Here’s an ‘imperial statue’ – a little figure I bought at a roadside market in Cape Town a few years ago, carved and painted by an anonymous African, as a representation of his (or her) colonial master. I hope to use it for the cover of my new edition of The Lion’s Share. I don’t want anyone pulling him down.
(The photo was taken by Kevin Greene, who lives just round the corner from me. Let me know if you ever have need of a professional photographer in Hull!)
You would think that, as a historian of the British Empire, I would welcome these ‘history wars’ that have just broken out (again). You know, the ‘statue’ thing: whether or not public images of old imperialists, or men (it’s usually men) with imperialist and racist views, should be torn down as insults to ‘correct’ feeling today, or offensive to men and women of the ‘races’ that were looked down on in the past. It puts my subject – history – back into the spotlight. Surely I should be pleased?
Whether or not all this statue-toppling is justifiable morally and politically must be a matter of personal judgment. My own view has been spelled out on this blog: I’d rather the statues stayed, but with inscriptions testifying to their crimes. This is in order to avoid the sanitized view of British history that would be created if we only had statues of literary figures, humanitarians, slavery abolitionists, nurses and suffragettes in our streets to admire. We have plenty of those in any case; but we also need images of our British baddies, in order to remind us how ‘bad’ we – that is, past Brits, if we are allowed to identify with them – have been. Personally I’m quite happy to see Rhodes go – he happens to be one of my own historical villains – though I would rather have seen him kept on the facade of Oriel College, with a suitable inscription, and perhaps wearing some mark of infamy (a dunce’s cap?). But I’m shedding no tears over him.
I also take the point that the BLM and RMF (‘Rhodes Must Fall’) movements have made people aware of some of these seedier sides of British history, which were generally kept from them in school. I remember at my school being taught about Wilberforce and Britain’s part in the anti-slavery movement, but nothing about her (or her citizens’) part in establishing the slave trade in the first place. It never occurred to me – at the age of 14 or 15 – to question this. To the extent that BLM and RMF have corrected this imbalance, and punctured the more innocent and ‘patriotic’ view of our past, they deserve to be commended; by a radical historian (as I believe myself to be) most of all.
But that’s where my support for these movements peters out. This is for two reasons. The first is that their list of targets seems to be spreading exponentially. A slave trader, OK; and one of the most brutal and active of imperialists, well, perhaps. But Churchill, because of his racist and imperialist views? Yes, he had them, in common with most (not all) of his high social class at that time; but he had others too, far more liberal; and accomplishments that could be said to far outweigh these flaws, and which are the reasons for his commemoration in Parliament Square.
If Churchill ‘falls’ because of his racism, it might be hard to find another British hero, especially from long ago, who doesn’t deserve the same fate. The best example may be Gandhi, whom Churchill despised, but who also has his own statue not far from his; and whose views on black Africans were scarcely more ‘correct’ by modern standards. Scratch the stone or bronze surfaces of any of the other statues scattered around our cities, and we might well find the same. Even our justifiably celebrated suffragettes could be less than supportive when it came to their ‘coloured’ sisters. (See, for example, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11914757/Racism-and-the-suffragettes-the-uncomfortable-truth.html.) Are we to pull down their statues for that?
My second reason for being unhappy as a historian about this particular version of the ‘history wars’ is that it doesn’t really add much to our understanding of the past, which is what a true historical education should aim to do. Generally it over-simplifies it, turns important historical issues and debates into questions of ‘black or white’; without any regard for their complexity, or their contexts. ‘Imperialism’, one of my own special areas, is a prime example. The word is widely used these days as a blanket term of condemnation, on the same level as – or even synonymous with – ‘racist’, or ‘fascist’: words which themselves are often employed indiscriminately; and without any acknowledgement – probably through ignorance – of the many different attitudes and policies the word covered in historical reality, and of the global conditions in which various forms of ‘imperialism’ were pursued.
