Sadistic slave owner statue ‘an affront to black people’, – council leader
As calls grow for the statue of Thomas Picton to be removed from Cardiff City Hall, Geraint Talfan Davies reminds us that Wales cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to the history of the abhorrent slave trade
THE leader of Cardiff council has backed calls to remove a statue of a 19th-century war hero, who the mayor described as a “sadistic slave-owner”.
The marble statue of Sir Thomas Picton stands in City Hall, in a series of memorials of “Heroes of Wales”.
Responding to an open letter from the mayor Dan De’Ath, council leader Huw Thomas said the statue was an “affront” to black people in Cardiff.
Cllr Thomas said: “While Picton is commemorated for his part in the Napoleonic Wars, the growing awareness and understanding of the brutal nature of his Governorship of Trinidad and his involvement in slavery makes it, in my view, very difficult to reconcile his presence in City Hall with the values of tolerance, diversity and equality which we want the Cardiff of today to stand for.
“On that basis, and because his presence is an affront to black people in the city, and a large number of Cardiff citizens, including yourself, I support your request to remove the sculpture.”
The mayor had said it was “no longer acceptable” to keep the statue, after protesters tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston Sunday, and dumped it into the harbour.
In 1916, the Welsh public voted which people to commemorate in the Marble Hall.
While Picton was remembered as the highest ranking officer killed at the Battle of Waterloo, he was also accused of executing a dozen slaves while governor of Trinidad.
He was also found guilty of torturing a 14-year-old mixed race girl, while governor, but was never sentenced.
Cllr Thomas said it “important and necessary to seek a democratic mandate” to remove the statue. Councillors will debate a motion on the removal “at the earliest possible opportunity”, and also debate how to address other contentious statues in the city.
As well as removing the statue, the council leader proposed establishing
> Council leader Huw THomas a task force to work with black communities in Cardiff.
Cllr Thomas said: “Symbolism and gestures won’t resolve the challenges that black people face in our country today.
“The Windrush scandal, and the high proportion of deaths from Covid-19 in the Bame communities, are just the latest manifestations of the structural inequality and – let’s be frank – institutional racism, which many people must contend with in this country.
“No-one therefore should be surprised at the strength of feeling expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement. “My promise to you, over and above the support offered on the issue above, is to redouble this council’s efforts in helping to address those challenges.
“Building on the progress the council has made in recent years, I propose to establish a task force to work with the various Black communities in Cardiff to better understand their real issues, and what support they want from us.”
Thousands of people around the UK are demanding the removal of controversial monuments and statues which campaigners describe as “racist and unwelcoming”.
A number of petitions are circling online which have taken inspiration from Sunday’s anti-racism demonstration in Bristol, which saw protesters topple the statue of slave trader Edward Colston before heaving the bronze monument into the harbour.
ALTHOUGH born in an America stained by slavery, Black Lives Matter has become an international movement.
It matters to us in the United Kingdom and here in Wales, because we are both implicated in that history and stained by persistent racial inequalities.
The events of the last few days are a sharp reminder that this country is still living with the legacy of Empire, and of the slave trade in particular, however much our society has tried to turn a blind eye to our past.
We are not immune to that charge here in Wales, however much we pride ourselves on our radical and progressive traditions.
With the statue of Bristol’s archslave trader, Edward Colston, now at the bottom of Bristol Docks, the Lord Mayor of Cardiff, Dan De’Ath, has called for the removal of the statue of Sir Thomas Picton from the Marble Hall in the City Hall.
It is a reminder that, though Wales was not as deeply implicated as Bristol in the slave trade, we cannot afford to be complacent on this issue.
The slave trade was not something confined to Bristol, London and Liverpool.
It permeated the whole of society, in every corner of the country. Slave traders and their companies needed investment, so the country bought into it in a big way.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 freed 800,000 Africans – though offering them no compensation – but at the same time compensated no fewer than 46,000 slave owners.
These were not all the caricature wicked slave owners, but men and women in this country investing their cash – small landowners, middle-class professional and many women.
In all they received £20m in compensation, the equivalent of £16bn in today’s money.
Some have calculated that it was the biggest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009.
The profits that accrued in Bristol were also invested heavily in coal and iron industry developments in south Wales.
The ironmasters of Merthyr Tydfil, in particular, found their investors where they could. Bristol was ready with the money.
Sir Thomas Picton, a Pembrokeshire man, was not an arm’s-length investor.
