Statues and Empire

I once had an idea. Take pictures of all the statues in Edinburgh and then research their stories. Who are these people? How did they come to prominence and who is it that thought so highly of them that they raised the funds necessary for a statue, often in a prime location? Then I was going to stick it all on an app and flog it to Edinburgh’s many tourists as a series of walking tours. Naturally I did nothing of the kind and, with the current demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter, I am kind of glad the effort necessary was put into other projects. Another side of me wished I had done it because I would have been in a prime position to give an informed view on whose monument is based upon the fruits of slavery. 

There are many that say you don’t need statues to tell history. For the history of the individual who is being commemorated, that is perfectly true. We don’t need statues of either Hitler or Stalin to tell their stories. But they are terrible examples to hold up. For one thing, both were being honoured in life as part of a totalitarian cult of personality. Their statues were built on order of the state. The case of Edward Colston, whose image in bronze was torn down by demonstrators on the 7th of June 2020, is far more interesting. That particular statue was not erected until 1895, one hundred and seventy years after Colston’s death. There was no state directive to be obeyed, no one was impelled by the threat of force to do this. What Colston’s statue is is hard evidence that the values of late Victorian Britain held up someone who had build their fortune upon the trading of mass human kidnapping and enslavement as someone whose virtues outweighed these crimes.
Of course, I am looking at Colston’s statue through the eyes of a 21st. Century liberal. It is quite possible that those who erected the Colston statue did not either know of his links to the slave trade or, if they did, that they did not care nor even regard it as a crime at all. 

Now, before I continue, am I outraged that Colston’s statue took a dip in the River Avon? Not particularly. I certainly don’t think anyone should be charged with criminal damage for this. It is clear from media accounts that there was a long-standing local campaign to have the statue removed and that parts of the Bristol establishment consistently vetoed its removal. Throwing that statue into the river is totally understandable. What worried me is what comes next.

“What comes next” has already started. The weekend of 13th of June has seen violence on the street as far-right activists have appeared on our streets “to defend the statues”. The recorded fact that these people throwing straight-armed Nazi salutes and punches at the police who were actually defending The Cenotaph and Whitehall cannot be mistaken for anything else but intimidation, designed to keep Black Lives Matter supporters off the streets. 

A bit more of a genteel example was the gathering in Poole, Dorset, to defend the statue of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts movement.  Anti-colonial campaigners would point out that Baden-Powell was charged with the illegal execution of Matabele prisoners of wars. He was acquitted of any crime but that might well have been a reflection of values of the day and that the the prisoners were black, for they were certainly shot. Baden-Powell’s statue was also a possible target because of his encouragement of the Hitler Youth movement and recorded admiration for Mein Kampf. This did not stop B-P ending up on the Nazi’s infamous “Black Book” list. The truth is always more complicated. The Scout movement has, and continues to do, much good in the formation of young people across the globe. 

So what is at risk here is a proxy war between racists and human rights campaigners, with a new battlefield being over lumps of carven sandstone and moulded bronze. There has to be a better way and there is. It is called education and it is at the heart of Black History Month. It is a profound criticism of history teaching in the United Kingdom that there has to be a Black History Month at all. The British Empire is fundament to 19th Century global history but is only part of the picture.
Naturally one has to be selective about the history taught to children, purely based upon time available but one has to worry about the flow and material. While I was studying my A level in the subject (The Cold War is already being taught in some current syllabi) I pretty well just got modern history 1880 until 1945. There was also options on the Late Anglo-Saxon period and the Norman invasion. All good stuff but apart from the naval arms race in response to German demands for “A Place in the Sun”, empire did not really feature. My daughter’s more recent exposure to history education in Scotland, covered the medieval wars of independence from England, The Scottish Enlightenment, World War Two and the US Civil Rights in 1960s America. Upon checking the BBC Bitsize GCSE history site, the AQA board specifically teaches empire, and OCR teaches immigration. The rest do not. 

Black History Month is more that British and Empire history and that is fine. A lot of black history is British history too. Whether it is the slaves, sugar, tobacco and cotton triangle between Britain, West Africa and the Americas, or the plantation of people from the Indian continent into East Africa, it is really history that everyone in the UK needs to know about. Fortunes were created which went to build up cities like Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and London. Individuals were glorified which brings us back to the statues. 

Not all statues are worthy of preservation but how is that to be judged? Some would say take them all down, others keep ‘em all up. Others say preserve them in a museum. None are perfect solutions and the museum solution could end up costing a lot of money. I have a possible compromise which does not lead to destruction. Monuments dedicated to those directly in the slave trade should be removed. Space for them can be made in a local park - not in a prominent place - and the monuments displayed together with explanations of their history. The history should be the good, bad, downright monstrous and why others thought these people worthy of honour. Such a grouping can be used to educate school parties as part of British and Empire history: that should be part of the history curriculum. The freed up spaces in our city centres can be used to honour later generations.

What of the really famous figures? Nelson who married into a rich plantation family in Nevis and defended the slave trade? Wellington defeated Napoleon but he gained his military experience in India. According to Elisabeth Longford, the sacking of Mysore in 1799 brought the young Arthur Wellesley a £50,000 share of the spoils (equivalent to £5.7million today), paid by the East India Company. This was all legal. Wellesley himself was concerned with the common soldiery looting, having several flogged and four hanged. Churchill was prime minister during the 1943 Bengal famine as supplies were shipped to feed Britain and our armies. Did Churchill set out to kill three million people? Almost certainly not but appears to have been callously indifferent to their fate.  These histories should be known but for their service to the nation, the honour also remains.