I’ve already given, in a previous post, an example of one notorious ‘imperialist’ who was motivated by the desire to eradicate Arab slavery in Africa (https://bernardjporter.com/2020/06/12/imperial-statues/). Where do you place him? Another example, on the opposite side of the ledger, was the renowned ‘anti-imperialist’ JA Hobson, whose criticism of the colonialism that was being practised in his time – the turn of the 20thcentury – didn’t prevent his advocating another kind of imperialism, in order to protect free but weak peoples from exploitation by global capitalists. He realised that ‘imperialism’ per se was not the root of the problem. Nor was it, in most cases. This is why I called my book about him Critics of Empire, rather than The Anti-Imperialists, which had been my original choice of title before I too came to this conclusion. ‘Imperialism’ in fact describes a highly complicated and variegated number of phenomena, and the indiscriminate use of the word more often than not obscures the huge differences, moral and political, between its various forms. Perhaps more seriously, it can distract attention from other historical causes of events that lie beneath its surface.
Which is why – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before on this blog – I once suggested at a conference that we ‘imperial’ historians go through a period of, say, five or ten years when we don’t allow ourselves to employ the ‘i’ word (or the ‘e’ or ‘c’ words – no, not that one!) at all; in order to encourage us to try to understand and explain phenomena and events other than under the simple – but often misleading – rubrics of ‘imperial’, ‘empire’ and ‘colonial’.
Pulling down Rhodes’s statue won’t do that. My British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t, might. That is, if anyone were bothering to read it. (In publishing terms I understand it’s a bit of a flop. Which is why I’m shamelessly pushing it here yet again.)
Of course I’m worried about the coronavirus; both personally – with my ‘underlying condition’ it would almost certainly be curtains for me if I caught it – and also because of its far more serious impact on millions less fortunate and privileged than me.
But I’m also worried about the politics that seems to be going on under the cover of the disease; insidiously slipped in, with everyone naturally distracted, no proper means of scrutinising it democratically, with a lame ‘virtual’ House of Commons, most of its decent Conservatives ‘purged’ by Johnson last year; and measures simply announced – or in some cases not announced at all – as faits accomplis. Most of them are designed as sops to the Conservative Party’s Right wing and the rabid Brexiteers in the country. The government’s refusal to consider an extension for trade talks with the EU before we finally cut the painter, in the teeth of current public opinion polls, is an example of this. Without the distraction of the virus, and with a properly functioning democracy, it’s possible that this might not have got through.
The latest example is Johnson’s announcement yesterday of the merging of the Foreign Office and the Overseas Development Department: designed to make the latter a tool of British diplomacy, rather than the foreign Aid agency that Labour intended it to be when it set it up. Soon we’ll be seeing ‘Aid’ diverted into supplying arms to the Ukrainians, rather than clean water to poor Zambians. The Tory Right has always begrudged giving taxpayers’ pennies to lazy natives (or, for that matter, to Britain’s own working classes). Johnson yesterday referred to foreign aid as ‘that great cash machine in the sky’. That mirrors the populist Right’s prejudices precisely.
I suspect the evil hand of Dominic Cummings behind all this. We know that one of his greatest ambitions is to ‘tame’ the civil service, and make it less ‘independent’ and more meekly obedient to the Executive. I can’t imagine the fluffy-headed Boris thinking this wheeze up on his own. Just look at him at Prime Minister’s Questions if you doubt his utter incompetence to function off his own bat. And you’ll see then why he was so desperate in April to rescue Cummings from the fate he so richly deserved, after that law-breaking dash to Durham. He can’t do without him. Cummings is his Thomas Cromwell, his Svengali, his Machiavelli, his Mephistopheles, his Rasputin. He even looks the part.
One of the most difficult things for us on the Left to do over the next few months is to ‘be alert’ (to mimic Boris’s – or Cummings’s? – own slogan) for signs of ‘reforms’ like these emerging out of the fog created by Covid-19. Cummings undoubtedly knows how to exploit any conditions for his own right-wing agenda. A global pandemic is just there to be used.
