A blue plaque, seemingly stolen, is missing from the front of a house on London Road.
This is a first for Cheltenham and is a very rare occurrence indeed.
There was a notorious case in Leeds, in 2022, when a newly erected commemoration of David Oluwale – who died in 1969 after police harassment – disappeared. But I can find no other examples, probably because there is little intrinsic value in a cast aluminium plaque.
The missing plaque was installed in 2010 and commemorates Dr David Lyall, a naval surgeon and botanist who took part in Ross’s Antarctic expedition in 1839 and later botanised widely in the Arctic, New Zealand and North America in association with Sir Joseph Hooker.
His work was honoured in many plant names, and one of the best known, Ranunculus lyalli, is shown on the plaque. The plant was recorded on Mount Cook in New Zealand and is popularly known as the Mount Cook buttercup. It is the largest known Ranunculus species.
