The futility of attempting to hide away those monuments that reveal the dark side of our history

sir – As a past student and staff member at St Thomas’s Hospital, I am dismayed by the cowardly decision of the Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust to bow to public pressure and remove the statues of Sir Thomas and Sir Robert Clayton from public view, “due to their association with the slave trade” (report, June 13).

Perhaps next they will acquiesce to renaming St Thomas’s Hospital itself, or renaming Clayton ward – where I did my house jobs.

No one doubts the importance of the message that “black lives matter” – but trying to airbrush history, good or bad, is not the way forward.

Dr Michael Hellier FRCP

Marlborough, Wiltshire

sir – Many schools have sidelined the teaching of history in recent years.

Is it time to make it compulsory for all school ages in order to engender the understanding of our past that feels so lacking in society today?

Judith Barnes

St Ives, Cambridgeshire sir – The statue of Winston Churchill and the Cenotaph at Whitehall have been boarded up (report, June 14).

My late father would be appalled. He gave four years of his young life to defend the freedoms and liberties that this country upholds. One of the proudest moments of his later years was marching at the Cenotaph with the Royal Naval Association.

Rosalind Godward

Royston, Hertfordshire

sir – I am a veteran and proud of that fact. The veterans’ groups heading to war memorials across the country (report, June 14) do not represent me or the many thousands of other service veterans who deplore the targeting of such memorials by any extremists.

You can’t prove the other side wrong by making them right. These thugs and activists rely upon the general population to bulk up their numbers and thereby legitimise their cause.

Deny hardline activists the numbers they seek, and their threat is lessened.

Such a move also makes it easier to identify and control them.

Alec Richardson

St Martins, Shropshire

sir – There are some people who, no matter what your opinion of their cause, hold genuine beliefs and sometimes demonstrate in support of those. They have a legal right to do so.

Then there is an ignorant, violent underclass who will attach themselves to genuine demonstrations solely in order to get drunk, fight the police, deface monuments, relieve themselves in public, and then crawl back under the rock from which they came.

To assume they have any informed motivation is a grave mistake. They don’t care what you think; they won’t change, and they will despise you if you try to analyse their motives.

Alisdair Low

Richmond, Surrey

sir – The police are rapidly becoming a laughing stock. This is not down to the actions of individual officers, who without doubt do their duty in an exemplary fashion; it is down to the fact that they now appear to be led by senior officers who have little regard for maintaining law and order.

Robert Courteney-harris

Stone, Staffordshire

sir – Should this climate of protest continue, it is hard to imagine any new statues being erected in future.

However, one possibility comes to mind: a tribute to Dame Shirley Bassey, a fan of James Bond and a friend of comedians Morecambe and Wise. This should be placed outside the Welsh Parliament in Cardiff – near where she was born. Of course, on the plinth there ought to be a reminder to all passing politicians of a lyric from one of her hit songs: “Hey, big spender”.

Martin Everett

Tintern, Monmouthshire

sir – All I ask is for a Government that governs.

Rupert Behrendt

Bingley, West Yorkshire