Britain, being a complex country – and I don’t just mean the English-Scottish-Irish-Welsh-possibly Cornish thing – has many histories. Imperialism is one of them, and the most visible – all the red blotches on those old maps – but is by no means the only or the most important one. Other broad themes will occur to anyone who has studied British history in any depth, many of them arising out of Britain’s radical tradition, from the Peasant’s Revolt (at the latest) to the BLM movement of the present day. That tradition has contributed at least as much to our (British) identity as have the more ‘traditional’ traditions, like the Monarchy, the Navy, the House of Lords, Empire and forelock-tugging, that are usually the ones highlighted by present-day Conservatives, English Nationalists and neo-Fascists; and could be said to be represented by the public statuary that the Right is so keen on ‘protecting’ today.
One strand in that tradition is anti-imperialism. Britain didn’t invent imperialism; but she could be said to have invented anti-imperialism. By that I don’t mean merely opposition to an empire that is afflicting you, but opposition to ‘imperialism’ generally, and on principle. So American opposition to the British Empire at the time of the War of Independence doesn’t count, because most of the American rebels in 1776 weren’t at all adverse to their independent United States doing a bit of imperialising of their own: to the west and south, of course, at the expense of the Native Americans, French and Spanish; to the north, in the war against Canada of 1812; and then all over the place. (See my Empire and Superempire, 2006.) Britain, by contrast, was the country in which a general and genuine anti-imperialist movement was formed, sustained by a general and genuine anti-imperialist ideology. That ideology’s high priest was John Atkinson Hobson, about whom I wrote my first book, Critics of Empire (1968). Since him anti-imperialism has formed a crucial part of the British story, usually on the political Left, but also intruding in crucial ways into British imperial policy, and influencing the End of Empire, when it came. (You’ll have to read my other books to see how.)
Is there a statue to him? I’ve Googled ‘Hobson’ and ‘Statue’ but not found one. Perhaps there ought to be, to leaven the imperial bread. (Is that the right expression? I’m not into baking.) A good place for him would be Derby, where he was born and brought up. Other possible candidates – some of these may well be statued already – I’ve not checked – would be Richard Cobden (there must be one of him in Manchester), ED Morel, Palme Dutt, Emily Hobhouse, Leonard Woolf, and dozens of others; ending up, of course, with Jeremy Corbyn. All these, together with– this is Kajsa’s idea – group statues representing some of Britain’s imperial victims: gangs of black slaves, of course; Indian mutineers shot from guns; Cromwell’s Irish victims; Amritsar massacrees (?); even, perhaps, some Boers. A bit like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. And – I would add – some of the victims of Britain’s brutal factory system in the 19thcentury: ‘wage slaves’, they were called; in order to emphasise that some of us (white British) suffered as well. They could model that one on my granddad.
Facing the kings and generals and slave-traders, and alongside the doctors, footballers, writers, artists and suffragists already memorialised, a city adorned with this mix of stone or copper characters might give a truly accurate and educational impression of our rather messy national history to anyone passing through it. If, that is, they could bother to look up from their mobile phones to notice them. Better, at any rate, than distorting our ‘mixed’ history by pulling down the slavers and imperialists. But you’d still need the baddies – suitably described as such on their plinths – too.
What did I tell you? Out comes Boris, using this ‘statue’ nonsense to entirely avoid the main issue raised by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, and instead to attack what has been the Tories’ favourite target for years, the ‘Loony Left’!
It’s right out of the Trump playbook. Johnson even issues his condemnation in ‘tweets’. Together with his inane boasting about Britain’s being a ‘world leader’ in its response to the coronavirus pandemic (!!), his ban on government ministers appearing on certain MSM TV or radio programmes, like Newsnight, which might be overly critical, his studied refusal to criticise Trump in the House of Commons the other day, his government’s subtle reneging on ‘chlorinated chicken’ and American involvement in our NHS, and of course his persistent lying and avoidance of questions always, it looks as though he’s angling to become a mini but classier Trump himself, and to turn Britain into a de facto colony of the American empire. So are the biters (the British) bit. And 1776 is finally revenged and reversed.