On the contrary, he was Governor of Trinidad for five years, a role he discharged with such arbitrary cruelty that even his peers petitioned for his removal.
Although no doubt a robust soldier – he was the most senior officer killed at Waterloo – his commander, the Duke of Wellington, thought him “a rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived”.
How then did he come to be commemorated in Cardiff’s City Hall? In truth, through a rather dodgy process chronicled some years ago in great detail by historian Angela Gaffney.
In July 1910 Sir Ivor Herbert, grandson of Lady Llanover, a baronet and Liberal MP for South Monmouthshire, wrote a letter to the Western Mail, joining in a debate about a suitable memorial for the late King Edward VII.
He thought that the idea should be combined with a “national Valhalla for Welsh heroes”.
In the end the late King was commemorated separately.
Cardiff City Hall, although built some four years earlier, was, at least internally, unfinished business.
The town clerk, Joseph Wheatley, was agitating for some sculpture to finish the Marble Hall, and by 1912 had persuaded the wealthy industrialist and politician DA Thomas (later Viscount Rhondda) to foot the bill.
Thomas said he “couldn’t help noticing that the pedestals at the top of the staircases were waiting for some suitable figures to be placed on them”.
But the plan, undoubtedly, was to “associate Cardiff still more closely with the national life of Wales”.
And so in May 1913 the Western Mail ran a competition to choose which 10 Welsh heroes would be commemorated, with a prize of £20 to anyone who got closest to the choices of a three-man panel of worthies – Sir T Marchant Williams, the stipendiary magistrate for Merthyr, Professor Thomas Powel, a Celtic scholar at Cardiff’s university and W. Llewelyn Williams, a journalist-lawyer who was at the time Recorder of Swansea.
This was far from an exemplary democratic process.
The Western Mail received only 364 entries that suggested no fewer than 250 different names.
In the end the three worthies shared the £20 prize among six people who managed to match eight out of the panel’s 10 preferred choices.
The choice of Picton was a fix, almost certainly focusing on his ‘killed-in-action’ fame, rather than on his time in the Caribbean.
Even so, Western Mail readers had given him only 49 votes, fewer than the Welsh prince, Llewelyn the Great, and the educationist Griffith Jones, Llanddowror.
The legendary Caradog (Caractacus) had got 82 votes. None of the three made the panel’s cut.
No women were chosen, but when it was decided to move St David to the centre of the hall, creating an 11th plinth, Boadicea, leader of the British Iceni tribe against the
Romans, filled the vacant one on the side. Thus did a Norfolk girl become a Welsh hero.
Boadicea (Buddug) apart, Picton’s contribution to Wales is hardly of the same order as the other choices: Hywel Dda, the 10th-century lawmaker, Llywelyn, the last prince of Wales, the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, Owain Glyndwr, Bishop William Morgan, translator of the Bible, and the hymn writer William Williams, Pantycelyn.
Today some might also question the inclusion of Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty.
Picton squeezed in “for valour and generalship”, but if one were to take the Western Mail’s entries as indicative of any sentiment, Picton should not have made the cut in 1913, let alone today.
The removal of Sir Thomas Picton from his plinth in Cardiff’s City Hall would do no great injury to Welsh history or to popular sentiment then or now.
Arguably, it would not be a case of imposing the values of today on the past.
What it would do is open up new possibilities, not least the inclusion of women.
Boadicea died in AD 61. We can surely come up with another woman from the intervening 1,959 years, even if it were thought politic to avoid a contemporary list.
Charlotte Guest, Betsi Cadwaladr, Ann Griffiths, Lady Rhondda come to mind.
Another possibility would be an empty plinth to encourage contemporary responses to our circumstances, as has happened on Trafalgar Square.
The removal of statues is often contentious.
There are campaigns for the removal of a bust of HM Stanley in Denbigh for a connection with massacres in the Belgian Congo.
Others want rid of statues of Clive of India, described by historian William Dalrymple as an “unstable sociopath”, from a square in Shrewsbury and from outside the Foreign Office in London.
Students and other protesters have long wanted to get rid of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, regarded as representative of white supremacy in South Africa, from a wall of Oriel College Oxford.
Oliver Cromwell’s statue stands outside the Westminster Parliament despite his butchering of thousands in Ireland.
Historians debate whether this was within bounds accepted at the time.
But the melding of the effects of austerity, Brexit, and the Covid pandemic – all of which can be seen to have a disproportionate effect on some racial minorities – is forcing us to reappraise many things in a very fundamental way.
Statuary will not, and should not be sacrosanct.