A handy guide to London's dead, racist white men
Featuring slave traders, merchants of death and tone deaf developers
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Ever since the anti-racism demonstrations of summer 2020, the sound of soul-searching and hand-wringing has been heard emanating from inside some of London’s most venerable institutions.
The museums, galleries, schools and universities who had been diligently ignoring the darker aspects of their histories, were finally forced to face up to some harsh realities and start the painful (and painfully slow) journey out of ‘wilful ignorance’ and towards the land marked ‘reluctant acknowledgement’.
Now, almost eighteen months later, we’re starting to see some of the results of all that institutional introspection, so let’s a look and see if anything productive or useful has emerged (or if it’s just an orgy of overcompensatory arse-covering).
The National Gallery and… Everyone?
Probably the most recent (and definitely the most exhaustive) example comes from the National Gallery, which last week produced a very detailed bit of research into its links to slave-ownership. The initial data covers the years 1824 to 1880 (there’s more to come), and looks at all the works from those years to see how they came into the collection and the people who brought them there.
This was always going to be a very knotty rabbit hole to start digging around in but, to the gallery’s credit, they have done their best to meet it. And, honestly, they may have done too good a job, because there’s an awful lot of what the gallery calls “incidental” connections in there.
One name that jumps out immediately is Thomas Gainsborough, who as well as being “the leading portrait painter in England in the later 18th century”, was also a founding member of the Royal Academy. Gainsborough wasn’t a slave owner, but he did paint portraits of families who became wealthy through slave plantations or the slave trade.
Wiliam Wordsworth’s entry is more tenuous. While the poet was initially best mates with prominent abolitionists in his younger days, as he grew older his politics shifted to the right (ah, that old chestnut) and he ended up living in a cottage, “which was owned by John Frederick Pinney, a slave-owner” and he’s also known to have said that “slavery is not in itself and at all times and under all circumstances to be deplored.” Both these things were already public knowledge. So what’s the link to the National Gallery? Well, William was “among a group of subscribers who presented John Constable’s The Cornfield to the NG in 1837.”
Someone else who was among that group was scientist Michael Faraday (he of the eponymous cage). He’s on the ‘related to slavery’ list because John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller (who was a drunk and a lunatic as well as a renowned slave owner) was a mentor and supporter of Faraday’s early on in his career.
The gallery has said that it produced this research in order to “understand and acknowledge the role that slavery has had in the history of the National Gallery,” but in making sure every conceivable angle has been covered, it’s created a kind of absurd, colonial version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. By casting the net so wide you could argue that the gallery has overshot its stated goal of ‘complete transparency’ and looped right back round to ‘unhelpfully murky’.
Imperial College London’s arms dealers and diamond mine owners
At the end of last month Imperial College London also published a report into their links to the British empire, with the intention of “addressing racial inequalities and improving inclusivity at the university”.
One part of the report that really stood out to us was the mention of Sir Basil Zaharoff (1849-1936):
“..an arms dealer and industrialist. Zaharoff was described as a ‘merchant of death’ and his success was forged through his cunning business tactics. These included the sale of arms to opposing sides in conflicts, sometimes delivering fake or faulty machinery and skilfully using the press to attack business rivals. Zaharoff made a significant financial contribution to the Department of Aeronautics and the Zaharoff Chair of Aviation remains today.”
You have to ask if they really needed to spend an “intensive ten months gathering evidence and views from across the College community and its key stakeholders” to know that ‘merchant of death’ is not a good look for a university.
And that’s not the worst of it. Other headline-grabbing names were the philanthropists Alfred and Otto Beit and Julius Wernher, who as well as being some of the college’s biggest financial donors, also oppressed the Black migrant workers in their South African diamond and gold mines.
The most high profile name is that of the 19th century biologist, Thomas Henry Huxley, who was the first person to suggest that birds may be closely related to dinosaurs as well as being a vocal slave abolitionist. But he also wrote an essay titled Emancipation – Black and White, which the ICL report says “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’ that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today” and therefore a “bust of Huxley should be moved from the building for preservation with this historical context to College archives and the building should be renamed”.
None of these actions are (excuse the pun) set in stone yet. The university is sticking to the traditionally glacial pace that all educational establishments seem to enjoy moving at, and has said they’ll consult with staff and students first, before “deciding what action to take early next year”.
Museum of London Docklands’ slave trader statue
Robert Milligan did not have ‘incidental’ connections to the slave trade. He was a prominent slave-owner and merchant with estates in Jamaica that, by the time of Milligan’s death, had 526 slaves in their sugar plantations.
