Tag Archives: slavery

Why no statue ? (1)

There has been enormous controversy of late about the fact that a good many of our old statues were erected to honour people whose lives contain some rather unpleasant details, hiding away and hopefully forgotten, or even not noticed in all the glory and the wonderfulness.

Arguably, this phenomenon may have had  its origins in England years and years ago with the controversy about Jimmy Savile, that favourite son of the BBC and of their audiences. Wikipedia says…..

“He raised an estimated £40 million for charities and, during his lifetime, was widely praised for his personal qualities and as a fund-raiser.”

But he had a very large and dirty secret…….

“After his death, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, leading the police to conclude that Savile had been a predatory sex offender—possibly one of Britain’s most prolific. There had been allegations during his lifetime, but they were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved.”

Here’s Savile with Cardinal O’Brien, a man who, according to the Guardian newspaper at least, had “admitted in general terms to sexual conduct that had “fallen beneath the standards expected of me”.”:

So what was done?

“Within a month of the child abuse scandal emerging, many places and organisations named after or connected to Savile were renamed or had his name removed. A memorial plaque on the wall of Savile’s former home in Scarborough was removed in early October 2012 after it was defaced with graffiti. A wooden statue of Savile at Scotstoun Leisure Centre in Glasgow was also removed around the same time. Signs on a footpath in Scarborough named “Savile’s View” were removed. Savile’s Hall, the conference centre at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, was renamed “New Dock Hall.”

You can read about the two sides of this very strange and sad man here.

Here’s Savile’s Hall in Leeds. I took this picture years ago while we waited for the coach to come and pick us up. I must confess, I was attracted by young Marilyn. I’m sorry about the blurry focus but my hand was shaking:

People guilty of child abuse are a relatively easy target to identify. So are those with a background in slavery. Having “slavery” appear on your CV is not good.

And both slavery and child abuse are, of course, huge “no-no”s if you want a statue of yourself to be erected somewhere after your death.

A large number of Kings and Queens of England have been enthusiastic buyers and sellers of slaves. I have written two blog posts about this subject. Here’s a link to one, and here’s a link to the other.

The guilty parties included:

Queen Elizabeth the First, the family of King Charles II, King Charles II, King James II, Queen Anne, King George I. King George II, King George III, King George IV and King William IV.

It wasn’t just our beloved Royal Family though. It was ten of the first twelve Presidents of the United States. (Well done, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams.) The guilty parties were George Washington (317 slaves), Thomas Jefferson (600+), James Madison (100+), James Monroe (75), Andrew Jackson (200), Martin van Buren (1), William Henry Harrison (11), John Tyler (70), James Polk, (25) and Zachary Taylor (less than 150).

Zachary Taylor was the last president-in-office to own slaves and Ulysses S. Grant was the last president to have ever owned a slave. This picture shows a president and his slaves at cotton picking time, but the internet seems a little confused about which one:

What superb irony that Thomas Jefferson won the slave owning contest with a minimum of 600 slaves.

He was the man who wrote if not the most beautiful sentence in the English language, then certainly the most important:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

In my scheme of things the people above may well lose their statues. That’s a lot of statues to take down. Slavery was not illegal in those days, but the 25-or-so people listed above would all have said they were Christians and putting it bluntly,

Jesus Christ did not keep slaves.

Just look at the expressions on these faces. Even the dogs are sad.

One major point to be made before we finish is that the descendants of slaves, in a great many countries of the world, do not want continually to be reminded of how their ancestors were mistreated in one of the great crimes of human history but instead they want to look forward to a better life. And I would be OK with that too.

What I think is that it would be a good idea to have the controversial statues put in a museum with explanations about why these previously valued men and women have been removed from public gaze. People would then have the choice of looking at them, or not.

 

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Filed under Africa, Criminology, Film & TV, History, Politics

“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas…”

This tale comes from a source which I have used quite frequently in the past, namely “The Date Book of Remarkable Memorable Events Connected With Nottingham and Its Neighbourhood”.

Imagine. It is December 12th 1786. Less than a fortnight to the Big Day. What will Santa bring you? Better make sure that Santa can get down those Georgian chimneys without a problem:

December 12th. “A remarkable escape from death at the premises of Mr Wilson, bookseller, of South-parade, Nottingham. Mr Stretton, a builder, accidentally met a Mr Ward of Eastwood, and stood on the pavement in front of the shop, conversing with him about Christmas.”

You can go nowadays and stand where exactly these two gentlemen stood, nearly 250 years ago. I have painted an enormous orange arrow on the pavement:

And I also found a photograph of the houses concerned. This was taken in 1874 and although the ground floors are very different today, the upper floors of some of the buildings are still quite similar:

In 2017, it is not just the ground floors which are different. The people are as well. Nowadays, all the people try to dress as much like each other as possible. A 21st century guerrilla army:

But what about Mr Stretton and Mr Ward the builder? Well, they were talking about what Santa was going to bring them, and Mr Ward was just saying that he had been repairing loads of chimneys in this area because all the little kids were worrying about Santa’s arrival, when suddenly…..

“…a violent gust of wind overthrew a stack of chimneys, which in their descent brought down with them a large proportion of the roof and a quantity of the brickwork of the front wall.”

