Sir Robert Vyner

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.

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The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 7

On the whole it is easier to identify City of London aldermen who were directors and investors in the slave trading Royal Africa Company (RAC) than common councillors from the same local authority. This is, of course, because aldermen generally held a more elevated social status and were richer – although many common councillors were and are wealthy. Nonetheless, J. R. Woodhead’s Rulers of London 1660-1690 provides a good guide to the involvement of not just aldermen but also common councillors who were Africa Company directors and investors for a limited period of the RAC’s existence. So here we extract from Rulers information about those who were only common councillors and didn’t become aldermen, but who did invest in the RAC and/or participated in organising the slave trade as its directors.

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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.

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The City of London & The Slave Trade Part 2

When we began our look at the huge overlap between the slave trading Royal Africa Company and the City of London council we quoted Historic England on this entanglement. We chose this particular source because it emphasised that the Guildhall (the City of London council offices) was a centre of the slave trade. That said we could see that the numbers used were drawn from the book The Royal African Company by K. G. Davies (Longmans Green, 1957), since on pages 68/69 Davies states: “Fifteen of the Lord Mayors of London, between the Restoration and the Revolution, and twenty-five of the Sheriffs were shareholders in the company, as were thirty-eight of the men elected or appointed aldermen between 1672 and 1690.” Historic England use the same figures and time frame in what we quoted from them. It’s important to understand that these numbers do not cover the overlaps between the City of London council and the Royal Africa Society during the entire history of this slave trading operation, just its earlier phase.

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