Gurkha Memorial, London



The Memorial to the Brigade of Gurkhas on Horse Guards Avenue, Whitehall, London, was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on 3 December 1997. This was the first memorial to Gurkha soldiers in the United Kingdom, and was occasioned by transfer of their headquarters and training centre from Hong Kong to London in 1997. The sculptor was Philip Jackson, working from a statue of 1924 by Richard Reginald Goulden in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the plinth was designed by Cecil Denny Highton.

Two casts of Goulden's sculpture had previously been erected in locations in Nepal as World War I memorials to the Gurkhas, the first at Kunraghat in 1928 and the second at Birpur in 1930. The memorial in London is more than one and a half times the size of this model, so Jackson worked the figure up in his own style and from a living model, Captain Khemkumar Limbu. One of several inscriptions on the plinth is a quotation from Sir Ralph Lilley Turner, a former officer in the 3rd Gurkha Rifles.

Inscriptions
1st King George V's Own Gurkha Riflles

(The Malaun Regiment)

2nd King Edward VII's Own Gurkha Rifles

(The Sirmoor Rifles)

3rd Queen Alexandra's Own Gurkha Rifles

4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles

5th Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force)

6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles

7th Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles

8th Gurkha Rifles 9th Gurkha Rifles

10th Princess Mary's Own Gurkha Rifles

11th Gurkha Rifles

The Royal Gurkha Rifles

The Queen's Gurkha Engineers

Queen's Gurkha Signals

Gurkha Military Police

The Queen's Own Gurkha Transport Regiment

Other units in which Gurkha soldiers served after 1815

and also the units of the Royal Nepalese Army

which, as Britain's allies, took part in the Indian Mutiny

and the First and Second World Wars.

India 1816–1826

North East Frontier and Burma 1824–1939

First Sikh War 1845–1846

North West Frontier 1852–1947

Indian Mutiny 1857–1859

Bhutan 1864–1866

Malaya 1875–1876

Second Afghan War 1878–1880

Sikkim 1888

China 1900

Tibet 1904

Third Afghan War 1919

Kurdustan 1919

Iraq 1919–1920

North West Persia 1920

Malabar 1921–1922

Palestine 1945–1946

Java and Sumatra 1945–1946

Indo-China 1945–1946

Malaya 1948–1960

Brunei 1962

Borneo 1963–1966

Malay Peninsula 1964–1965

Falkland Islands 1982

The Gulf 1990–1991

Bosnia 1996

FIRST WORLD WAR

1914–1918

France and Belgium

Gallipoli

Egypt and Palestine

Mesopotamia

SECOND WORLD WAR

1939–1945

North Africa

Italy

Greece

Persia, Iraq and Syria

Malaya and Singapore

Burma