Above you can see your faithful narrator standing in front of a monument in the centre of Banbridge, County Down, Ireland. The statue is of Francis Crozier (1796-1848) and is located in the middle of a very busy junction outside his family home, Avonmore House. The reason I risked life and limb playing a real life game of Frogger to pose for this photo – after making an hour and a half round trip to Banbridge, which boasts fuck all apart from this monument – is that I am distantly related to Crozier through my Dad’s family line, and it felt meaningful, somehow, to visit this grand commemoration of his life.
This entire opening paragraph was really just a clumsy segue into talking about statues.
There has been a movement to have statues all over the UK and the United States torn down because the subjects of the statues were prominent slave traders or Confederate officers or general bastards of several stripes and flavours. This isn’t a recent movement, but it has flared up again in the news over the last few weeks when a statue of Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol and pushed into the harbour. This was because the statue was raised to celebrate Colston’s philanthropy, but a sizeable part of the money that allowed him to be a philanthropist was made in the Atlantic slave trade.
Why this has happened now is undoubtedly a complex mixture of factors. Several petitions to have the statue removed have been unsuccessful going back to the 1990s. The Black Lives Matter campaign is once again very much at the front of the public consciousness, and while I’m sure most protestors would deny it, the statue of a historical slave trader is an excellent proxy for acting out socially acceptable mob violence (whether that desire is sublimated or not, there is a burning of the Guy vibe here). The coronavirus lockdown is probably a factor too: being stuck indoors in chat rooms and Facebook groups trying to deal with social inequality or injustice is probably not a very healthy environment, mental health wise.
It all adds up to the situation boiling over, and an inanimate object takes a swim.
While I do have an opinion about whether we tear statues down or not, I’m more interested in why we want to tear them down. Our relationship with our national history and, more broadly, who we idolise and what we do when they turn out to have feet of clay is a murky subject.
Edward Colston is just one of many historical figures whose statue represents a Victorian whitewash. It’s true of cities up and down the United Kingdom, no less so in Glasgow, the city on my doorstep. Glasgow was the second city of the British Empire back in the day, and there is a renewed effort to reconcile how much of its success and growth was funded by wealthy men who profited on the slave trade between the 16th and 19th century.
It’s not just statues. Glasgow Cathedral shows 18th century merchant families who paid to be included in the stained glass windows, with money made in the plantation trade. The Gallery of Modern Art was originally the mansion of the Cunningham family, while Ingram, Buchanan and Glassford Streets are all named after slavers.
The Victorians raised these statues and named these streets to reflect the financial wealth these individuals brought to their respective cities, and they were presented without reflection on where the money came from. In Colston’s case the statue was erected 174 years after his death, and some sixty or so years after the abolition of slavery in the UK.
It comes down, at the seed level, to where one gets their version of the facts, just like hearing the details of an argument from only one of the people involved. You are presented with facts, and how much you check the facts, trust the person relating them or investigate your own personal bias is up to you. When I listed off the names of the slavers above I had to really had to dredge the shallow depths of my knowledge on the subject, none of which was information I was taught in school: in fact, looking up Wikipedia and Google to check which names were legitimate has taught me more in the last ten minutes, and that’s only skimming the surface.
I have no idea what the current curriculum in Scottish schools is for History as a subject (or its close cousin, Modern Studies), but my recollection of it from school was free from bias (a good thing) but also free from making you form a moral judgement for yourself (a bad thing). Of the subjects I recall in any detail we had some Scottish history: William Wallace and Robert the Bruce were en vogue because Braveheart was new, but we also covered the Jacobite War of the British Succession. There was local history in the form of Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party. And of course, for world history we covered The Great War and World War Two.
In the latter case, we covered the factual history – a little Kristallnacht, the Blitz, evacuation of children, the Holocaust, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, and the two big figureheads of Churchill and Hitler – but it was all broad strokes and exam-relevant dates. A general, easy to digest ‘Nazis evil, Tommies good’ story, with Adolf Hitler as a floppy-fringed bad guy and Winston Churchill as the bulldog-faced mascot of the plucky Brit.
