{"id":644403,"date":"2026-06-18T00:41:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T00:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/644403\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T00:41:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T00:41:13","slug":"mischievous-scotland-fans-give-bostons-statues-traffic-cone-hats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/644403\/","title":{"rendered":"Mischievous Scotland fans give Boston&#8217;s statues traffic cone hats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, is famous for defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and later becoming prime minister. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Category-A listed statue of the duke on his favourite horse, Copenhagen, was sculpted by Italian artist Carlo Marochetti and erected in 1844 in Glasgow. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However the tradition of his traffic cone is thought to have started by late night revellers in the 1980s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">For years <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/scotland\/4264683.stm\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">locals battled the council<\/a> over the placement of the cone.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It said the statue had once been minorly damaged and raised concerns around the potential for injury when attempting to place a cone. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The council also reminded locals that the act was &#8220;vandalism&#8221; and police warned of criminal charges.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But the prank continued and any attempts to free the duke of his plastic hat have always been quickly thwarted with the cone replaced within days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, is famous for defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-644403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}