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Legacies of Enslavement:Unlocking a Door to Girton’s Past
from The Year 2023
Opening doors to opportunities, or to glimpses of the future, may sometimes also involve confronting locked doors to the past. Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, Life Fellow, former Mistress and Chair of Girton’s Legacies of Enslavement Working Group, offers a personal reflection on why and how the College recently began turning one particular key
Behind the impetus for Cambridge University setting up its Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry in 2019 were its historic links to unconscionable practices that had helped fuel more than two centuries of British prosperity. The legacy the University had in mind stemmed from that era: how racism was built into social inequalities. Had those inequalities gone away one might have opened that door out of interest or curiosity, but they have not gone away and the door must be opened with a more urgent sense of unfinished business.
Of all forms of oppression, enslavement is egregious in denying people legal and civil recognition. One aspect of that unfinished business is acknowledgement of personhood denied. It was the combination of treating people as chattel goods and a period of huge economic expansion, on both sides of the Atlantic, which came to entrench a racist ethos. One of Girton’s redoubtable historians, the late Betty Wood, always emphasised that there was nothing inevitable about this process. If we are opening doors, it is initially onto a very specific epoch, and in Girton’s case onto nineteenth-century outcomes of that expansion.
July 1885
It is summer 1885. Girton has just learned it was the principal beneficiary of a will of one Jane Catherine Gamble. The bequest – completely unexpected – recalls a moment when the young college, in this regard a struggling one, could see only a future of mounting debt. Gamble’s legacy was to be transformative: Girton’s land was doubled, the tower built, 24 student rooms added.
Gamble had nothing to do with Emily Davies’s energetic circle of supporters. Of course, it was the promoters of a college for women who gave concrete form to how she wished to dispose of her residuary estate. Perhaps behind Gamble’s interest in a female establishment was her own predicament as an heiress, indeed someone who had had to flee from fortune hunters, as she herself openly publicised.
That fortune derived largely from money made in the Americas, starting well before she was born but sustaining her for life. Gamble never disowned its origins; far from it. Across the Atlantic she had connections with plantations deploying enslaved labour on both her mother’s and father’s side. She benefited from those of the former, regretted that she was disinherited from the latter. Residing all her adult life in London, she fashioned her personal identity out of living connections with a plantation aristocracy.
That was not in anyone’s head when the news came that surprised and delighted the College. It is what we know, and might want to ponder on, now. That said, among the propertied classes, people at the time would have been aware of the role that marriage and inheritance played in women’s independent ability to dispose of wealth. Opening a door in a women’s college is not going to be like opening other doors in Cambridge.
The Working Group
In tracing lines of inheritance, we slip through time; the foundations of Gamble’s wealth were being laid long before the abolition of enslavement was a reality for British interests (not that they applied to her connections with the Southern states). College did not take its relatively late founding as a reason for avoiding the University’s challenge. As noted in The Year 2021/22, Girton’s Legacies of Enslavement Working Group was set up in 2020.
The Working Group was asked to investigate what aspects of College’s history or endowments might be linked to the Atlantic trade in enslaved people. As a scoping exercise, the Group concentrated on six historical figures key to Girton’s early development, and on monetary gifts. A survey of some 70 major benefactions over the period 1869–1929, which financed named prizes, scholarships and fellowships, pointed to about a quarter that would warrant further research. That included contributions from some of the six. As well as Gamble, these comprised Girton’s founder Emily Davies; two major benefactors, Barbara Bodichon and Henrietta, Lady Stanley of Alderley; and two early students who became officers of the College, Katharine Jex-Blake and Gwendolen Crewdson. Gamble turned out to be the only one to have lived (as a child) in the company of enslavers; no direct links to gains from the proceeds of enslaved labour were found for Davies. But complexities emerged. Here is one example.
Girton had long known about the activism of its founders in the abolitionist movements, but until now had not inquired into the other side: the extent to which it had benefited from such proceeds. The joining of these strands created concerns familiar to at least some nineteenth-century families, and family members could turn out to be multifaceted in their orientations. Consider the 1890s student and later Junior Bursar, Gwendolen Crewdson.
Gwendolen’s forebears were merchants and manufacturers in sugar and cotton produced originally by enslaved persons; at the same time, the Crewdsons had been for three generations anti-slavery campaigners, as far as possible promoting cotton grown by ‘free labour’. While the Crewdsons might have been campaigners, and had sought to disinvest from economic concerns linked to enslavement, none of that stopped Gwendolen’s father marrying the daughter of someone who (unsuccessfully) claimed property compensation when enslavement was banned in the British colonies. On Gwendolen’s maternal side there had been substantial ties to plantations in Guyana and the Caribbean. Her mother was a Waterhouse, the sister of Girton’s first architect, the families being linked by their Quaker affiliations.
As to present interest in where Girton might have benefited, the Working Group saw no alternative to investigating the precise paths along which enslaved-produced wealth travelled. For women, inheritance was key, and thus the Group found itself tracking family fortunes as they changed over time.
