A big difference between denying history and not honouring it

I’M grateful to letter-writer G Best for highlighting his concerns around a potential new slavery museum for Bristol (Post letters, November 16), as many of his assumptions are quite wrong.

I’m one of the ‘elitist virtue signallers’ group that is behind the latest call for an interpretation centre for a long overdue and meaningful Bristol Slave Trade Memorial on the river Avon. The proposal is akin to the French Abolition Memorial that already exists on the river Loire in Nantes, a city with a past and geographic location which closely mirrors that of Bristol’s.

Far from being patronising, the group contains leading members of Bristol’s black diaspora and has the support of the local community in Welsh Back and their councillors, past and present. There are no ‘here-today-and-gone-tomorrow’ students amongst us but if they would like to come on board they would be most welcome.

The ignorance of Bristol’s role in the transatlantic slave trade is palpable, and this is one of the main reasons an interpretation centre is such a vital addition. After Bristol’s failure to do something tangible after the hugely successful ‘Respectable Trade’ exhibition of the 1990s, and the less successful ‘Abolition 200’ commemorations of the 2000s, the time is right to lay this particular ghost to rest in a fitting manner.

Bristol needs somewhere to ‘reconcile, remember and reflect’ for this most divisive of all topics. It’s as important to Bristol, in my opinion, as the WW2 civilian war dead memorial in Castle Park – if not more so when you consider how many suffered in terms of scale – and no one would deny Bristolians that particular memorial.

The ‘plain unvarnished truth’ is that many in Bristol fought against the transatlantic slave trade from as early as the 1650s, suffering persecution, imprisonment, transportation and even death in the process.

Early Bristol Quakers and Baptists, Bristol Methodists from the 1740s (care of John and Charles Wesley), Bristol sailors, Bristol writers (such as Southey, Coleridge, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More), Bristol reformers – electoral as well as abolitionist – and many prominent Bristol families going into the 19th century, the Estlins, the Blackwells and the Carpenters amongst others.

For years this statement from D’Arcy Parkes of the Society of Merchant Venturers (Evening Post, November 28, 2006) has stuck in my craw: “We all regret that the slave trade happened. Slavery was a trade in which all of Bristol was involved in...”

Really? Even if this were so, were they willing? Did they have a choice? Did they benefit from the obscene wealth created?

In 1830, Bristol abolitionists were leading the way in seeking immediate emancipation of the enslaved while calling them “our fellow subjects”, questioning why they were not being considered for compensation themselves, rather than the slave-holders.

In a public meeting on Brandon Hill in August 1833, Henry Hetherington addressed thousands of Bristolians regarding the final deal that gave Britain’s 40,000 plus slave-holders £20,000,000 in compensation. He asked why should they receive this ‘gift’ in order to justify their ‘loss of property’, when the enslaved were already rising up to free themselves? Witness the Emancipation Rebellion in Jamaica of Christmas 1831.

Of these slave-holders, the 70 successful claimants in Bristol got a share of £500,000. We, the British tax-payer, only finished off paying this debt in 2015! What a con...

Where can you go to readily find out about this history in Bristol? Well, it’s not easy. And it’s not easily found on the internet either: I know, I’ve tried. Bristol Central library is excellent but you have to dig.

Rewriting history? Renaming of the Colston Hall and moving Colston’s statue are only small measures, his memory won’t go away, how can it when he’s proportionally the most over-memorialised person in any city in the country?

A nice lady from Redland that I met on a recent Abolition Walk said “there’s a difference between denying history and not honouring it.”

Mark Steeds

Abolition Shed Collective