i) England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1871. Q4; (ii) 1881 England Census. Essex. Barking. Ilford. District 7; (iii) 1891 England Census. 8 Buxted Lodge, The Forest, Leyton; (iv) London, England, Marriages and Banns, 1754–1921 … 28 May 1898; (v) England and Wales, Civil Divorce Records … 1899; (vi) 1901 England Census. London. St Marylebone. St John. District 14; (vii) 1911 England Census. St Marylebone. St John. 06; (viii) 1921 England Census. London. Hampstead; (ix) 1939 England and Wales Register. Kent. East Ashford; (x) England and Wales. National Probate Calendar … 1952.
Bibliography: AHR net, via Art UK: Artists: Hibbert Charles Binney; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 60, 241–42; Mapping Sculpture; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘Hibbert Charles Binney’.
Terry Cavanagh, April 2025