Ask for whom St Catharine’s College bell tolled

SIR – St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has removed a historic bell from view, saying it “most likely came from a slave plantation” (report, May 8).

Can we shine some light on the St Catharine’s bell? You call it a mission bell, dedicated to a saint and inscribed “De Catherina 1772”. So isn’t it likely to have been used by a Christian place of worship, rather than a plantation?

St Catharine’s maintained a 10 per cent “foreign quota” even in my time there (1961-65), and I’m proud to say it now receives an unrivalled proportion of applications and entrances from persons of colour.

Slavery built this country. Even a London cobbler in the 1770s could own a half-share in the yearly “profits” from a slave on a Guyana sugar plantation – let alone the titled families who endowed colleges such as St Catharine’s.

To make adequate atonement for this national crime against humanity, you would not just have to hide a bell – you would have to tear down, brick by brick, the university that produced William Wilberforce. John Oakes

Cherry Hinton, Cambridgeshire SIR – Before I took employment with Bookers Sugar Co in 1975, I researched the company history and it appeared that no slave labour was employed.

They staffed the sugar plantations with local labour supplemented by indentured workers from South Asia. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines this arrangement as “a contract by which a person agreed to work for a set period for a colonial landowner in exchange for passage to the colony”.

I made a number of good friends in Guyana and a large proportion of them were descendants of that indentured labour who have, over the years, settled happily in the country.

Workers in the cane fields worked hard and some were summoned and dismissed by a plantation bell, which over the years has fallen into disuse. Edward Goodland, who donated this bell in 1960, will have brought home one as a memento of his years working for a first-class employer. Peter Dodd

Tadworth, Surrey