by Christopher Draper
IF Germany preserved the mansions of the men who organised the Nazi slave camp system and published accompanying guidebooks detailing architectural features and the aesthetics of looted art works whilst concealing the source of their former owners’ wealth we’d be appalled, yet Britain’s NATIONAL TRUST lovingly maintains the heritage of Britain’s aristocratic slave traders with scarce a mention of their iniquities.
For Example…
Buckland Abbey – home of Francis Drake, who with his cousin John Hawkins started Britain’s slave trade in 1562, owned by Drake’s descendants until NT took over in 1946
Chirk Castle – acquired in 1593 by Thomas Myddleton, a founder of the rapaciously racist East India Co. Managed since 1981 by NT, the Myddleton family remain in residence
Tyntesfield – owned by the Gibbs family whose African slave trade profits were re-invested in the exploitation and virtual enslavement of Chinese labourers in their Peruvian guano pits
Powis Castle- lavishly displayed Indian artefacts plundered by Robert Clive
Newark Park – owned from the 18th century until 1946 by the Clutterbuck family, in 1837 Sarah Clutterbuck “of Newark Park” claimed compensation for 110 Jamaican slaves
Quarry Bank Mill– erected by Samuel Greg who jointly owned, with his brother, a Dominican plantation with 139 slaves
Speke Hall – purchased in 1795 by Richard Watts an immensely rich slave trader based in Liverpool and Jamaica, owned by Watts family until 1943
Dyrham Park– according to NT, William Blathwayt was a “Hard working civil servant” and Dyrham Park -“An early example of how a fortune made from empire was invested in a landed estate.” According to history he was a tireless advocate for the slave trade who readily accepted bribes from its practitioners.
Convenient Lies
There’s no objectivity to NT guidebooks which feature aristocratic family trees, portraits, pottery and fine furniture but rarely mention slavery. As air-brushed exploits of the gentry are extolled at length, the histories of the enslaved blacks and poor whites they exploited are ignored. To visit an NT property is to worship at the altar of aristocracy and with twenty million paying visitors a year, NT is a powerful advocate of reactionary worldviews.
As we perambulate NT’s pastoral palaces we gaze up at portraits of generations of be-knighted toffs who richly deserve to be pulled from their pedestals and consigned to the dustbin of history. Whilst acquiring country houses and arranging exhibits, NT bosses may not fully comprehend their complicity in concealing the gentry’s genocidal role but as Hannah Arendt observed, such is the banality of evil.
Rewarding the Guilty
Britain’s slave traders were never held to account for their murderous record. On the contrary, when their slaves were “emancipated” in 1833 Parliament rewarded the traders with £20 billion (2020 equivalent) “compensation”. In the following century, when food imports undermined agricultural land values, Parliament again intervened to sustain aristocratic privilege. Whilst some toffs auctioned off the family silver, pulled down crumbling piles, sold off estates and reinvested in liquid assets, traditionalists fought to maintain their God-given social and political pre-eminence and discovered a surprising ally.
Polite Subversion
Although NT’s founders were Christian Socialists who opposed privilege and campaigned for workers’ access to the countryside, from the late 1930’s onwards, the Trust and the toffs became affectionate bedfellows. This ideological volt-face was engineered by James Lees-Milne, who in 1936, was appointed as Secretary of NT’s newly created “Country House Committee”. Lees-Milne was an arch-snob infatuated with “aristocracy” who’d spent the previous five years as Private Secretary to Baron Lloyd. Together with his posh chums and their Parliamentary lackeys, Lees-Milne devised a plan granting tax relief all round for NT to bail out aristocrats who wished to remain in residence. NT shouldered the burden of running and renovating their mansions on condition that the public was granted limited access. The deal was sealed by an act of Parliament passed in 1940 as “The Country Houses Scheme”. Lees-Milne was in his element socialising with the toffs, encouraging a succession of Lords, Ladies, Dukes, Earls and other assorted gentry to take up influential positions within NT.
Rebel in the Ranks
NT was soon stuffed full with both grand Country Houses and Country House grandees and these came to characterise NT. A campaign to return the Trust to its original principles was in 1967 led by an employee, Conrad Rawnsley, the grandson of one of its founders. He claimed NT’s original aim to provide “open air sitting rooms for the poor” had been subverted to offer “aristocratic drawing rooms for the middle classes.” Headlined as, “Rawnsley versus the Reactionaries”, NT’s reactionary Chairman, Randal McDonnell, 8th Earl of Antrim (ed Eton & Oxford) responded by sacking him but was forced by Harold Wilson’s government to commission an internal enquiry. Lord Antrim appointed Henry Benson CBE, a senior partner of accountants “Coopers & Lybrand” and member of a shooting syndicate that leased NT Land, to head that enquiry. Benson suggested bureaucratic reforms but did little to restore NT’s founding principles.
Vulnerable
Confronted by Black Lives Matter NT bosses feel suddenly vulnerable and have hidden away incriminating items of slave imagery (see previous post). Dr Tarnya Cooper, NT’s “Curatorial and Collections Director”, insists NT has the matter in hand, “The National Trust has just completed the first phase of a ten-year internal inquiry into links between its properties and slavery, during which it found that almost a third of its world-famous 300 houses and gardens are tied to wealth from slaving practices…and the number could well rise”. The implicit message is, “Trust us, we’ve got everything under control and with a few more years research we’ll eventually correct our minor errors and oversights”, but NT cannot be trusted.
I emailed Dr Cooper requesting details of the properties NT had identified as linked to the slave trade but received no reply. I searched the web in vain for further details of NT’s “ten-year internal inquiry into links between its properties and slavery”. I wonder - When did this inquiry commence? When will it conclude? Who are the members of the inquiry? Does it accept external submissions? Does it even exist?
Curious Case of the Disappearing Display
NT exploited the 2007 bicentenary of Britain’s “abolition of the slave trade” to claim the moral high ground and made great play of a special exhibition it mounted at Penrhyn Castle. A Trust property built by the Douglas-Pennant family who made a fortune from their Jamaican slave plantations which they re-invested in exploiting Welsh slate quarrymen, provoking what remains Britain’s longest ever industrial dispute. On 11.12.2006 the National Trust obtained £45,700 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to mount a permanent exhibition at the Castle entitled, “Sugar and Slate – The Penrhyn Connection”. Tipped off that NT had duplicitously ditched the exhibition, in 2016 I investigated and emailed Martin Buckridge of HLF who confirmed that permanence was a condition of that grant and, “It is clear that at the time of your enquiry and for a period beforehand, the permanent exhibition was not on public display”. All sorts of feeble excuses followed and ultimately only a fragment of the original exhibition was remounted in an out-building but this was sufficient to satisfy both NT and HLF. Tokenism at its most cynical!
NT doesn’t like exhibiting inconvenient truths, they upset resident aristocrats and spoil the aesthetics of the Country House experience. As Andrew Loukes, an NT “House & Collection Manager”, told the Financial Times, “The more alien paraphernalia that you introduce into these spaces, the more you take away from their power to impress as historic interiors.” What a give away! - NT is concerned only to present the aristocratic perspective. Playing cat and mouse with critics, NT makes token concessions when forced but retrenches when no-one’s looking.
Inconvenient Truths
Clevedon Court is a grand north Somerset country pile and the NT handbook explains, “The house was bought by Abraham Elton in 1709 and is still the well-loved family home of the Eltons today”. Abraham Elton was a slave trading Mayor of Bristol and all three of his sons invested in slave ships. Throughout the eighteenth century the Elton’s received money from their Jamaican plantations and the refining of slave produced sugar. At their peak the family owned a quarter of the land around Bristol. They handed Clevedon Court over to the NT in the 1960’s in lieu of death duties but were permitted to remain in residence. In the 1980’s the Trust published a short guide to Clevedon Court which briefly referred to its slave trade connections but this was excised from the 2003 edition that was co-written by Julia Elton (sister of the current Baronet, Sir Charles Abraham Grierson Elton). Asked about her family’s involvement in the slave trade by Andy Beckett of the Guardian, Julia Elton insisted, “They were fighting for Bristol, you could argue that they were giving an economic opportunity to the local peasantry...”
After listening to an NT guide who, “Eagerly describes the Eltons’ successes as 18th-century industrialists, property dealers and shipping magnates” Becket asked,
“Were they slave traders as well?” “We don’t know that they were,” - “the guide says tersely” - “There’s no proof”.
In reality, there’s ample proof and when NT again revised and reprinted its Clevedon Guidebook there remained no mention of slavery.
Time for a Change
Black Lives Matter achieved more in one afternoon by toppling Colston’s statue than many years of Bristol Council reviews and committee meetings. A child visiting Charlecote Hall recently suggested an Indian sword’s label should be changed from, “Taken During the Indian Mutiny” to “Stolen during the First War of Indian Independence”. The National Trust’s perverse misrepresentation of history demands immediate action not nebulous promises of internal review and future reform.
Christopher Draper
(no. 2 in a 4-part NT series, August 2020)
**********
Posts
4 comments:
EDITOR's Note:
A live link to this to this post was sent to enquires@nationaltrust.org.uk and a few hours later it bounced back with the the information below. Readers must judge what it represents:
The National Trust is a registered charity no. 205846. Our registered office is Heelis, Kemble Drive, Swindon, Wiltshire SN2 2NA. The views expressed in this email are personal and may not necessarily reflect those of the National Trust unless explicitly stated otherwise. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error, please notify me immediately. If you are not the intended recipient of this email, you should not copy it for any purpose, or disclose its contents to any other person. Senders and recipients of email should be aware that, under the Data Protection Act 2018, the contents may have to be disclosed. The National Trust has scanned this email for security issues. However the National Trust cannot accept liability for any form of malware that may be in this email and we recommend that you check all emails with an appropriate security tool.
I really enjoy reading your blogs but this was especially good.
Quoting Charlie Courtenay the Earl of Devon, whose ancestral home is Powderham Castle near Exeter; Henry Mance in the FT [27/09/20] wrote: 'When the Black Lives Matter movement came out, there was a sense of people wanting to hunker down - "I hope they don't notice us".' but '[My view was], don't get out of the way, stand up, here's an opportunity to tell you why we're here.'
Jan Karpinski wrote in a letter in last Saturday's Financial Times: 'Of course slavery was bad. It ended (with important exceptions, not least the US) because the British establishment (residents of the sort of house Mr Mance writes about) decided it was wrong and deployed the resources of the Royal Navy, the Foreign Office and the Exchequer to put a stop to it.... readers will want to set an example in putting the bad that our ancestors did in context of the good. How will our our descendants judge us? Will they revile us, for dividends received from sweatshop fashion, energy and mining companies, airlines and exploitative tech?
Post a Comment