Sculptor born on 26 November 1886 in Chester. In the 1911 census, while still living in his parental home, 24 Watergate Road, Chester, he was described as an art student (presumably studying at Chester School of Art). In 1925 he was elected a member of the Art Workers’ Guild. He contributed to the annual Royal Academy (RA) exhibitions from 1927 to 1957, showing 23 works in all, comprising mainly imaginary subjects and portrait busts. In March 1931 he won the open competition arranged by the Royal Society of British Sculptors (RBS) for the Mary Stanford Lifeboat Memorial, unveiled in the churchyard of the Holy Spirit, Rye, East Sussex, 19 November 1931 (Wedgwood exhibited the memorial’s figure of a lifeboatman at the RA in 1932). In 1943 he won the RBS prize for the best work of sculpture exhibited in London for his two stone groups, Pietà and Adoration (shown at the United Artists’ Exhibition, RA, winter 1942–43). He was elected an Associate of the RBS in 1944 and a Fellow the following year (and was a member of the RBS council, 1946–48). In 1952, he was runner-up in the Royal Geographical Society’s competition for a statue of David Livingstone for their headquarters building at Kensington Gore, London (the commission was won by T.B. Huxley-Jones). In 1953, Wedgwood presented his Adoration (which he had first shown at the RA in 1940), plus three other stone sculptures, Grief, Leda (RA 1944) and Protection (RA 1946), to the Metropolitan Borough of Fulham for erection in the newly laid-out garden in Bishop’s Park, Fulham, to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (Wedgwood had lived locally, at 10 Fulham Park Gardens, since c.1935). His group in Portland stone, Ad Infinitum (RA 1939) is in the collection of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Newport, Wales.
Ancestry: (i) England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index … 1886, Q4; (ii) 1911 England Census, Cheshire, Chester, Chester Castle; (iii) England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index … 1973, Q4; (iv) England and Wales, National Probate Calendar … 1974.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 335; Mapping Sculpture; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, p. 94.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025