As a result, the statue of Milligan that stood outside the Museum of London Docklands was taken down by Tower Hamlets in June, a few days after protesters in Bristol tore down the statue of Edward Colston.
Tower Hamlets Council have just completed a two-month public consultation in which they asked “members of the public” (always risky) what should be done with the statue and they’ve just announced that the majority voted for the statue to come out of storage and be presented “in an exhibition about the slave trade” (the other options they were given were to “keep it permanently out of public view” or to “store it in the Museum of London Docklands”).
So the statue’s coming back, right? Well, not so fast. The Canal and River Trust, which owns the land where Milligan’s statue used to be (insert your own joke about them being ‘out of their depth’ here) has now been tasked with discussing the statue’s future with the Museum of London Docklands and the council.
Guildhall’s pair of slave owners
Two statues that are (almost definitely) going to remain on display, are those of William Beckford and Sir John Cass.
Beckford, who was Lord Mayor of London (twice), “owned 13 sugar plantations, over 22,000 acres of land, and about 3,000 enslaved Africans”. While Cass was on the board of the Royal African Company “which since 1662 had held the monopoly in England on trading along the West Africa coast in gold, silver, ivory and slaves”.
Back in January the City of London Corp, said it was going to “set up a working group to oversee the removal of the statues and consider what might replace them.” But the group seems to have worked themselves into a U-turn, because last month they reversed that decision and said the statues could stay in the Guildhall, as long as they were “contextualised,” via a couple of plaques “installed alongside the memorials with information about the figures’ ties to slavery.”
John Cass has however been removed from another part of London. Back in the summer, Hackney Council decided to rename Cassland Road Gardens to Kit Crowley Gardens in honour of “community stalwart” Kathleen ‘Kit’ Crowley the daughter of an English mother and Barbadian father, who was described as a “role model for children of the Windrush generation growing up in the area”.
Tate Britain’s mural and The Museum of the Home’s statue
Back in May we reported on the fact that the Tate Britain had been forced to close its Rex Whistler restaurant, which is named after the man who painted the mural that adorns its walls. Entitled The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, the mural depicts “the enslavement of a Black child and the distress of his mother using highly stereotyped figures that were common at the time.” When this was brought to wider attention by The White Pube earlier this year, the Tate decided to keep the restaurant closed while they held “a consultation process” to “help determine the future of the Rex Whistler room and mural.”
There has been radio silence from the Tate since then, but they had said that the result of the consultation would be delivered by the end of the year, so let’s see what happens (we’re not holding our breath though).
In June, the Geffrye Museum reopened with a facelift and a new name, but while The Museum of the Home no longer carried the name of the “prominent East India merchant” (and another Lord Mayor!) Robert Geffrye, it did still contain a statue of him on the grounds.
Despite Geffrye having no direct connection to the museum itself (the buildings are former almshouses, which he helped to fund), the statue is still there because, the museum says, they would have to get planning permission to remove it and it might also affect the building’s Grade-I listed status.
As recently as last month, campaigners from Hackney Stand Up to Racism were protesting outside the museum, calling for teachers, youth groups and families to stop visiting it until the statue is taken down or “conceptualised” in some way.
The Museum of the Home’s most recent reply to the Hackney Citizen was, “At present we have no comment to offer.”
And we’re not done yet…
As we were putting this issue together it was announced that the owners of the Plantation Wharf development (which was built in 1995, just south of the river, between Battersea and Clapham) have launched their own consultation “over a potential name change” because… Well, do we need to spell it out?
And the rest…
Amazon is opening a bricks and mortar shop in Westfield, which will sell “a range of goods trending on its website, covering categories such as books, games and toys.” Or, in other words: Because Christmas.
Westminster Council has approved plans to give The House of Fraser building on Oxford Street a £100 million facelift that will include “an extensive refurbishment to fix its crumbling exterior and convert its upper floors into office space and a top floor restaurant with 360 degree views of the surrounding area.”
The Seven Dials Playhouse is a brand new 100-seat venue which will open early next year with the European premiere of Steve, a “comedy-drama about gay men in the throes of domesticity” that was recently directed by Cynthia Nixon off Broadway.
The Guardian has a great photo essay on the birth of the Ministry of Sound. The images are mostly from the early weeks of the club’s life when the owners were doing minimal publicity and instead personally inviting people they had “hand-picked at clubs like Legends, the Wag, the Astoria and Heaven”.
National Geographic has published a really good long read about London’s wild parakeeets. The article references the book The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure in Gonzo Ornithology which is a great read and one to put on your Christmas list if you enjoy the article.
This guy rode 75 miles around London to draw a Strava ‘portrait’ of a man with a moustache, to raise money for Movember.