Nowhere did we discuss what actually motivated thousands of presumably decent German people to follow Hitler. I mean, yeah, there was talk of the reparations after WW1 and the Treaty of Versailles, a little bit of Lebensraum, but nothing that showed how a fascist with such extreme views and a national platform could stir up such a deadly brand of patriotism. I genuinely hope that teachers today are taking the opportunity to make this relevant to our current crop of students and showing them parallels between Hitler’s tactics and those employed by President Donald Trump. I’m not saying this as a Trump hater – I have quite enough of my time monopolised by hating the Conservative party on my side of the pond, thank you very much – but I think it’s fascinating that we have a comparable modern leader on realistically a far more global stage repeating the lessons of history.
It all goes to demonstrate the short collective memory of society, that lessons from the past are not indelibly learned. When I was at school, WW2 was modern history, the end of the war only about 50 years ago and fought by the living grandparents of the people in that classroom. It was recent enough that the scars on the collective psyche of society still hadn’t healed, people in Europe especially were driven towards unity, not division. We were taught that in Modern Studies and History class when we talked about things like NATO and the European Union.
Since I was in high school another 20 years have passed: the last fighting Tommy from WW1 died in 2005, the last veteran followed in 2012 and the Great War officially became history as an abstract, not a living thing. We still have hundreds of thousands of WW2 veterans alive worldwide today, but that number will dwindle over the next decade or so. The further we get from the past, the more we rely on what we are told about it: in the example which started this discussion, Colston’s statue was erected long after living memory of the man and his life had washed away. The Victorians raised a statue to a rich man, a philanthropist, and no discussion of where he made his fortune was deemed necessary.
Staying with World War Two and the theme of statues, another thing I wasn’t taught in school. Winston Churchill was a truly despicable human being.
I really only came to learn about this by accident. I was writing something about heroes, and I made a list of people who had inspired me over the course of my life. As I hope is clear, I’d loved History at school and had gone on to some further reading about Churchill. I particularly admired him as an orator and a mordant wit: I studied his famous “We will fight them on the beaches” speech (with its impressive use of Old English) as much as his digs at Clement Attlee or Nancy Astor. In my own writing I was trying to flesh out that gruff, hard-drinking, inspirational caricature and quote machine.
It’s a dark list of misdeeds. In recent years much more of it has become documented in the press as various anniversaries of his death or life have come to pass: he went from being voted the greatest ever Briton in 2002 to having his statue defaced on numerous occasions. His views on race and eugenics were abhorrent to modern sensibilities (check out his comments to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937, for example). His role in the Bengal Famine, through his actions or inactions, was damning, although some apologists say he saw that as a distraction due to the global war of the time.
There are more, but like the man himself they are a little harder to portray in black and white terms. There are allegations of anti-Islamic or anti-Semitic views, but there is equally as much evidence to say he had Zionist tendencies: his conduct with the Tonypandy strikers and the siege of Sydney Street are both very questionable. But even disallowing them, there is plenty available both in his own writing and in the historical record that casts him as being as deeply flawed.
In many respects he was an extreme product of his time and class: Imperialist at the decline of the British Empire, staunchly anti-working class, an early supporter of fascist regimes and at least casually anti-Semitic and determined to shore up British global interests through bloody violence. It’s almost as though to defeat an arch-racist like Hitler we had to field one of our own as his opposite number.
So do we tear down his statue? And hundreds of others, for that matter?
I think in the case of Edward Colston and other slavers, we have a chance to make history and to correct injustices. We should not have statues of slaver presented as statues of philanthropists. I’m not in favour of them taking a dip in a canal, but I do support the idea that some of them can be rehomed in museums where their proper historical context can be examined. The Victorian era of statue raising was an attempt to celebrate our national identity as a prosperous world power while ignoring how our Empire had been built, and at what cost in foreign lives. I’m all in favour of making history by reframing those statues as lessons from history.
