National Trust: 100 sites linked to slavery
THE homes of Sir Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling are among almost 100 National Trust properties which the charity claims have links to slavery and colonialism.
Churchill’s former family home in Kent, Chartwell, was included, alongside several other well-known properties linked to leading figures from the East India Company.
The audit, released yesterday, leaves the heritage charity facing accusations of smearing key figures from British history.
National Trust members have threatened to cancel subscriptions.
The trust has insisted it does not want to censor history but that it has a duty to ensure its supporters and visitors know about the origins of some of its properties. But Lucy
Trimnell, a Conservative councillor in Somerset, wrote online that she would cancel her membership, adding that she ‘cannot support the naming and shaming of innocent families who left these properties to the custodianship of the National Trust’.
The trust said the year-long audit was ordered before the Black Lives Matters protests, when a statue of Edward Colston was toppled from a plinth and thrown into a harbour in Bristol because of his role in the city’s slave trade.
The charity, which has 5.6million members and 500 historic sites around the UK, said it commissioned the report last September.
The audit details properties’ links to slave traders but also to families whose plantations used slave labour, and who were paid compensation after the slave trade was abolished.
The report also highlights figures involved in Britain’s colonial history, including author Kipling and historian Thomas Carlyle, whose former homes are now run by the trust.
Dr Tarnya Cooper, the National Trust’s curatorial and collections director, said the charity had a duty to research and share information.
She added: ‘A significant number of those [properties] in our care have links to the colonisation of different parts of the world, and some to historic slavery.’