The Memorial to the Brigade of Gurkhas on Horse Guards Avenue, Whitehall, London, was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on 3 December 1997. This was the first memorial to Gurkha soldiers in the United Kingdom, and was occasioned by transfer of their headquarters and training centre from Hong Kong to London in 1997. The sculptor was Philip Jackson, working from a statue of 1924 by Richard Reginald Goulden in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the plinth was designed by Cecil Denny Highton.
Two casts of Goulden's sculpture had previously been erected in locations in Nepal as World War I memorials to the Gurkhas, the first at Kunraghat in 1928 and the second at Birpur in 1930. The memorial in London is more than one and a half times the size of this model, so Jackson worked the figure up in his own style and from a living model, Captain Khemkumar Limbu. One of several inscriptions on the plinth is a quotation from Sir Ralph Lilley Turner, a former officer in the 3rd Gurkha Rifles.
Inscriptions
1st King George V's Own Gurkha Riflles
(The Malaun Regiment) 2nd King Edward VII's Own Gurkha Rifles (The Sirmoor Rifles) 3rd Queen Alexandra's Own Gurkha Rifles 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force) 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles 7th Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles 8th Gurkha Rifles9th Gurkha Rifles 10th Princess Mary's Own Gurkha Rifles 11th Gurkha Rifles The Royal Gurkha Rifles The Queen's Gurkha Engineers Queen's Gurkha Signals Gurkha Military Police The Queen's Own Gurkha Transport Regiment
Other units in which Gurkha soldiers served after 1815
and also the units of the Royal Nepalese Army
which, as Britain's allies, took part in the Indian Mutiny
and the First and Second World Wars.