An amateur sculptor, author and campaigner against Britain’s pre-war appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini, she was born Hilda Mary MacDowell in Blackburn, Lancashire. In 1906 she married the metallurgist and chemical engineer Richard Seligman (1878–1972) in London; the couple had four sons and one daughter. During the 1930s, the Seligmans entertained the Emperor Haile Selassie (then in exile following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia) at their home, Lincoln House, in Wimbledon, south London, and Hilda carved a stone portrait bust of him which she erected in the grounds of her house. Following the Seligmans’ sale of their house prior to its demolition in 1957, she presented the bust to the then Wimbledon Council who sited it in Wimbledon’s Cannizaro Park. Restored and formally unveiled on 22 October 2005, on 30 June 2020 it was smashed to pieces by a group protesting at the oppression of Ethiopia’s Oromo people. Seligman’s other sculptures include a bronze bust of J.P. Blake, which she showed at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and the Royal Academy in 1943, and a bust of Chandragupta Maurya, which she donated to the Indian Parliament building, New Delhi. Her plaster statuette, Innocence, is in the collection of Kirklees Museums and Galleries, Huddersfield. She also had three of her books published: When Peacocks Called (1940; with an introduction by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore), Skippo of Nonesuch (1943) and Asoka, Emperor of India (1947). During her time travelling with her husband in India, Seligman had become a health campaigner and, in 1945, with donations and royalties from Skippo of Nonesuch, she set up the ‘Skippo Fund’, which paid for several mobile health vans to serve isolated villages in India and Pakistan. Seligman’s papers were presented to the Women’s Library, London School of Economics, in 1999. One of her grandsons, Lincoln Seligman, went on to become a professional sculptor.
Bibliography: BBC News: ‘Haile Selassie: Statue of former Ethiopian leader destroyed in London park’ (2 July 2020); F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xvii, 194–95, 373; London Remembers: ‘Hilda Seligman’; Mapping Sculpture; Wikipedia: ‘Hilda Mary Seligman’; Wimbledon Times: ‘Heritage: The African Emperor who found refuge in Wimbledon’ (29 June 2012); Wimbledon Society Newsletter, September 2020, p. 5: ‘Statue Toppling’ (PDF).
Terry Cavanagh, August 2025
