Black’s Head and its two faces

THE debate over the Black’s Head sign, “dubbed racist by thousands across the UK who signed a petition”, continues to generate more heat than light (Criticism over ‘biased’ report into removal of ‘racist’ town sculpture, October 13).

Mary Winstone, in her guide, Ashbourne & Dovedale (1996), noted that the Black’s Head is double-sided, with two different faces, “smiling in one direction, miserable on the other”.

Closer inspection of the faces suggests they are of different origins, and the ‘head’ may have been intended to denote the contrasting fortunes of two similar but different ethnic groups – possibly ‘miserable’ for (enslaved) South/west Africans, and ‘smiling’ for North Africans.

And while the precise date of the sign construction is unknown, it may date to the time of the anti-slavery campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s.

Indeed, there is a possibility that an anti-slavery petition in Ashbourne – collecting signatures in Wheatley’s bookshop in February 1826 – is contemporary with the erection of the sign, and it is presumably the same petition presented a couple of months’ later in the House of Commons (by William Evans MP).

Thus the sign may have been erected with far greater local sensitivity to prevailing attitudes over racerelations than has been credited by the petitioner and petition supporters.

So perhaps the two local authorities - Ashbourne Town Council and Derbyshire Dales District Council - should commission a research study into the sign’s origins and likely date of construction, so as to minimise further wasted effort rooted in prejudice and ill-informed speculation?

David Purdy Littleover