Our great museums must reflect glory of Britain’s history
CULTURE Secretary Oliver Dowden is right to remind our museums this week that they are supported by taxpayers and must reflect a broader pride in our history – not just the criticisms of a vociferous minority. All aspects of our creative, dynamic history should be represented in our museums, not just the relentless anti-British Empire bashing favoured by left-wingers.
Addressing the directors of our leading institutions, including the British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Trust and Historic England, Dowden is making it clear they must reflect a “more rounded view” of our past that celebrates much that we can be proud of and does not just wallow in a frenzy of self-loathing advocated by a handful of “woke” academics.
Thousands of taxpayers’ pounds are being spent on digging into our colonial past to focus solely on the evils of slavery, such as the £160,000 squandered by the National Trust on its “Colonial Countryside” investigation.
Any historic personality or location with the slightest association with slavery is to be outed and shamed with the vigour of a Chinese Red Guard denouncing socialist backsliders.
OF COURSE, we should not cover up this shameful trade in human cargo but equally we should not put it at the centre of our island’s glorious story.
Sculptor Sir Antony Gormley recently criticised the British Museum for being obsessed with the classical world, arguing that Africa instead should be put at its core. This is a complete denial of the way our remarkably rich cultural history has evolved over the last two thousand years.
Our art and architecture has been directly inspired by Roman and Greek models for centuries with African influences only becoming vaguely significant during the early years of modernism.
Unsurprisingly, Gormley comes up with the same old plea to return the exquisite Elgin Marbles to Greece. But the whole point of Sir Hans Sloane founding the British Museum with his own personal collection was to bring objects from around the world to inspire and enrich intellectual life on our shores.
Yes, part of Sloane’s fortune derived from his wife who inherited sugar plantations in Jamaica but much of it also came from his lucrative medical career. It is impossible to find any civilisation, Western, African or Asian, that does not have long ago roots in the abhorrent slave trade. After all, it was African slavers who sold their fellow human beings to European traders and continued to do so to Muslim merchants long after the British Empire and Royal Navy cracked down on the Atlantic trade route. All are equally guilty but I don’t hear many academics telling that inconvenient truth.
The fact is that this left-wing assault on our heritage has been going on for decades, but has been given a new momentum by Black Lives Matter protests. On the eve of becoming Prime Minster in 1979, Margaret Thatcher quoted Lord Acton’s dictum that “While a foolish Conservative would judge the present by the standards of the past, only a foolish Liberal would judge the past by the standards of the present.”
She bemoaned the fact that socialist historians continued to denigrate the achievements of our Industrial Revolution by focusing on the dreadful conditions of the poor. But it was the prosperity created by our innovative factory machinery that enabled governments to pursue progressive policies that steadily improved the lives of workers. Better sanitation and health provision, improved availability of food and housing, derived from the wealth generated by those dark Satanic mills.
The hard work of the 19th and 20th centuries created an enviably high standard of living for almost everybody. It is that story our museums should be explaining, how British ingenuity, invention and effort means most people now live longer and more happily than ever before. That’s the good news of our island’s progress and our children should be brought up to understand and celebrate that.
INSTEAD a handful of universities and museums prefer to focus our attention on just one evil that afflicted almost every nation at the time. They do it because deep down they rejoice at any criticism of our past. But they are clearly out of step with the majority of people in this country who will always reject their dour vision of our heritage because they know it is not the full picture.
The Culture Secretary is to be commended for reminding our lefty dominated institutions that it is the patriotic majority who keep their museum doors open.
‘Slavery should not be put at the centre of our glorious story’