The key does remain with education and I suggest that even the controversial monuments have their role in this. Statues erected willingly by choice, as opposed to those erected by totalitarian regimes, have their place. It just may not be where they were originally placed. 

The real issue is that the people of the United Kingdom, all of us, are going to have to face up to our own history. There are times when it was not honourable, never mind glorious and victorious. Some of time we were the downright bad guys and, in terms of human rights, sometimes not so bad. The important thing is that we are taught it, as Cromwell might have said, warts and all. 

How To Feel British

Prime Minister-in-waiting, Boris Johnson, said this week that he wants immigrants to feel more British. This was swiftly followed up on Twitter by appeals on how this can be achieved. For instance, a French lady called Martha, currently living in York, made this appeal: “If any of my English followers have any tips on how to ‘feel British’, I’d appreciate receiving them.”

As a native Brit, being half-Irish / half-English, university educated in Wales, a previous resident of the Republic of Ireland and having lived in Scotland since 2000, I should have some insights to offer you Martha. 

One of the first things that an immigrant needs to learn is stop speaking your mind. If something is rubbish, for God’s sake do not complain openly about it, especially to the person responsible. Simply smile, say ‘It’s fine’ or ‘it happens’ and work around it, even if this is at some personal inconvenience. The time to complain is to your friends and colleagues afterwards, when the possibility for fixing the issue has long passed. Phrases like “Can you believe it?” or “what a jobsworth” can then be freely thrown around to anyone within earshot.

Conversely, if something is really good, never offer praise. It might be the most amazing pleasure one has ever experienced in life but the highest acceptable compliment is to nod and mutter “not bad.” If one must, a slight smile is permitted. 

In the workplace, never, ever volunteer or offer constructive criticism. If one can imagine being a sheep, and your place is in the centre of the flock, then just keep that image in mind at times of decision making or crises. Never allow oneself to take on greater responsibility, especially without extra pay. Acceptable answers to requests that should be made someone in a more senior position are “Sorry, I’ll have to speak to my boss” or “Out of my pay scale mate.” The reason for such negativity is that British employers seldom go in for this no-blame culture that is popular across Northern Europe. If something goes wrong, someone must be the cause of it. At best, ownership of a mistake will be a black mark against your record and can lead to something worse. Remember, in the television show The Apprentice, any time a candidate has owned responsibility for a failed task, Lord Sugar has fired their arse. 

Someone schooled in American English might have ended the previous sentence with “fired their ass”. This of course is a mistake and someone who has been educated in US English has to make the effort to adjust their language accordingly. Chips are crisps, not French Fries. Biscuits are not cookies. It is trousers and not pants and no, we Brits do not sit around on our fannies, as they are otherwise employed elsewhere on the female body. Make an effort to match one’s language to the local region and do not point out the glaring inconsistencies in a native speaker’s own usage of American English (see examples within this text). The British are seldom well educated in English grammar, making it extremely difficult for us to learn foreign languages as we usually have little idea what is happening with our own. As Tolstoy said, an Englishman in inevitably in the right because everything he says and does is right. This especially goes for spoken English. 

On a related topic however, we Brits love word play, especially when linked to cultural references. Such games can be downright silly but reduce the Brits to tears of laughter, much to the bemusement of foreigners in the group. As an immigrant, you might never get the joke. Don’t worry about it. English is the most public language in the world so perhaps it is only natural we have made it incomprehensible for our own amusement. My best advice would be just to relax, be happy to see us happy and when your finally do start getting the references, then your have finally cracked the English language. 

Do not take offence to the question “Where are you from?” as it really is a statement which means “You are not from round here, are you.” Owing to never having an East Anglian accent, it was a question that I was constantly asked when growing up in the town where I was born. Except in the largest and most cosmopolitan of cities, Brits has a curious sense of regional identity which is linked very strongly to accents. “Where are you from?” might mean that your accent comes from a town twenty miles away where the local inhabitants tend to have a bit of a funny accent and, therefore they don’t speak proper like we do. Yes, I know it is a pain answering this question and immigrants often feel it is a prequel for something nastier to follow but usually it isn’t. We Brits ask each other that same question all the time. Only when the question is followed up by something like “And when are you going back?” is rudeness or sarcasm justified as a response.

Now, perhaps the hardest thing to achieve for some immigrants is to enter into the British drinking culture. Those who are unable to drink alcohol for religious reasons are at a special disadvantage here. Outside the most formal of evenings, it is socially acceptable for Brits to get so drunk as to be a complete embarrassment to ourselves. Sorry about this but get used to it. Over the decades, many governments have tried to change things through taxation and tighter laws, drink-driving being a good example. Unless they are completely teetotal (a very rare thing for a Brit) or a recovering alcoholic (the only socially acceptable excuse not to drink), at some point you are going to see your British friends pissed - as in the English sense of being drunk and not the American of being angry. One understands that for the younger generation, illicit drugs are a socially acceptable alternative to booze, or even along with it. Either way, once work is done, us Brits love getting off our tits on abusing alcohol, or even several substances at the same time. 

There are many things to love about being in Britain. As an immigrant, that is why you are here. This is also the reason why I have not written about our virtues: they are well known, self evident and it is impolite to boast about such things. Instead I have written about the other side of being British: the negative and sometimes the self harming side. No nationality has a monopoly on either virtue or vice. Remember that it is often geography that forms a national personality and that Britain is a group of islands. Some of us Brits still seem to cling to this notion as some kind of comfort when, in today’s global world, being an island nation is a hindrance rather than any help. To understand the British, one has to see us, warts and all. If after doing so, you would prefer to live by your own cultural values instead of ours, I think most people would understand. I certainly will.