Welcome to our fourth newsletter.
Hello! You’ll find lots to read here, including our twelve-step guide to being an ‘heir of slavery’, the latest news from reparative justice campaigns, the grim tale of the Draxes of Drax Hall, how tackling racism leads to better health outcomes, the story of the meeting of an estranged father and son, a celebration for the first recipients of a bursary in Grenada, as well as updates from our busy members.
Plus – we would love your thoughts on what Heirs of Slavery should do next – and how you’d like to be involved.
With thanks for your continuing interest and support,
Alex, David, John, Laura, Richard, Robin and Rosemary
What next for Heirs of Slavery? Click here to give us your views
Navigating Disturbing Family Histories
You’ve found out that your ancestors were involved in slavery. Feeling ashamed? Worried? Wondering what to do next? We’ve written a twelve-step guide – it’s on the Heirs of Slavery website – for those newly navigating their troubling family histories. Here’s a taste:
Lean into the discomfort. Research your family history, especially the bits that make you wince. White Britain’s reluctance to engage with slavery’s legacy is precisely why so much of its impact still lingers. If you don’t know where to start, UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery database is a good bet.
Read up about the empire. Practise the language of reparative justice. Talk about what you discover – and not just with people who already agree with you. Conversations, especially the difficult ones, move the dial. By engaging with this history, we encourage others to do the same.
Consider formally acknowledging your ancestors’ role, publicly or privately. Reparations aren’t just about money – though funding education or supporting Caribbean communities can be meaningful acts. And if you have some old family papers about slavery? Place them in a public archive. History should belong to everyone.
Ultimately, there’s no ‘right’ way to be an heir of slavery. But there’s a wrong way. It’s called silence.
Read on here.
King Charles III and Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s prime minister,
at Buckingham Palace in September 2022.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?
Campaigns for reparative justice for transatlantic slavery have taken some steps forward – and some back – since our last newsletter. Alex Renton sums up what’s been going on.
Last October, Britain’s new Labour administration shocked many people by declaring in advance of a crucial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting that it would not pay or even discuss reparations for slavery with its former colonies, despite Foreign Secretary David Lammy having been a vocal supporter of reparations as a backbencher.
This met with an outcry, particularly from the Caribbean and West African countries at CHOGM in Samoa – ‘What’s the Commonwealth for, if not to discuss issues that divide us?’ was the general view. That forced something of a U-turn. At the end of the week the UK joined all the other 55 nations in agreeing to begin discussions on reparative justice, with Keir Starmer acknowledging in his speech that repair and justice can take many forms beyond the monetary. You can read the CHOGM statement here.
Talks between Britain and the CARICOM nations are due later this year but, under attack in January this year from the Conservatives, the Foreign Office said: ‘We do not pay reparations’. Pressure on Britain is mounting. More Caribbean nations are actively considering cutting some ties with Britain; Jamaica’s parliament is currently debating a bill to remove King Charles as head of state.
In February, Grenada’s prime minister Dickon Mitchell took the CARICOM reparations call to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at a heads of government summit. ‘I don’t mean to be impolite,’ said Mitchell, ‘but I’ll say this to you: the issue of reparations for the transatlantic slavery and the enslavement of African peoples and black bodies is an issue we will take up with you.’ France, Portugal, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands are among the EU countries directly involved in transatlantic slavery, while others, including Sweden and Germany, benefited economically.
Meanwhile, in Britain, institutions continue to examine their links to slavery. In November the two Nottingham universities published a joint report acknowledging that significant figures among their benefactors had wealth derived from slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. Among these were Jesse Boot, founder of Boots the Chemist, Barclays, Lloyds and Midland banks, and the Cavendish-Bentinck family – some of whom objected, arguing that the wealth accrued by enslaver ancestors such as the first Duke of Portland, a governor of Jamaica in the 1720s, was not relevant to the money donated in the 1880s that helped build Nottingham University. There are ‘troubling ethical implications of holding descendants accountable for the actions of their ancestors’, the family told the Times (£) – an issue of which all of us at Heirs of Slavery are well aware. So, let’s all keep talking!
Drax Hall in Saint George, Barbados, property of
the British Drax family since the 1650s.
Drax of Drax Hall: Four Centuries of Shame
What’s in a name? Investigative journalist Paul Lashmar revealed back in 2020 that the multi-millionaire British politician Richard Drax was inheriting the infamous Drax Hall plantation in Barbados, where his ancestors had helped start the first sugar plantations using enslaved Africans. Since then Paul has reported more about the legacies of slavery, including the Trevelyan and Gladstone family apologies. Here he tells how ‘Drax of Drax Hall’, his new history of the Plunkett-Erne-Erle-Drax family, came about.
In June 2020 I was driving along the ‘Great Wall of Dorset’ that protects Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax’s home, Charborough Park. I knew little about the Conservative MP for South Dorset except that his ancestors had some kind of historical link to slavery. A thought flickered, what had this MP contributed to the debate about the BLM protests? Once home, I could only find one recent comment, in his regular column for the county newspaper – an attack on the protests. I was curious that no one seemed to have taken much of an interest in Richard Drax.