Boris of course was born in New York. Does that have something to do with it? If only we had the same rules as America, it would rule him out as our Prime Minister. (I think. Or would that only apply to our titular Head of State?)
Banning ‘Til Death do Us Part and the ‘Don’t mention the War!’ episode of Fawlty Towers is of course beyond nonsensical. Both of them were satirising xenophobia and racism. The ‘Loony Left’, or whoever is responsible for these acts of pointless censorship – it could just be over-defensive TV executives – should grow up. And acquire a sense of humour. Where would we British be without that?
I can hardly contain my anger at these Leftists – or are they Right-wing agents provocateurs? – who are distracting attention away from the serious issues of the present day by directing their anger against statues of past ‘imperialists’ who are too old and, frankly, too dead, to be of much relevance to these issues. This Facebook entry – from a Left-wing source – puts the case well: https://www.facebook.com/TRTP4/photos/a.1060700227436420/1494853380687767/.
As it happens I know something about ‘imperialists’. Many of them had pretty dodgy views, but conventional for their day, about the ‘races’ of humankind, and also – by the way – about gender. Yes, Baden Powell admired the work the Hitler Youth were doing for young people in Germany, imparting the kind of discipline, patriotism and outdoor exercise his own Scouting movement was offering British youth – though without the ‘race superiority’ ideology that came with it in the German case. The wide attraction of that to other ‘races’ was illustrated when many of them – Indians, for example – took up ‘Scouting’ too; maybe against BP’s instincts at first, but he was soon won over. In fact today Scouting is one of the great ‘international’, and internationalist, movements. I was a Boy Scout for a short time, with the hat, the scarf, the woggle and everything; I left because I didn’t like the Church Parades and marching generally, but I can’t remember anything particularly ‘Fascist’ about it, even in retrospect. And yes, Churchill certainly shared the racial prejudices of his day and class; and insulted Gandhi; and bore some responsibility for the great Bengal Famine of 1943. But he changed his mind on a lot of things. Even bad people are not necessarily bad about everything, and all their lives.
And these men (Drake is another), and most of the other historical figures whose statues are apparently coming under threat today, were memorialised for their other achievements, quite unconnected with racism or even ‘imperialism’. There are a few exceptions. I accept that the slaver Edward Colston was one. The Belgian king Leopold II is another. He was a real monster, responsible for probably the most brutal example of 19th-century colonial exploitation, in the Congo. There’s a movement going on in Belgium just now to bring down all his statues, too. I must say I won’t shed any tears over him. But even in these cases I still think it would be better, as I suggested in my last post, to let them stand (or sit) on their plinths, with suitable non-laudatory inscriptions, in order to remind us of the darker sides of our respective national histories. I’d even be in favour of a statue in Grantham of Margaret Thatcher, for the same reason. (I’d be happy to provide an inscription for her.)
And there aren’t, after all, all that many of these sorts of statue around in Britain – or England, at any rate. This is a point I made in my The Absent-Minded Imperialists: that imperial or military statuary is far less common in public places in England than in many other countries , like France and the USA; which means that people walking around our towns and cities are hardly likely to be swamped by the propaganda of it – or even in most cases to notice it. ‘Imperial’ monuments are hugely outnumbered by representations of doctors, lawyers, reformers, churchmen, politicians, suffragettes and Gandhi. I know; I made a count of the London ones.
Besides, if you want to rid the scene of racists and imperialists, where do you draw the line? I sometimes fear that my beloved Edward Elgar – generally reputed to be an ‘imperialist’: ‘Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set…’ – will be marched to the guillotine next. And – a particular problem here – what about the explorer Henry Stanley, who was just about as ‘imperialist’ as you can get, but one of whose leading motives was to stop the cruel Arab slave trade in central Africa: the one that by and large supplied the Africans to the traders on the west coast who then shipped them over the Atlantic as slaves. (We don’t hear much today about Moslem slavers.) ‘Imperialism’ and ‘racism’ are not necessarily the same thing. Indeed, they can sometimes be direct opposites. (To see how, you’ll need – again – to read my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t.) By saying that, however, I could well be ostracised as an ‘imperial apologist’ myself. Luckily there are no statues of me around.
