Laurence Bradshaw

During his career, he also painted posters for Transport London, the Spanish International Brigades, the British-Soviet Friendship Society, and the Marx Memorial Library.

• Name — Laurence Bradshaw • Birth Name — Laurence Henderson Bradshaw • Born — 11 March 1899 • Birthplace — Chester, Cheshire, England • Died — 1 April 1978 • Education — Liverpool College of Art • Occupation — Master of the Art Workers' Guild (1958) • Known for — Creating the Tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

Laurence Henderson Bradshaw was born in Chester in 1899. He attended Liverpool College of Art and completed his studies in painting and sculpting in London. He began his artistic career in the 1920s by assisting Welsh artist Frank Brangwyn. Bradshaw quickly became prolific, demonstrating his wide variety of artistic talents. In the 1930s he undertook a number of public works, including sculpting the decorations for Worthing Town Hall (1933–34), and a stone relief depicting a mother and child for Oxford's Radcliffe Maternity ward (1935), which is today located within the Radcliffe Primary Care Building. As his skills and fame increased, he was commissioned to create posters for London Transport from 1935 to 1937 to promote the rural green line bus services. During the Spanish Civil War, Bradshaw produced artworks in support of the anti-fascist forces of the International Brigades. One of these works was a hand-painted banner memorialising two International Brigade volunteers—W. Langman and A. Bird—who had died in Spain, alongside 19 other volunteers with the caption, "Hammersmith Communist Party Sends Greetings to Comrades Fighting in Spain".

Bradshaw's most famous work is his sculpture for the Tomb of Karl Marx, erected in London's Highgate Cemetery. In 1955, Bradshaw won the commission to design the tomb, which was unveiled at a ceremony in 1956. It was attended by the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Harry Pollitt, the socialist singer and black civil rights activist Paul Robeson, the Soviet Union's British ambassador, and the scientist J. D. Bernal who was president of the Marx Memorial Library. • Illustration — Tomb of Karl Marx, by Laurence Bradshaw Bradshaw designed every element of the Tomb of Karl Marx, including the bust, the plinth, and the calligraphy of the texts on the monument, but he did not sign his finished work. He considered that his design must be "...not a monument to a man only but to a great mind and a great philosopher." The tomb was designated a Grade I listed monument in 1974.

During his later career, Bradshaw was elected the Master of the Art Workers' Guild in 1958, and was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Other notable communist figures that Bradshaw sculpted included the African-American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the Trinidadian musician and actor Edric Connor, the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and the British communist leader Harry Pollitt. Bradshaw eventually became the chair of the British Soviet Friendship Society (BSFS) when Andrew Rothstein was the BSFS's president. Bradshaw created numerous artworks and illustrations for the BSFS, including the front cover of their journal in 1970 commemorating Vladimir Lenin. In 1970, Bradshaw created a Lenin sculpture in the main hall of the Marx Memorial Library. This bronze relief was unveiled on 22 April 1970 and was inscribed with the words: "1870–1924. LENIN. In this house, then the British Social Democrat's ‘Twentieth Century Press’, Lenin, leader of the victorious October Revolution, edited Iskra, the first all-Russian socialist newspaper, in 1902–3."