Compo statue to go ahead

Nov 20 2003 By Hazel Ettienne, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A TRIBUTE statue to actor Bill Owen is to go ahead - despite pleas from his widow for the money to be given to a Holme Valley charity.

Campaigners hope work will start early next year on a bronze sculpture of the character Compo from the BBC TV comedy Last of the Summer Wine, for which he is best known.

But his widow, Kathie, expressed "profound dismay" about the plans in a letter.

She says the £30,000- plus life-size statue "evokes the kind of grotesque Disneyland effigy, more at home in Florida that the Holme Valley".

She says using the money raised was utterly at odds with what her husband would have wanted.

And she says the money should be given to local charities, rather than an effigy of the whimsical character he played.

The Bill Owen Memorial Trust plans to put the statue in King's Head Gardens on Huddersfield Road, Holmfirth.

Bill's son Tom, by his first wife, who joined the series in 1999, officially launched the fund.

At the time he said his father would have been over the moon to know what was happening.

Bill died in 1999 at the age of 85, having played Compo for 26 years.

Andrew Bray, a trustee of the Bill Owen Memorial Trust, said it knew of Mrs Owen's feelings.

But he added that the trust did not want to get involved in long-standing family disputes.

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