‘Political correctness gone mad’? Or the work of provocateurs? In either case it’s unlikely to help the cause of ‘Black Lives Matter’. I can already see the gleam in today’s closet racists’ eyes.
As a long-established historian of British imperialism – not ‘Establishment’, I hope, and not an ‘imperial historian’, which could imply that I’m an imperialist– I’ve felt nagged over these last few days with the idea that I ought, out of civic duty, to contribute to the current debate (though it’s not a new one) that has sprung out of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, nurtured by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, and has now spread to embrace the question of whether statues of slave-traders and ‘imperialists’ in our British streets should be torn down.
On that last question I have to say I have strong opinions, which might seem at first sight to put me in the camp of the neo-Fascists who are happy to have these men – so far they’re all men – memorialised.
But my argument is very different from theirs. It’s essentially a historian’s argument. These men and what they stood for, however vile, were important in the history of modern Britain, and so should not be forgotten. Indeed, the more reminders there are in our cities of these dreadful aspects of our past national life, the better. All I would ask is that the plaques and inscriptions which in most cases adorn them be radically and prominently modified to recount their crimes, as well as their acts of ‘generosity’ to their local communities. That would put our true – rather than a sanitised – national history on display.
Otherwise we’re faced with the prospect of walking round cities like Bristol and London warmly cushioned by images of just the ‘goodies’ in our national story (if we can even agree on who those were), and oblivious of the rest. I can see that appealing to Right-wing patriots; who should therefore in logic be the ones in favour of bringing down Colston and Rhodes. But not the rest of us.
There’s one more thing that bugs me, as a historian of Empire, about the current ‘pull the statues down’ movement. That is the way its champions misuse the word ‘imperialism’ as a simple synonym for slavery, racism and oppression, when the phenomenon was in fact far more complicated than that; not necessarily ‘better’ – I’m not concerned with moral judgments here – but worthy of more sophisticated analysis. Some of that would allow the real dynamic of imperialism, its motives and its effects, to be understood in ways that should allow us to understand it better, and to target our criticism – if that’s what we want – more precisely and effectively.
I may devote a future post to this. In the meantime, if you can’t wait, and can afford the £15 that Amazon (those great imperialists!) are asking for it, can I recommend my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (IB Tauris, 2016). It also has a nice picture of me on the fly-leaf.
This has just gone up on the LRB Blog; a joint effort by Kajsa and me. I thought I might as well share it here.
Well, that was a disappointment. For the last couple of weeks, Swedes have been waiting for the results of a new police inquiry into the assassination of Olof Palme in a side street in Stockholm 34 years ago. Even by the standards of political assassinations, Palme’s murder has been more puzzling than most, and more controversial.
The controversy has been fuelled by his outspoken stances on the Vietnam War, South African apartheid and political brutality generally. He was also a democratic socialist, on roughly the same point on the scale as Jeremy Corbyn. This lay at the root of his enormous popularity in Sweden, and of his government’s considerable social achievements, including legislation on abortion rights, workers’ rights, universal daycare and gender equality. It also however provoked extreme hostility towards him in Sweden from the usual right-wing suspects, to add to his international enemies; some of it expressly anti-semitic (he wasn’t Jewish, but some of the haters thought he was). Since the murder, ‘conspiracy theorists’ – using that term in its broadest sense, to describe anyone who believes that forces behind the scenes can affect politics – have had a field day. The results of the new inquiry, released today, should have brought closure.
