A NEW creation by renowned royal sculptor Philip Jackson of a teenage boy leaving school for the last time to fight in World War One has been unveiled to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme.

Brighton College commissioned Jackson, whose London works include the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, the Ghurka Monument on Horseguards Avenue and HM Queen Elizabeth Memorial on the Mall, to commemorate the young men who gave their lives in the Great War - including 147 from the school itself.

Jackson, who is based in West Sussex, was asked to create a piece of work that would be a daily reminder to pupils of the sacrifices made by their predecessors.

He said: “I tried to envisage what it was like to be at school in 1913, with the storm clouds rolling over Europe and the inescapable fact that you were going to have to go into one of the services for this conflict, even if there may initially have been an optimistic view about how long it would take.

“What I’ve done is a mature schoolboy of about seventeen, who is capable of becoming an officer and who will, in eighteen months’ time, be leading men over the top - and who will probably not survive.

"He has the look of someone who has got courage. He is intelligent, thoughtful and has the qualities of leadership which the services would have been looking for and which the College would have taught him to possess.

"And I think he also has something else, which schools in his day would have taught their pupils, which was that if you had a privileged education then you also you had a duty.

Headmaster Richard Cairns said that the statue’s unveiling also marked the end of a year-long history project during which every Year 9 child had researched one of the former Brighton College pupils who had lost their lives fighting. The stories they unearthed will now make up a book, collated by history teacher Max Usher.

Mr Cairns said: “I wanted a sculpture that reminded the pupils of today that those who died in the Great War were boys just like them. Very few were professional soldiers. They simply happened to be born at a time and in a place where they were expected to put their lives on the line for a cause of which they probably had little real understanding.

"That is why the sculpture depicts a sixth form boy on the cusp of adulthood, leaving Brighton College, book under his arm, never to return. An image of Doomed Youth and the impending loss of innocence.”