Saints or sinners?

FEATURE: SAINTS OR SINNERS? SAINTS OR SINNERS?

In July 2020, the First Minister commissioned an audit of public monuments, street and building names associated with the slave trade and the British Empire. Gaynor Legall, the chair of the Task and Finish Group, and researcher Peter Wakelin, talk about the early findings.

Left: A family at the broken plinth of the toppled statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. © Adrian Sherratt / Alamy Stock Photo. Below: Peter Wakelin and Gaynor Legall.

When demonstrators threw the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour it showed that monuments have powerful meanings. For Bristolian families with ancestors who were enslaved in Africa and trafficked to the West Indies, Colston’s statue felt like an insult. Years of discussion about putting a plaque under it to explain Colston’s past had come to nothing and frustration finally boiled over.

Meanwhile, in America, Black Lives Matter protesters and local governments are felling statutes of pro-slavery Confederate leaders: monuments put up long after the Civil War as propaganda for the ‘Jim Crow laws’ that enforced racial segregation and made African Americans second-class citizens.

The systematic enslavement of a civilian population is now recognised internationally as a crime against humanity. Slavery may be age-old but the Atlantic slave trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was unique for its vast scale and its basis in race. Its consequences are still apparent in destabilisation and impoverishment in Africa and world-wide racism and inequality.

Wales did not stand apart from this abuse. Welsh mariners and investors took part in the slave trade and Welsh people invested in slave-worked plantations. Welsh trades and industries made cloth, copper and iron for markets that were dependent on slavery in Africa and the Caribbean and Welsh consumers bought tobacco, coffee and sugar grown by enslaved people.

The Picton monument at Carmarthen was built following a public subscription after Picton’s death at Waterloo. John Nash’s original column decayed and was replaced by this 25-metre (82-foot) obelisk in 1847. © Crown Copyright: RCAHMW

These were among the reasons why the First Minister commissioned an audit of statues, plaques, street names and building names that put some who were responsible for slavery and exploitation literally or metaphorically ‘on a pedestal’. It may have been hard to avoid participating in the economies created by slavery and colonialism, but some people were directly responsible for abuses. Examining their commemoration is an important step on a journey of truth and reconciliation.

Statues tend to fade into the background of our daily lives and most of us barely notice the names of streets or public buildings, let alone think about who might have been commemorated by them. If we consider them at all, we see people responsible for brutalising men, women and children in earlier centuries as figures from a distant past.

No case in Wales is more extreme than that of Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton who, as military governor of Trinidad, drew up a code to control the enslaved population through torture and exemplary executions, including dismembering people or burning them alive. So extreme was his regime that 36 charges were laid against him of torture, false imprisonment and execution without trial.

He was convicted on a specimen charge of permitting the torture of a 14-year-old girl — a case so notorious that the publicity helped to defeat the slave trade. However, Picton’s conviction was overturned on a technicality and he went on to lead military forces in the Peninsular War and die a heroic death as the most senior officer killed at Waterloo.

Picton was memorialised enthusiastically in his homeland. The audit has found four monuments, five buildings and some 29 streets commemorating him. Recently, Cardiff Council voted to remove him from City Hall’s set of 11 statues of ‘Welsh heroes’ selected after a public poll in 1913. His statue is currently concealed behind screens while the impact on the grade I listed building is considered.

The audit has sought to examine potential links to slavery among all the known public statues, plaques and other monuments in Wales. It has also searched Ordnance Survey data on building and street names for some 200 persons of interest. Given that streets are usually identified by just a surname, further examination was required using clues from surrounding streets and documentary sources to determine whether particular individuals were commemorated.

The results so far list around 11 commemorations of slave traders, 55 commemorations of plantation owners and — the

The Swansea tithe map from the beginning of Victoria’s reign shows several streets named after people in the audit. Clarence Terrace at the bottom references the future William IV, who opposed abolition of the slave trade in the Lords. It leads into Wellington Street. Above that are two streets (since lost under the Quadrant Centre) named for Horatio Nelson, who expressed pro-slavery views in private. At the top is Picton Place (now Kingsway). Map supplied by National Library of Wales.