They won’t have done. The virtual press conference, streamed live on Swedish TV this morning, conceded that the original police investigation had been flawed. (It isn’t the only one.) Of course the police had a difficult time of it; they apparently interviewed 90,000 people, 134 of whom had confessed to the murder. They narrowed these down to a more manageable number of suspects, including a Kurdish exile group, before finally alighting on a petty criminal called Christer Pettersson, mainly on the strength of an identification by Palme’s widow, Lisbet. Pettersson was convicted but later exonerated and released from prison. He died in 2004.
Today’s report replaces him in the frame with a man called Stig Engström, but not conclusively. Engström had been one of the popular suspects all along, known as ‘Skandia Man’ because he worked for Skandia Insurance, just around the corner from the crime scene. He was on the spot at the time, and afterwards clearly enjoyed his celebrity as a ‘witness’, spreading stories about the murder that turned out to be obvious lies. The evidence against him was all circumstantial: his membership of a shooting club, his alleged hatred of Palme. The police tried to connect the murder weapon with him forensically, but couldn’t. The leader of the inquiry said they reckoned they had enough to commit him for trial, but not to prove his guilt. That could only be done in court but, since Engström had committed suicide in 2000, it was no longer an option. So they’ve closed the book on him, and on the whole affair.
The explanation didn’t entirely satisfy the journalists at the press conference; only one of them, however, raised the question of Engström’s possible motive, and possible links with – for example – South African intelligence services or the CIA. If the police did follow these lines of inquiry, they’re not saying where they led. Indeed, the impression given at the press conference was that the new inquiry only went over the old ground. The report itself and its evidence will not be published in full, on grounds of ‘confidentiality’.
Sweden at the time of the murder was not geared up for this kind of thing. It’s a remarkable fact that Palme and Lisbet were out walking on their own, heading home from a public cinema to their small flat, without the sort of protection afforded to political leaders in every other part of the world. It’s different now. That’s a shame.
So, of course, is the loss of a European leader who meant so much for progressive forces worldwide. Why is it so often the goodies who get gunned down? Maybe a deeper inquiry into the context and motivation behind Palme’s death could have suggested an answer to that.
I’m a bit of a fan of ‘alternative’ history. There’s nothing wrong with that. All historians need to speculate about ‘what might have happened if’ history had turned out differently, in order to understand why what actually happened did. For me it started with a novel I read ages ago set in a modern Britain (and world) where the Reformation hadn’t taken place; no, not Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, though that was quite funny – Harold Wilson as a Cardinal, for example – but another, earlier one entirely. It had a steam-driven car on the front cover. (Catholic theology had banned the internal combustion engine.) Can anybody remember? It was more serious than the Amis. More recently I’ve been devouring all those books predicated on the Nazis winning the War – Robert Harris’s Fatherland, for example. And then of course there are similar fables written about an ‘alternative’ USA. I have to say that none of these fictions seems anywhere near as unlikely as what we have in both the UK and the USA just now. I sometimes think that we’re actually living in a speculative novelist’s ‘alternative history’. No-one would have believed in a Trump or a Johnson if a novelist had invented them. Reality should be more normal than this.
I mention it because for years now I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a ‘What If’ novel myself. It wouldn’t be at all serious, and therefore of any use to historians, but I thought it might be fun. It arises out of the research I used to do into the early London Metropolitan Police Special (or political) Branch; and out of one particular police report I discovered in the course of that. It was penned by an officer whose job it was keep a watch on Karl (or Charles) Marx, the famous London resident. The officer reported back that Marx was showing no sign of plotting against anyone or anything, so that he could be safely left alone.
Jolly good. It was reassuring to know that our boys in blue were guarding the interests of Britain so resolutely, so that the late Victorians had nothing to fear. Except that the date didn’t fit. When this report was written, Marx had been dead for three years. Which suggested three possibilities.
The first one was that the Special Branch was a bunch of idiots; which would be entirely consistent with its other activities at this time. (See my The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987.) The second was that they were somewhat over-zealous, and fearful lest Karl might be resurrected, emerge from his grave in Highgate Cemetery, and resume his fearful career as scourge of the capitalist class. I imagined our portly policeman sitting in a deckchair by his grave, a bottle of Alsopp’s pale ale by his side, keeping an eye open for any sign of the topsoil being disturbed from beneath.
