Frobisher Crescent & The City Of London Council’s Failure To Address Contested Heritage

Although we’ve devoted a fair bit of space on this site to contested monuments and memorials in the City of London – one we haven’t to date addressed is Frobisher Crescent in the Barbican Complex. The building is named after Martin Frobisher, an English privateer whose activities as a human trafficker are well known – he kidnapped several Inuit people from Baffin Island and brought them back to England where their lives were cut short by injury and exposure to diseases prevalent in Europe.

The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 8

Here look at City of London councillors who were independent slave traders. This is a a more difficult area to research than those involved with the Royal Africa Company. That said, after we began this series the project Structures & Significance of British Investment in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, c. 1550-1807 was announced. This is funded to the tune of over a million pounds by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is due to publish its results both online and in book form with biographies of all those implicated in these crimes against humanity in 2024. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, we will simply use this instalment to look at three senior City councillors we know to have been independent slave traders. The results of the academic research due for publication in three years time will undoubtedly be more comprehensive than anything we can do. That said, even with entries on just three City councillors who were independent slave traders this post does serve to highlight the problematic nature of the City of London council’s art collection held at the Guildhall Art Gallery.

Schools Drop Robert Aske Slaver Name, Masonic Lodges Memorialising The City Grandee Are Silent

We suspect that like the Haberdashers’ Company, the Aske lodges will do the minimum they can get away with in terms of properly addressing the real history of those to they have long held up as important predecessors and role models. Since the Aske masonic lodges are largely closed off from public scrutiny they will probably do nothing. Helping organisations like the Haberdashers’ Company along with their reputation washing are right-wing journalists peddling fake news. These hacks include Tom Newtown Dunn who falsely claimed in an opinion piece for The Standard entitled How to defuse a culture war: a group of London schools can teach us a lesson (8 September 2021): “…in March this year, a disturbing discovery was made. As well as his silk business, Aske also invested £500 in the Royal African Company…” As we make clear above, Aske’s slave trade investment has been known about for well over fifty years and possibly a lot longer. Only a journalist who either doesn’t check facts or doesn’t care about them could claim Aske’s stake in the Royal African Company is a recent discovery. Dunn is one of many hacks furthering the hard right’s culture war agenda by replacing facts with fake narratives created by organisations like the Haberdashers’ Company who wish to escape criticism for holding Aske up as a role model for children at their schools until just a few months ago. The Haberdashers’ did this by erasing Aske’s real history – and it stretches credulity to suggest they weren’t aware of it – and replacing it with a mythologised fake one.

Robert Aske & The Memorialisation Of City Of London Grandees Connected To The Slave Trade

While name changes for the Aske schools is something we wish to see happen, this and the renaming of places like Aske Gardens in Hackney, should only be a small part of a much broader process. The activities and ‘treasures’ of all City of London livery companies need to be thoroughly investigated and their charitable status properly scrutinised, as should be clear from our last post. The Aske schools aren’t the only ones the Haberdashers’ have a hand in and the ideological orientation of the education offered in institutions controlled by various livery companies and the City of London council is deeply problematic. A lot more than symbols need to be addressed to create an equitable world.

City of London Livery Halls & The Ongoing Celebration of Slavers & Colonialists

In our posts on the City of London and the Slave Trade we’ve had reason to mention memorials to slavers in a number of livery halls. Livery companies were originally medieval trade guilds but they have more recently transformed themselves into ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ that pose as charities while simultaneously occupying a problematic role in local government in the City of London. We haven’t done a thorough investigation of the 40 odd livery halls dotted around the City but here we mention some problematic items we have come across that we didn’t cover in our earlier posts. Much work remains to be done on exposing everything that’s rotten about the livery companies but it is clear that for at least as long as they have a role in the local government in the City of London, they should be stripped of their charitable status. However, their political role is by no means the only issue we and others have with livery companies being accorded charitable status.

If The Guildhall Was Repurposed As A Slavery Museum There Would Be No Need To Remove Its William Beckford Statue

There is an obvious solution to the City of London council’s reluctance to remove the statue of slave owner William Beckford from its Guildhall HQ, which is a listed building. Viz to transform the Guildhall into a museum dedicated to exposing the horrors of slavery and colonialism. Our own view is that the City of London as the last rotten borough should be abolished, although if this local authority continues in some form the council offices could be moved to the soon to be vacated Museum of London site in Aldersgate. We’ve previously suggested that site could eventually become a slavery museum but using the Guildhall for this purpose would actually seem preferable – with the Beckford statue and the actual location of the 1783 Zong court case over insurance payments for massacred slaves – at the very heart of its historical record of the evils of colonialism.

Beckford & Cass Guildhall Slaver Statues To Go But City Still Failing On Diversity

The results of the City of London’s Historic Landmarks Consultation are in and they are exactly the PR farce we predicted when we wrote about it back in September 2020, concluding: Our guess is the City of London will remove the Cass and Beckford statues from the Guildhall in a miserable attempt at appearing enlightened but it will fail to make more meaningful changes that would lessen the grip on power of middle-aged white men at this local authority. While we’d like to see the Cass and Beckford statues removed, it’s clear that abolishing the business vote would have a much more beneficial effect in terms of inclusion and diversity. Memorials may be the most visible aspect of institutional racism but our anti-racist work does not stop with their removal, it must go on to utterly transform both institutionally racist organisations – such as the City of London council – and the world.

The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 5

A continuation of sketches of senior City of London councillors (aldermen) who were directors of the slave trading Royal Africa Company (or investors in it) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside remarks on various contemporary organisations responsible for memorials and other references to them that require actions such as removal of object, renaming or a more rigorous historical framing. The contemporary organisations addressed in this post include the National Portrait Gallery, Art UK, British Museum, City of London Corporation, Haberdashers’ Company, Carpenters’ Company, Bank of England and Bank of England Museum.

RECLAIM EC1

No To Business Votes, Yes To Democracy!

Robert Aske