A portrait in Carmarthen Guildhall of Thomas Picton. It was painted posthumously around 1815–20 by Martin Archer Shee, who had painted Picton from life a few years earlier. © Mike Walters / Alamy Stock Photo The origin of some street names is uncertain. Jim Crow Square in Cwmbran, Torfaen, takes its name from nearby Jim Crow’s Cottage. But was the cottage called after the early nineteenth-century black-face act that became a racial 13insult or, as local hearsay states, a friend of the owner? © Peter Wakelin

This statue of Robert Owen in Newtown, Powys, by Gilbert Bayes shows a child sheltering by Owen’s feet, reflecting his work to outlaw child labour. It was put up by the Co-operative Union in 1956. A proposal for a statue soon after Owen’s death in 1858 was rejected owing to his atheism. © Powys Photo / Alamy Stock Photo A Celtic cross of white granite put up in 1910 commemorates the intellectually brilliant Morris brothers of Anglesey: Lewis, Richard, William and John. John was a mariner who served on an East India Company ship transporting enslaved people from Madagascar; Lewis Morris’s son, Pryse, died on a slaving voyage to Barbados. © Tony Bennett/Art UK

largest number of all — 118 commemorations of a handful of influential people accused of opposing abolition. The audit has also found 19 commemorations of three Victorians accused of crimes in Africa. Other historical figures queried by campaigners (with 73 known commemorations) include people as diverse as Christopher Columbus, Elihu Yale and Mahatma Gandhi.

Although the current project is not looking at campaigners against slavery, that is an important subject too. William Williams (Pantycelyn), who preached against the slave trade in the eighteenth century, is commemorated by Pantycelyn hall of residence at Aberystwyth and a statue of Henry Richard MP, secretary of the Peace Society, stands in Tregaron. Less widely known is the remarkable Jessie Donaldson who left Swansea for the United States to provide a safe house for people escaping slavery on southern plantations.

Statues tend to make heroes of people, but it may not be helpful to think in terms of heroes and villains, saints and sinners. Many of those examined had complex histories that need careful consideration and some may, in due course, be viewed more sympathetically than others. For example, Frances Batty Shand, who founded Cardiff Institute for the Blind and was remembered in the naming of its building (now a student residence), was both a beneficiary of a plantation and a Black woman from Jamaica. Some people both defended West Indian interests and supported emancipation, including the widely commemorated prime ministers Wellington and Gladstone.

A challenging case is that of Robert Owen, justly remembered for his pioneering ideas about working conditions and co-operatives. Owen’s factories were supplied with cotton from slave-worked plantations. While he sought improved conditions for British workers, he suggested that enslaved people would be better off without emancipation. He shows that even progressive thinkers can be blinkered by the norms of their era. He has ten commemorations in Wales.

This contrasts with just seven commemorations of people of Black heritage, including plaques to Paul Robeson and a Mandela Avenue in Bridgend. A statue of the Cardiff teacher and campaigner Betty Campbell is due to be erected next year. Yet people identifiably of Black heritage have lived in Wales for 2,000 years and made distinguished contributions in politics, education, sport, the arts, health and other spheres. Some of these people might prompt future commemoration, such as Eddie Parris, who in 1931 became the first Black football player capped for Wales; the diplomat Abdulrahim Abby Farah from Barry who set up a hospital for landmine victims in Somalia; or the anti-slavery orator Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in America and spoke to a packed Wrexham Town Hall in 1846. What will Wales do with this emerging information? There may be many ways to respond — to follow the examples set by Liverpool, which has produced literature that explains why its city-centre streets are named after slave traders, or America, where offensive statues are coming down, or Bristol, where the music venue Colston Hall has changed its name.

Commemorations are just one part of a long history of changing attitudes but a rich territory in which to remember, challenge and evolve.

Above: Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland. After escaping in 1838 he became a famous orator and campaigner. He toured the British Isles in the 1840s to huge audiences: plaques mark appearances in London, Edinburgh, Cork and Waterford but not in Wales. When he spoke at Wrexham Town Hall in 1846 it was ‘densely packed until near midnight’. © Major Acquisitions Centennial Endowment