Another Opening
This is a moment to relinquish detail for a broader perspective – open an upper-storey window perhaps. The actions and aspirations of individuals are one thing; other issues also bear on the flourishing of institutions.
Generations of scholars, including from Cambridge, played their part in theorising about human differences, an issue addressed by the University’s Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry. The bulk of its report is devoted to the institution’s involvement in the ownership and trade of enslaved people, over the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with the long-term material benefits that the University and its colleges have enjoyed from this source. Percolating throughout society, plantation wealth was a significant impetus, if only indirectly, behind many Victorian developments, invigorated by the outfall from the 1833 government compensation scheme for former enslavers, including absentee owners with plantations in the colonies. By the 1860s, for an institution of Girton’s size and ambition, it would be surprising if – in addition to whatever direct links could be traced – there were no indirect links with the proceeds of enslaved labour.
Racist assumptions seem to have been entrenched not just by enslavement but by certain aspects of emancipation. One unlooked-for consequence was that innate characteristics, as they were conceived at the time, moved to the fore as a rationale for discrimination. We live with the further legacy of that: among diverse reasons for today’s inequalities, it is obvious that such racism persists in too many forms and places. That there ever needed to be a movement called Black Lives Matter says it all.
The University (of which Girton is a part) will be making its own recommendations as to what should follow its findings. On a rather different scale, and given its specific circumstances, the College will be acknowledging the part that these issues have played in its own history.
Unfinished Business
So what might be College’s response? The Working Group was charged with making recommendations and suggestions for future action. Its ethos has been one of addition not subtraction, not to erase the past but add to our knowledge of it. In recalling the personal foresight of Girton’s benefactors, we can also recall something of what made those benefactors’ actions possible in the first place. It is there that the contributions of others are concealed.
To return to the starting point, state-supported chattel slavery was an egregious act of concealment, insofar as someone with the legal status of property is not being recognised as a person. College’s question was about recognition: how to think about who and what is memorialised? We might append the further question, can we respond to individual involvement and to generalised –for example, institutional – circumstances alike?
Given the extent to which early Girtonians were supported by prizes, scholarships and such like, called after individual donors (or those being remembered), including the originally prestigious Gamble Prize, the Working Group thought College should consider establishing a new prize to keep the issues in mind. This would be for work in the general area of legacies of enslavement, including modern slavery. Future prospects for recognition come into view.
The Working Group recommended providing supplementary information to certain individual names that awards, or any other existing form of memorialisation, carried. Apropos of the Gamble legacy, it suggested that College think of a new memorial, perhaps a public sculpture or dedicated area, in its own space with its own authority. This would stand for a generalised recognition of
Conveyance certificate with sketch map for the piece of land known as the ‘Crewdson Field’, 14 January 1914. This was drawn up between William Crewdson and Mary Lumsden, acting as executors of Gwendolen Crewdson’s will, and Girton College. The land was just over 5 acres in size those whose work created some of the wealth that came to Girton. In a significant addition, it recommended finding new sources of nomenclature for the future. We now know the names of some of the enslaved individuals who worked on plantations that have become part of Girton’s history. Drawing on such names could never be more than a symbol of individualisation, but it is one that would bring home what recognition is about. However, this cannot be done quickly; among other things, College would need to make inquiries about any traceable descendants.
The recommendation that College should be developing forms of dedicated support for BAME undergraduates and Masters’ students, such as bursaries to assist their studies, can be effected more quickly. This is also true of a recommendation intended to reflect Girton’s general status as an educational institution. College’s idea all along was that the Working Group’s investigation would only be the beginning of self-knowledge in this arena –a venture that will change as generations of Girtonians change. It was the institution that grew with those individual benefactions and the Working Group made an institutional response. It has amassed a significant amount of material that can serve as the nucleus of a research hub to keep future scholarship and interest in this and cognate issues alive. Through such a hub College would maintain its memorialising intentions, while being open to what relevance incoming years of students and researchers might find in it and bring to it. Doorways to the future.
What Have We Unlocked?
Girton is contributing to knowledge of the ripple effects of proceeds from enslavement and the impetus they gave to promoting education itself. But having in its very foundation links to such proceeds really opens one’s eyes. We are made aware of practices that we simply wouldn’t countenance these days. At the same time, they echo enduring discriminations, including access to university education, that remain issues for us here and now. Our inquiries do more than add to knowledge of the past, and thus of ourselves: pointing to an unacknowledged presence in our foundation helps make visible what also troubles us about current inequalities and prejudices. Girton’s pioneering sense of inclusiveness never had an end date.
College accepted the Working Group’s recommendations. In The Year 2023/24, we shall report on what has been happening since.
Further details, and the reflections they have prompted, can be found on the College website under ‘Girton Reflects: Legacies of Enslavement’ www.girton.cam.ac.uk/girton-reflects
