Cambridge college to give away bell with slave trade link

A CAMBRIDGE College has admitted that a bell it had on display for decades was originally from a slave plantation in Guyana.

St Catharine’s College said that the bell, which carried the inscription “De Catherina 1772”, will be donated to a Dutch national museum for a major exhibition on slavery next year.

Earlier this year the college said that it had “shuttered” the bell off from view while it investigated its origins.

The move came after Cambridge University announced that it will launch an inquiry to see how the 800-year-old institution benefited from the slave trade.

Researchers have been commissioned to pore over archives to see how much it gained from the “Atlantic slave trade and other forms of coerced labour during the colonial era”.

The mission bell was donated to St Catharine’s College by alumnus Edward Goodland in 1961, three years after his arrival in the colony of British Guiana, which is now Guyana.

Mr Goodland, who studied at St Catharine’s from 1930-33 and went on to become a successful industrialist, moved to Guyana in 1958 after he was appointed as the technical director at Bookers Sugar Estates.

According to an archived issue of The St Catharine’s Magazine, the bell was “believed to have been a plantation bell, used for regulating the work schedules of slaves on the sugar plantations”.

The bell was initially hung in a belfry outside the Porter’s lodge where it was used to “summon College residents to food and to prayer”, the magazine says, but in 1994 it was moved to a less prominent position.

From September next year, the bell will go on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, as part of an exhibition on slavery in the Dutch colonial period.