Statues

Recently, I had the odd experience of having one of my Facebook posts go slightly viral. Instead of getting 80 views and one pity share from my sister, it got 200+ shares and is currently on 25000 views. Perhaps this is not so surprising when the content is taken into account. I wrote about the Clarkson Memorial in Wisbech, a statue commemorating Thomas Clarkson’s work in abolishing slavery in the late 18th/early 19th century. Clarkson is perhaps Wisbech’s most worthy son, and the context of that post – immediately after the Colston statue was thrown into the river – clearly struck a chord.

But the Colston monument being consigned to the sea has been interesting from a historian’s point of view, as well as from a Black Lives Matter point of view. Before we go on, I want you to be in no doubt about my opinion: I absolutely support hurling it to the depths. I think recovering it to be preserved, to tell the story of this movement, on this particular day in Bristol, is an excellent idea.

An opinion I have come across many times, from the upper reaches of government down to random tweets, is that removing Colston’s statue was wrong, and is rewriting history, destroying an educational opportunity.

What is a statue? It’s art. It’s not history. A statue can tell a story, or act as a biography. A statue can mark a boundary, or represent a nation. Statues can be a marker of an event, or a gift. It can be a deity. Statues can be bought. Sometimes, they can be a mystery. But a statue in itself is not history.

When it comes to people, statues are propaganda of the highest form. A statue does not randomly manifest. Decisions are made over who warrants a statue, who pays for the statue, and where the statue is placed. Decisions are made about what signage goes on the statue. Somebody decides what story this statue is going to tell.

To revisit Edward Colston, as I fear we must, he was born in 1636 and died in 1721. He was a slaver. He made an inordinate amount of money selling and buying slaves, and reinvested some of that money into the infrastructure of Bristol. When he died, slavery was entirely legal throughout the British Empire. In 1895, 170 years after his death, and sixty-two years after the abolition of slavery, a statue was erected to his memory.

Why then? Why not immediately after his death? Why did it take almost two centuries for Colston to warrant his image in bronze on the harbour wall? The statue was paid for mostly by one man, James Arrowsmith, who couldn’t even muster a thousand pounds in public subscription to put it up. One might say that if you cannot get people to pay for a statue, perhaps they do not want it. But the common folk are rarely consulted when it comes to the erection of statues.

So, is removing his statue rewriting history? Or even (and what a dreadful term this is in the context) whitewashing history? No. Erecting Colston’s statue in the first place was an act of whitewashing. Colston did not live in an era where slavery was absolutely fine: the Bible has a whole book about the damage of slavery (Exodus, you heathens) and it had been illegal in English law since 1102*. Colston’s philanthropy stemmed from his guilty conscience, according to some. And when his statue was erected, the black lives he ended for his own purse were gently erased from his biography. Almost the definition of whitewashing history.

History is rewritten daily. It’s the job of historians to sort through the Chinese whispers, surmise and barefaced lies of the past and try and find some truth. But a good historian knows there is no absolute truth. Historiography, the study of the development of a historical story, is a whole discipline by itself. To give an extremely obvious example, if the Nazis had won World War Two, we would know precious little about concentration camps. What is considered historically important changes from generation to generation, and how the past is depicted changes too. Our historic failures are framed as successes (see: Dunkirk evacuation), and our historic shame is covered up (see: entire British colonial history). History is mutable.

I think that’s a really hard concept to grasp. We are taught history in school as a procession of dates and glorious successes, starting in 1066 (somehow a success despite England losing), skipping over most of the medieval period to learn about Henry VIII’s sex life, and then some wars. I was taught the slave trade at school, but only as something nebulously linked to Britain, and very little about the practical horror of it. Maybe they just didn’t want to traumatise the kids, but in the same year, we learned about the Mai Lai Massacre.

The way British history is taught in schools is a choice that somebody makes. The curriculum is decided by a board. It does not self-generate.

Statues teach nothing. Over two hundred people have shared my post about Thomas Clarkson, many of them in Wisbech, with the same gist of message. “I didn’t know about this.” The Clarkson Memorial is a meeting place in Wisbech, you can’t miss it when you’re driving through town. People do not look to statues for education.

Destroying Colston’s statue did not rewrite history: Colston has been a figure of historical debate for at least one hundred years. Destroying Colston’s statue did not whitewash history: it’s erection did that. Destroying Colston’s statue did not destroy an educational opportunity: it created one. How many people have only learned England’s role in the slave trade in the last two weeks?

Destroying Colston’s statue made some people uncomfortable. Destroying Colston’s statue made people a little nervous that history might be more complex than a procession of glorious triumphs. Destroying Colston’s statue was a moment of synchronicity between the injustice of the past and the concerns of the present.

Destroying statues is a symbolic act, but so is erecting them in the first place.

* You could argue that the system of villeinage was akin to slavery, but that’s one for the medievalists.