Buttons the wrong way?
That Fred Dibnah statue gaffe was an ‘in joke’
EAGLE-EYED web viewers thought they had spotted a glaring error on the new Fred Dibnah statue – his buttons are done up on the wrong side.
Fred’s trademark jacket shows the buttons are on the “ladies” side on the left as opposed to the men’s side on the right.
And as the statue is already cast in bronze and due to be unveiled in Bolton town centre on April 29, what would have been Fred’s 70th birthday, it looked as though the appeal committee might have been left embarrassed.
But sculptor Jane Robbins has come clean about the “gaffe”.
She said: “The button thing is a bit of an in’ joke that I thought I’d try to sneak past folk.”
Jane explained that while she was researching for the statue she watched a film clip where Fred was doing the voiceover and he mentioned a statue of a famous man that had been created hundreds of years before.
“Fred said when the sculptor discovered he had put the buttons on the wrong way round, the girl’s way, he had killed himself – which was such an over reaction to a small oversight. It tickled me that Fred found it amazing that someone could get so het up about it. So I thought it would be a sort of nod to the man – a kind of in’ joke for Fred.”
Jane hopes people will see the amusing side of the joke when the statue is revealed to the public.
(Source)
Updates:
The other statue mentioned by the sculptor is that of Robert Peel in Bury. The story about the suicide following discovery of the error is an old urban myth as is the other explanation, that Peel had no thumb on his right hand so had all his waistcoats etc tailored that way so that he could fasten them more easily.