Or – thirdly – did the Special Branch know something we don’t? Maybe Marx faked his own death, adopted a clever disguise, and then, sick of all that writing and plotting, lived his final years in pursuit of another career? That’s the scenario on which my ‘alternative history novel’ would be based.
Then, I admit, it gets a bit silly. Here I was influenced by the career of one of Marx’s followers, the socialist Henry Hyndman, who founded the first genuine British ‘Marxist’ party, the Social Democratic Federation, or SDF; but who before that had been – of all things – a county cricketer. (He’s in Wisden: played in the 1860s for Cambridge University and Sussex, right-hand middle-order batsman, highest score 64, average 16.26.) Hyndman was converted to communism by reading Marx; but what if the conversion had also gone the other way? And then I looked at who else was playing county cricket at that time, and especially at their beards; which of course led me on to the most famous late-Victorian cricketer of them all, WG Grace, whose beard was as spectacular as Karl’s was. All Marx had to do was to trim his differently – longer, less at the sides – and it would amply disguise any other differences in their physiognomies. Then – after getting rid of WG’s body, and a bit of coaching from Hyndman – he could concentrate on making centuries for Gloucestershire, while maybe doing just a little dialectical materialism – to keep his hand in – when he wasn’t actually at the crease.
But sadly, it doesn’t work age-wise. Marx was thirty years older than Grace. In 1883, when he would have taken over from the genuine WG, he was 65. Cricketers played for longer then than they do now, but not into their 70s. Which is why I’ve abandoned my ‘alternative history’ project. That’s a shame, as I have the Police and Cricket history at my finger-tips. Perhaps I can find another plot to make use of these skills. WG Grace as Jack the Ripper, perhaps? He was a doctor, after all…
Well, it’s a change from genuine history. Facts can be so boring, Ask any postmodernist.
There’s one powerful argument in favour of the forcible toppling of the 17th century merchant Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol yesterday: which is that he was a vile slave-trader who did not merit being memorialised in this way. I must admit that I personally felt some satisfaction on seeing (on TV) his effigy being tipped into Bristol harbour, whence many of his slave-ships had sailed, literally crammed with Africans for sale in the New World, many of whom died and were unceremoniously dumped in the Atlantic before they got there; to the lasting shame of those responsible at the time, and arguably of their descendants too. (One direct descendant has written on Facebook to say that he was not at all unhappy to see his ancestor treated in this way. Good for him.)
But there are also two equally powerful arguments against. The first is historical. If we remove the visual and public evidence of men like this, we also delete them, and their sins, and the nation’s sins, from history. So people walking around the streets of Bristol (or Oxford, where of course the Rhodes statue outside Oriel College was recently the target of a similar movement to remove it) will no longer be reminded of the dark underside of British history, which must be undesirable. Only memorialising ‘good and great’ people can encourage a rose-tinted and falsely patriotic sense of history, which – as we can see today in the case of Boris Johnson, and all his Brexit nonsense – is illusory and can be highly damaging.
What was wrong about the Colston statue was the inscription on its base, which made no mention of the ‘commodity’ he dealt in as a shipowner, but only of his generosity to the city. Apparently that has been controversial for some time, with efforts being made to change the inscription getting nowhere. But that would have been preferable to moving him out of sight and out of mind. Either that, or stick him in a museum. But publicly memorialising him as a villain would be better.
The second argument against pulling down his statue is the ammunition that gives to the Right. I watched the long Commons debate on the incident this afternoon: one Tory MP after another attacking the ‘mob rule’ of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, with only a few token – and probably insincere – mentions of the racism it was protesting against. The ‘law and order’ Home Secretary, Priti Patel, was obviously relishing it. And so the antics of a few hotheads effectively obscured the more important issue; as they so often do.
Porter’s Pensées 