Jumping on the slavery bandwagon… but the facts don’t stack up

The way that issues snowball in this all-tooconnected age is remarkable. I am, of course, delighted that Black Lives Matter is getting heard and it is tragic that it took the murder of an innocent for it to be so. There is much to be done in the rail industry about diversity, especially the paucity of BAME managers in relation to the number of staff.

However, it is too easy to get carried away by the iniquities of the past, and I was shocked to see RAIL contributor Gareth Dennis jump on the bandwagon with so much alacrity.

On June 18, he tweeted: “Back in 1833, the UK government abolished slavery and decided to compensate former slave owners.”

He then went on to argue: “The greater part of the compensation money that stayed in the UK was invested in railways, meaning that the railway network that grew up in the 1830s and 1840s was largely paid for off the back of slave ownership.”

I’m not sure why this is relevant in any case, but there is no evidence to back up this statement. Firstly, of course, the railways predated this payout. The Stockton & Darlington, completed in 1825, was funded by Quakers - most of whom, according to The

Origins of Railway Enterprise by Maurice Kirby, were “small farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen”. The Liverpool & Manchester, funded by local industrialists who (incidentally) also contributed to railways in the South such as the London & Southampton, opened in 1830.

In The Grand Experiment, the Birth of the

Railway Age, Stuart Hylton writes: “The voracious demand for investment in the railway made it necessary to trawl a rather wider market [than rich people who funded the canals]... the railway boom of 1836 led to the establishment of Stock Exchanges in Manchester and Liverpool… and mania of the mid-1840s to many other towns and cities such as Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh.”

There were, literally, thousands of investors in the railway mania, which is the period to which Dennis refers. But while a few may have used some of this compensation money, to argue that this investment in the railway network largely came “off the back of slave ownership” is patent nonsense.

Dennis has quoted his source as an article by Ian Steadman in Wired, but there is nothing to back up his claim that much of this compensation money was invested in the railways. Indeed, Steadman cites a couple of rich former slave owners (such as William Gladstone’s father John) who did support the railways, but then quotes a source as saying: “We think probably 10% to 15% of the wealthiest elites were connected to the slavery business.” In other words, the rest were not. And in any case, as mentioned above, there were thousands of other investors.

Of course, much of the legacy of the Victorians was built on awful exploitation of workers paid barely subsistence wages and treated in intolerable conditions. But to focus on the railways, as Dennis has done, without any clear evidence of this supposed legacy and without any obvious reason why this industry should be singled out, is virtue signalling of the worst kind.

These myths need to be nipped in the bud before they become conventional wisdom.