Edward Colston lived three hundred years ago, the events of his life can be used to teach if we are willing to look at the history of our country and tell the true story. Bad decisions were made, many people suffered, but because the normal man on the street wasn’t affected, because resources were made more readily available and because rich men could become richer, slavery was allowed to exist and flourish. We need to own that, and telling that truth is, in itself, something of a reparation.
For Churchill, a figure inextricably entwined in a formative global conflict, we are in murkier waters. Churchill in many respects shows the problem we have when any talented or famous individual is exposed in an unflattering light.
Nobody in our country wants to talk about renowned philanthropist Jimmy Savile because after his death in 2011 it was revealed he had been a prolific predatory sex offender. Allegations made during his lifetime were largely disregarded because Jimmy was a national treasure and he raised £40 million pounds for various charities, but to more modern eyes it’s almost laughable that this seedy looking man in a tracksuit with his staring eyes and trademark cigar was not outed earlier.
A less clear-cut case is the former King of Pop, Michael Jackson. The most awarded artist in the history of popular music, a genuine cross-genre global superstar, his later life was dogged with allegations of improper conduct around minors. The facts, even eleven years after his death, will never truly be known: the more we learn of his fiercely-guarded private life, the more it becomes clear that four decades of superstardom had created a very troubled man. It makes appreciating his influence on the musical and cultural landscape much harder. I own most of his musical back catalogue and much of it would bear up well today, but do I want to listen to music made by a potential child molester? Do I want other people to know I was listening to it?
On a more personal note, one of my not-even-guilty pleasures is watching American professional wrestling. One of my all-time favourite wrestlers was a man called Chris Benoit, the Rabid Wolverine, who was famous for his no-nonsense, hard-hitting style. In 2007, Benoit murdered his wife and young son, then killed himself by hanging. The reasons are likely cumulative: an autopsy later revealed he had a brain similar to an 85 year-old Alzheimer’s patient after years of unprotected blows to the head, and the man himself had suffered terrible depression after the death of his friend, Eddie Guerrero in 2005. Whatever the reasons, I have since found it difficult to watch back any matches from Benoit’s career, despite them being writ large across my love of wrestling: I find it hard to divorce the man, the entertainer, from his actions.
Anyway, back to Churchill. Someone like Churchill needs to have his good deeds balanced against his abhorrent views, and that can only come about with mature discussion, whether that’s by councils or interested groups of citizens. This includes the fact that some of those abhorrent views were representative of the age he lived through. I have never been to Rome, but when I go there I would hate to see statues of Caesar or Pompey torn down or defaced because they were warlords who personally oversaw the deaths of thousands in war. We tend to look more benignly on ancient history, as if the men in those statues are somehow unknowable. We look at why the Colosseum was built and say, ‘It was a different time.’ And that’s true, it was. But so was the time Churchill lived in, even though it feels so modern and similar to our own.
It’s important to remember that statues are not, in and of themselves, history. History is what we teach ourselves and our children about our past, where we came from. Some of Churchill’s worst misdeeds caused people to suffer, but he did not grow rich on suffering like the slavers did. There is a wealth of writing in his own words that allows us to condemn or exonerate him, whereas with the slavers – like our aforementioned Roman citizens – we have only their deeds to be judged.
In my previous post, I briefly mentioned the statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow. Statues are part of the landscape of our cities, in no small part thanks to the Victorians. We could tear down the old statues and recycle the plinths for new statues, something honouring the lives of people who did good without ambiguity.
Winston Churchill committed genuine atrocities in his life, but he was instrumental in the defeat of the Nazi war effort. Perhaps only a ruthless piledriver of a man could have helped make the decisions that won the war. These complexities, these seeming contradictions, are what make Churchill a person, not a symbol. We need to remember that all of history is the story of men and women, the mistakes they make, and tell that story, share that narrative. In a quote often misattributed to the man himself: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The Unreliable Narrator 