Domino effect gathers pace as statues fall
The drive to rename and topple British landmarks connected to slavery has gathered momentum as councils and universities pledged to act.
A public square in Plymouth named after Sir John Hawkins, a cousin of Sir Francis Drake and considered the first English slave trader, will be renamed. Tudor Evans, Labour leader of the city council, said that Plymouth needed to acknowledge ‘‘some aspects of its past’’ after more than 15,000 signed petitions.
All 130 Labour councils will review statues linked to colonialism after the toppling in Bristol of a statue to Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader.
Nadhim Zahawi, a business and industry minister who moved to Britain with his Kurdish parents aged nine, said there should be no statues of slave traders but added: ‘‘I wouldn’t break the law to take statues down; it should be done through our democratic process. If the majority of people decide that we want the statues down, then they should be taken down.’’
In Shrewsbury the Tory leader of the council said it was considering moving to a museum its statue of Robert Clive, known as Clive of India, who played a lead role in colonising much of the Indian subcontinent.
The council is duty bound to consider the move after a petition reached 1000 signatures.
However, counter petitions have been launched against the plan. Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London said that it would consider whether to remove a statue of its founder, Sir Thomas Guy, but would not be changing its name.
Sir Thomas helped to set up the hospital near London Bridge in 1721 having made his fortune in the 17th and 18th centuries as a major shareholder of a company selling slaves to the Spanish Colonies.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ welcomed a review of statues and street names in the capital and said that the future of the monument should be considered.
The lord mayor of Cardiff is demanding that a marble statue of Sir Thomas Picton, the highestranking British officer killed at Waterloo, be removed from City Hall because of his slave trade past.
Sir Thomas executed dozens of slaves during his time as governor of Trinidad and authorised the torture of a 14-year-old girl. Dan De’Ath, the first black mayor of Cardiff, called the monument an affront to black people.
A statue installed to honour Sir
Henry Stanley, who uttered the famous phrase ‘‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’’, when he found the lost explorer in east Africa in 1871, is also the subject of a petition. It has been signed by more than 1500 people who want his statue removed from the centre of Denbigh, in Wales, where he was born.
Simon Jones, the petition’s organiser, said: ‘‘He was known for his brutal treatment of Africans to the extent that he used to shoot black children from his boat to calibrate his rifle sights while sailing down river. A statue to a man like that has no place in Welsh society in 2020.’’
Meanwhile the mayor of Bristol said that the statue of Colston would be fished out of the city harbour and be put in a Bristol museum alongside placards from the protest over the death of George Floyd in the US.
Penny Lane in Liverpool has also become the focus of controversy. As well as inspiring the Beatles’ song, the street was named after James Penny, a Liverpool slave ship owner and prominent anti-abolitionist, it is claimed. – The Times, London