Margaret Winser (1868–1944)

Sculptor, medallist and teacher, born in Rolvenden, near Tenterden, Kent, on 29 March 1868. She was a student at the Dover School of Art from c.1890, earning her living until early 1896 as an assistant teacher at the school. While still at Dover she produced illustrations for her eldest sister, Lilian Winser’s book, Lays and Legends of the Weald of Kent (published 1897). In September 1898 she was awarded a National Scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. In 1904, the Royal Mint staged a competition for students of the RCA modelling school to design the reverse of the Naval Good Shooting Medal; Winser’s design was selected and is still in use today for the King’s Medal for Champion Shots of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. In the same year, Winser, by now living in Parson’s Green, London, contributed the first of her works to the annual Royal Academy exhibitions. She showed 11 times, a total of 16 works, mostly medals, with four pieces related to memorials, plus three portrait busts, her final exhibit, in 1929, being a half-length bust of Ellen Terry in old age. In c.1909, Winser had moved back to Kent, to Ratsberry, in Tenterden, near Terry’s house, Smallhythe Place, and in 1913 had produced her first portrait of the actress in the form of a plaster medallion. The day following Terry’s death on 21 July 1928, Winser was invited to take a mould of her face from which she produced three death masks, one of which remains at Smallhythe Place, one is at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and one in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Winser’s sole public sculpture is the Hastings and St Leonard’s War Memorial in Alexandra Park, Hastings (unveiled 26 March 1922); she also took part in the open competition for the memorial to the men lost in the 1928 Mary Stanford Lifeboat disaster for Rye, East Sussex, but the commission went to James Wedgwood. She died at Ratsberry on 29 December 1944, aged 76.

Ancestry: 1891 England Census … Kent, Charlton; 1901 England Census … Lancashire, Prestwich; 1911 England Census … London, Fulham; 1921 England Census … Kent, Tenterden; 1939 England and Wales Register … Kent, Tenterden; England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index … 1944, Q4; England and Wales, National Probate Calendar … 1945.

Bibliography: AHR net: Art + Architecture Profiles, via Art UK; L. Forrer (comp.), Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, Vol. VI, London, 1916, pp. 513–14; Dover Express: (i) 31 January 1896, p. [8], (ii) 30 September 1898, p. [5]; Historic England: War Memorial in Alexandra Park (official list entry); Mapping Sculpture; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 62–63; Wikipedia: ‘Margaret Winser’.

Terry Cavanagh, March 2025