Muscles almost ripple in the semi-naked brothers on a great Liverpool monument. Now we can reveal their names for a new generation of ogling girls. David Charters reports

SINCE a romantic Italian with the rolling poem of a name, Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buanarroti (Michelangelo to his chums), fashioned the statue of the Old Testament’s David from a huge hunk of marble, women, and some men, have dreamed of the perfect male form – sculpted in Heaven to stimulate the aesthetic juices and stir the passions.

Not those fellows with wobbling beer bellies, who occasionally blink into the daylight in their pyjamas, or absurdly named track-suits, and waddle around the supermarket, pushing wire trolleys – but chaps with bulging thighs, glistening chests and six-pack tummies.

“Cor, grab a slice of that! Eye candy,” chorus the gals, or words to that effect, when they spot them parading on the beach, humping bricks on a building site, or disrobing like silhouettes behind the bedroom curtains.

Each time male ears blush to these bold outpourings, we look around to inspect the object of their unbridled admiration. Sadly, however, we have to admit that such chaps are as rare as cellulite on a temperamental fashion model’s photographs.

But a long time ago, before the airbrushing of pimples and blemishes from pictures used in multi-million pound advertising deals, we had brothers in Liverpool who were regarded as ideal specimens of the body beautiful – the Full Monty with a bit (or a bot) more class and a great deal more grace.

And yet many busy Liverpool women will have walked near them every day without even raising their eyes for a swift dimple-check or a wolf-whistle.

We are talking here of the Hallwood brothers, whose descendants claim that they were the models used in the statues featured on the Commerce section to the south-west of the Queen Victoria Monument, on the city’s Derby Square.

The central figure is a bearded man wearing a hat and great coat, seated on a bale. In his right hand, he holds papers and a book. His other hand holds the stern of a model steamship. But the bow is held by a bare-chested figure with labourer’s boots and trousers. He is sitting on the ground to the left of the bearded man. Another labourer leans over the first, so that he may look at the ship, an arm resting on his companion’s shoulders. He has a heavy sack on his back.