Alexandra Gardens Bandstand

The children of The Royal School were interested in both the events of the Falkland Islands conflict and in the native animals of the region. They drew some wonderful images paralleling the skills of the animals with military technology. The animals depicted in the final illustration reflect some of these ideas; the aerial skills of the seagulls, the water skills of the blue whale and the penguins. The Falkland Islands were a busy place during the era of whaling ships, the blue whale appears again in the famous whalebone arch outside Christchurch Cathedral in Stanley. A feature of the 1982 conflict was the sheer distance of the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom and the time it took for the British Military to reach the islands. The United Kingdom is represented as a distant map and the animals wait expectantly. The king penguins are iconic and rather noble, the Sea lion (which appears on earlier versions of the Falkland Islands coat of arms) echoes the use of lions in British heraldic imagery.