In 1940, five weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation, the remnant of the Czechoslovak army which had been formed in France arrived in England and was inspected by Winston Churchill, one of its artillerymen, the sculptor Franta Belsky who died on July 5th aged 79, liked to recall. Churchill looked him in the eye for what seemed an age, chin thrust out, hat in hand, leaning on his stick. "You wait," the young sculptor said to himself, "one day I shall model a statue of you, just like this".
The day came in 1968, when he completed his statue of Churchill for Fulton, Missouri, where the statesman had made his "iron curtain" speech in 1946. In 1988 the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, stood near the statue and, commenting that "the sculptor of this statue expressed the spirit of wartime England," announced the end of the cold war.
Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia on April 6th 1921, Franta Belsky was a major force in British sculpture. He sculpted portrait busts of four generations of British royalty, the Queen Mother, her daughter Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Andrew and Prince William. He has five works in London's National Portrait Gallery - and 15 public sculptures located round central London. But his work is not invariably about high-profile personalities or the rich and powerful. His sculpture of a mother carrying her child in the Town Square, Stevenage, is a burst of joyous action. Like the 30ft Shell Fountain on the South Bank, it is listed as a Grade II sculpture to be preserved even if - as in the case of the fountain - the building it was commissioned for is no longer in use.
These pieces and many others, including his Triga (three rearing horses in Knightsbridge), the Totem in the Arndale Centre, Manchester, and a delightful Owl and Pussycat on the wall of an infant school in Baldock, Herts, all demonstrate his conviction that sculpture is not for the elite but for the delight of the general public.
"You have to humanise the environment," he said. "A housing estate does not only need newspaper kiosks and bus-stop shelters but something that gives it spirit."
Franta Belsky spent his boyhood in Prague where, at the age of 16, he won first prize in a student sculpture exhibition. This was replaced by graver concerns when the family sought refuge in England the following year, 1939.
When war broke out, he volunteered for the Czech army. When his unit returned from France to Cholmondeley Park, Cheshire, he carved a memorial stone that marked the Czechoslovak fighting presence on British soil. A mention in despatches, in France in 1944, was linked to his receiving the Czech bravery award for repairing a manual telephone line while under constant fire, "in conjunction with some other unpleasantness that I survived," he would say, refusing to be drawn. "All faded now," he would snap, "I just had incredible luck."
After the war, he returned to Czechoslovakia with his wife, Margaret Constance Owen, whom he had met at the Royal College of Art during an extraordinary two terms he was allowed to spend there as a student between the fall of France and the Normandy invasion. A gifted cartoonist, Margaret died in 1989.
He and Margaret left Czechoslovakia in 1948, when the Russians effectively took over the country, but not before he had created the Paratroop Memorial in Prague (1947) and a medal to mark the achievements of the Czech athlete, Emil Zatopek.
On his return there 42 years later he created the Prague memorial to Czechoslovaks who had served with the Royal Air Force, and a statue of Churchill outside the British Embassy. In 1999 the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, gave Franta Belsky, who holds the rank of colonel (Retired) in the Czech army, the Presidential Medal of Merit.
His studio is at the bottom of the garden of his thatched double cottage in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, where he joyfully cultivated 30 different species of roses. His second wife, the Czech-born sculptor Irena Sedlecka, who survives him, recently completed a portrait bust of him that captures his patrician looks and his strength. They married in 1996.
Franta Belsky: born 1921; died, July 2000