Ukraine's Memorial to John Howard

Why is there a sun dial honouring the English prison reformer in Kherson?

After publishing this short piece about a monument honouring an 18th-century French aristocrat in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, a reader alerted me to another surprising Ukrainian memorial. (Thank you, Brad Odsen.) It is in Kherson, which is near Crimea, and therefore a principal target of Russia’s criminal attentions. Let us hope it, like a free Ukraine, survives the war.

The monument bears witness to John Howard (1726 to 1790), the great English social reformer. After being appointed High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, Howard went to see a prison under his remit and was appalled at the dungeon-like conditions. He then spent the rest of his life visiting prisons, in England and across Europe, and advocating reforms. Howard wanted prisons to stop inflicting pointless cruelty on prisoners and become places that strengthen inmates’ physical and mental health and set them on a course for a better life.

Howard was an inexhaustible traveller, and that helps explain the memorial in Kherson. It was there, in 1790, that he contracted typhus visiting a local prison. He died and was buried.

Somewhat awkwardly, for his admirers, Howard was humble to the point of self-effacing. Four years before he died, Howard wrote a letter from Vienna with the following admonition:

I shall ever think it an honor (sic) to have my weak endeavors (sic) approved by so many respectable Persons who devote their time and have so generously subscribed towards a fun for relieving prisons and reforming prisons.

But to the erecting a Monument, permit me, in the most fix and unequivocal manner to declare my repugnancy to such a design and that the execution of it will be a punishment to me, it is therefore, gentlemen, my particular and earnest request that so distinguished a mark of me may forever be laid aside.

As usual with such things, Howard’s modesty was quietly set aside and there are prominent — some quite beautiful — memorials to him in England.

But the Kherson memorial is a special case. As he laying dying, Howard asked to be buried in the countryside. According to a letter written years later by the Governor General of southern Russia, he also asked that “no monument be placed over his grave unless it were a sun dial.” The Governor General fudged a little and decided to build a memorial within the walls of the fortress of Kherson near a church where there were already several memorials to prominent persons. But it would feature a sun dial.

Hence the sun dial in the photo above.

This lovely essay contains more photos, plus a few more photos and references to other remarkable Ukrainian memorials.

I have a small personal connection to all this. On the wall next to my desk is a plaque given to me by the John Howard Society of Canada for some articles I wrote years ago. It features a glowering profile of the great reformer.

So every day, as I work, John Howard watches, keeping me on a path of industry and moral improvement.