From the Archives Elizabeth Wells
School Archivist
A map from a copy of Hakluyt’s work Divers Voyages in the school’s Greene Collection.
Black Lives Matter
One of the enduring images of the UK’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations will undoubtedly be the toppling of Edward Colston’s statute in Bristol. Many outside of the city would not have known who Colston was until 2020 – but the campaign to modify the statue’s plaque, so that it acknowledged that Colston’s philanthropy was built on trading over 80,000 enslaved people, had been fruitlessly continuing for years. The actions of the crowd were not a spontaneous act of vandalism but an expression of long held frustration. olston’s statue is the only one in the country to have been removed by protestors, and those responsible have been prosecuted. However, other statues across the country are now being scrutinized. At the time of writing a commission established to assess the legacy of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College – including whether or not to remove his statue – had delayed its final report, in part due to the weight of submissions received. The Corporation of London is engaged in a dispute concerning a depiction of Old Westminster, William Beckford, at the Guildhall. The government-backed approach of ‘retain and explain’, championed by Historic England, is at odds with the Corporation’s desire to remove the statue. I have been giving thought to those who are memorialised around the School. Comparatively little of our portraiture was commissioned or purchased by the School, most were gifts. Names have often developed in an organic fashion; Ashburnham House is named after the building in which it was based, rather than in honour of the Earls of Ashburnham. The accretions of history we see around us have developed in a haphazard way. Moreover, even where artefacts were intended to be celebratory, they are not always interpreted in that manner – the
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The Elizabethan Newsletter
mixed reactions to the school’s 450th anniversary statue of Elizabeth I are a prime example. History is a process of constant revision and disputation, not a single static story. The Westminster spirit is one of loyal dissent and I hope we teach all our pupils to approach their environment with a critical eye, especially when it comes to representations of power and wealth. The other difficulty is summarised by the historian’s adage – ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ The philosopher Julian Baggini noted in a recent article that ‘by our current standards, most Britons in history have been misogynist, racist and homophobic,’ whether or not records
Colston's statue, Bristol and above during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations
