Colston did a lot to improve lives
I WOULD like to add to Clive K Swonnell’s letter that those constantly ‘demonising’ Edward Colston should stand back and look at the larger picture of the days of ‘slave trading,’ and this city’s contribution to the development of human and employment rites.
Domestic life was grim, and depending on whether you could get a job or not you ended up in the workhouse.
In Edward Colston’s time there were no such things as human rights or employment laws. The various African tribal leaders were free to capture, beat, then drag Negroes from other tribes in Africa down to the trading posts to sell to slave traders for exporting to the West Indies.
Nor is there any mention of the ‘press gangs’ who plied the public house landlords on the dockside with money to oversell beer to their unsuspecting pub customers until they were so unconscious they could be dragged aboard a ship to act as crew.
When they awoke from their drunken stupor it was too late to go home as they were on their way to the West Indies.
On arrival of the ship in Jamaica the Negroes were sent off to the markets to be sold.
The sailors were flogged to make them run away so there was no need to pay them. Nobody seems to mention their inhuman treatment!
As for removing the name of Edward Colston from the records
– I would have loved to have been able to attend any of his surviving schools. But in my day you had to pass the ‘11-plus’ to get to them as they were part of the grammar school system and the best in Bristol.
Instead, I had to go to Bishop Road Secondary Modern School in the 1950s, whose academic achievement level was zero.
On leaving school I had to go to night school at my own expense and in my own time, to get the education I should have had at school.
I doubt if there are any citizens of Bristol who can come near to achieving what he did for the citizens of Bristol.
So leave well alone and let Edward Colston be judged by how things were in those times – he did his best to improve them.
Mrs A Earl Bristol