It was a little bit like this…

But a lot more like this…

It was no laughing matter, because…

“Neither of the gentleman had warnings sufficient to run out of danger. An apparently solid mass fell upon the back and head of Mr Stretton, but chiefly upon his shoulders, beating him to the ground, and cutting the back of his coat into shreds . He endeavoured two or three times to get up, but the bricks continually falling upon him, prevented him.”

I think we’ve all seen Laurel and Hardy, or Tom and Jerry, in that situation, as the last two or three bricks of many fall individually and hit them one after another on the head. But it was no laughing matter at all…

“Mr Ward also received serious injuries. The two men were taken away in sedan chairs, and both of them eventually recovered, although not without great difficulty.”

So it all turned out well in the end. Cue a famous Shakespeare play.

Sedan chairs must have been magic. Ideal places for meeting your lover, at least, if you can persuade the servants to go and have a cup of coffee for half an hour. And take that magpie with you…

And here’s the ideal sedan chair for a collapsing chimney situation. That roof looks very well made, very robust. And those top hats would be brilliant. Just like the special zones that crumple up when modern cars crash into each other.

Mind you, I think if they were my servants, I might buy them a pair of shoes each for Christmas. Unless, of course, I could think of a really life changing present to give them.

 

 

 

 

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Filed under History, Nottingham

What do you do with your freed slaves? (4)

Sooooo.

Not only have you managed to compose the sentence:

All men are created equal …….endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But you have understood it.

And then you have decided to act upon it. Unless you do this, there’s very little point in expressing these fine sentiments anyway:

slaves

But in practical terms, just what do you do with all these people who are, at a stroke, suddenly given their liberty ? The only figure I have been able to find on the Internet comes from the History Channel, who say that there were four million or more slaves suddenly granted their freedom. And the USA wasn’t the only country to have this problem to deal with.

Tsarist Russia called them “serfs” but they were to all intents and purposes no better off than the slaves in America. In this photograph, lucky Russian women are doing the work of an English horse, pulling a coal barge up a river, probably the Volga:

serfs

The serfs were all freed in 1861 but were then discouraged from moving away from their owner’s  estates. Indeed, they had to stay and work for the landlord in the normal way for two years.

The land, too, was divided up. The nobility were allocated almost all the meadows and the forests. The state paid all their debts.

The poor old serfs, though, they had to pay over the odds for the land they were allocated. On average, it was 34% extra. In the north, it was 90% over the odds and it was 20% more in some of the so-called black earth regions in present day Ukraine and southern Russia.  In what is now Poland, the Tsar wanted to harm the Polish landowning classes, so the peasants paid nothing extra for their land.
None of this worked, of course. The poor old serf farmed his land but saddled with huge debts, he couldn’t make ends meet. He only received 50% of his total income from his own usually tiny farm. The rest he got by continuing to slave away on his landlord’s farm. As a result of this stupid, short sighted iniquity, many of the serfs moved to the cities to work in the factories there. And that process did end in tears:

Lenin-Hooray

In England, slaves were kept but really only as domestic servants. It was too cold to grow cotton. Within the British Empire, though, slaves were used in very, very large numbers to cut sugar cane in the West Indies:

west injdies plantation

Britain, of course, was a country owned and run by the extremely rich, for their own benefit, and in a way which would ensure that they remained extremely rich. Many of them were large scale slave owners. How could they possibly be made to free their slaves and impoverish themselves?

hogarth1

In the next article, all will be revealed.

 

 

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What do you do with your freed slaves? (3)

I suppose that the major problem with abolishing slavery is knowing what exactly to do with this newly created army of probably uneducated people, who may well be quite ill fitted to deal with an independent life. Jefferson, the man who coined the expression “all men are created equal” seems to have supported a gradual process, with slaves being first educated and then freed as they reached adulthood:

Thomas_Jefferson_Regular_Issue_1968-1c

Apparently he later realised that this would created an inadequate return on the slave owner’s investment, if that’s the word, and altered the age of freedom to 45. After that, they would be taken back to Africa:

Repatriationxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Overall though, mainly for various personal reasons, Jefferson did not have a lot to say about slavery.
He did recognise one dilemna though.

The difficulties of freeing the slaves and the difficulties of not freeing the slaves:

“There is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from (slavery).
We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other”

Jefferson was not the only one to have worries about “safely letting go” the country’s slaves.. In 1806, the Virginia General Assembly grew so concerned about the number of free black people living in the state that they changed the law to make freeing slaves more difficult.  From 1790-1810 the population of black people there had risen from virtually nothing to more than seven percent. In Delaware, they too were worried about freeing their slaves. By 1810, 75% of the state’s slaves had been given their liberty.

Many of these politicians were equally worried about the influence Haiti might have on the thinking of black people in the USA. Around this time, of course, Haiti was a revolutionary state on an island in the Caribbean to the south of the USA. A little like a black Cuba rather than a red one:

revolution in haiti

And presumably, the Americans did not want similar scenes of bloody revolution in their own southern states:

haiti

In 1801 President Jefferson was delighted to see the French intention to take back the island and thereby stop it becoming a base which might foment black revolution in the United States. He loaned the French $300,000 “for the relief of whites on the island.”

The southern slave owners in the US, of course, were just as scared of similar rebellions in their own states as President Jefferson. He said of this dilemma:

“If something is not done and soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

But, in practical terms, what could be done?  Another article to follow in the near future.

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