Carl Bernard Bartels

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Carl Bernard Bartels (1866-1955), sculptor.

Bartels, a wood carver from Stuttgart, Germany, moved to Britain after visiting the country during his honeymoon in 1887.

In the early years of the twentieth century, while living and working in Harringay, London, Bartels entered and won a competition to design the Liver birds which stand on the top of Walter Aubrey Thomas’s Royal Liver Building on the Pier Head in central Liverpool.

During the First World War, Bartels was imprisoned in an internment camp on the Isle of Man before being forcibly repatriated to Germany, leaving behind his wife in England.

Bartels returned to the United Kingdom and lived and worked there until his death in 1955, producing carvings for Durham Cathedral, various stately homes and even making artificial limbs during the Second World War.