I discovered that the family owned 16,000 acres of land and was worth at least £150m. I also heard that it might still own Drax Hall plantation on Barbados. During Covid, though, it proved hard to get information from the locked-down island – until Jonathan Smith, a former BBC reporter living there, offered his assistance. It soon became apparent that Richard Drax was inheriting Drax Hall from his recently deceased parents.
By now I’d become fascinated by the history of the Drax family. Their ancestor James Drax had been among the first settlers in Barbados, landing in 1627, and had gone on to create the first successful sugar plantation in the empire. He was also the first to employ chattel slavery using captive Africans. Sir James Drax became enormously wealthy.
Until the abolition of slavery in 1834, over some eight generations, the Draxes’ ancestors had owned as many as several hundred enslaved Africans at any one time.
For the book I detail a family line that has occupied Charborough House and Drax Hall over a 500-year period. There are some fascinating characters – generals, admirals, proto-feminists, MPs and even a musician and composer who was a servant at the court of Henry VIII. I also reveal how the Drax ancestors benefited from slavery – not just from their plantations but through investments in the wider colonial economy, such as the East India Company and the South Sea Company.
The (now former) MP’s family are unique as descendants of an original settler family that still own a working sugar plantation which for 200 years was worked by enslaved people. Despite pressure from reparations campaigners in the Caribbean, UK and elsewhere, Richard Drax has refused to make a formal apology or a public gesture of reparation for the years of slavery. This has made him the icon for those who oppose engaging with this history.
Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery will be published by Pluto Press on 20 March 2025.
Charborough House, Dorset, home to
the Draxes since the time of Queen Elizabeth I.
Overcoming a Deadly Legacy
Michael Thomson – a Professor of Law at the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Leeds – reveals how his work on health inequities has brought him to consider contemporary legacies of slavery and the question of reparation for colonial crimes.
Inequalities in health exist within and between countries – individuals, groups and populations can have significantly different experiences of ill-health as well as life-expectancy. These inequalities are concerning, for many reasons – and, not least, because poor health can curtail our social and political participation, thereby limiting opportunities and freedoms that we should share equally.
It has long been recognised that these inequalities – in health and freedom – are human made. As a landmark World Health Organisation commission argued in 2008, inequalities in social determinants of health – that is, inequalities in the distribution of power, income, goods and services, and the conditions of work, leisure and home life – are ‘the result of a toxic combination of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics’.
Because health inequalities reflect social inequalities, the unequal distribution of poor health reflects familiar axes of disadvantage and discrimination. This is certainly true in terms of race and ethnicity. COVID-19 brought this graphically and brutally to wider public attention. In the UK, for example, in the early months of the pandemic, Black men were nearly four times more likely to die from the virus than white men, and Black women were nearly three times more likely to die than white women. Social inequalities impacted the mortality rates in two ways. First, long-standing inequalities had led to higher instances of health conditions which made people of colour more susceptible to the worst outcomes from the virus; and second, inequalities in determinants such as housing, transport and employment increased the chance of contracting the virus.
Increasing attention is being paid to racism as a determinant of health – racism which has deep historical roots. Under colonialism, medics, scientists, philosophers and lawyers created the concept of race, and models of racial hierarchy, that justified Atlantic slavery, settler-colonialism, and innumerable other crimes. This racism has persisted, extending the harms of these crimes intergenerationally. Turning to the UK again, the post-War period saw mass migration as people answered the call to address the country’s labour shortages; they also sought to escape the poverty caused by crumbling colonial economies. These newly arrived British citizens from the Commonwealth were generally given the worst housing on the worst estates – which in turn has had long-term consequences for access to employment and education. These still shape experiences today, as does the persistent legacy of racism.
In my article for the journal Medical Law Review, ‘A reparatory account of health inequities’, available here, I argue that addressing racial and ethnic health inequalities can be one part of a broader politics of repair. Like the CARICOM Ten Point Plan, this is not a substitute for other necessary reparatory action. But it’s an important way of acknowledging that the inequalities born of slavery and other colonial crimes live on in the present, in the form of poor health, with all the crushing impact this has on opportunities and freedoms.
Robert Wedderburn, and his 1817 pamphlet series, ‘The Axe Laid to the Root’, which advocated change through insurrectionary revolution.
The Sins of the Father
Alister Wedderburn, whose family has extensive historic ties to plantations in Jamaica, tells the story of a strange encounter that took place two centuries ago at what is now a treasured Scottish tourist destination.
At some point in the 1780s, the Jamaican-born radical preacher, abolitionist, and polemicist Robert Wedderburn travelled up to Scotland from his home in London. His destination was Inveresk Lodge near Edinburgh, the sprawling home of James Wedderburn – his father, and my first cousin seven times removed. Robert’s relationship with James was biological, but not familial. Like many of his Caribbean plantation-owning contemporaries, James fathered children with women he ‘owned’. Robert was one of these, born in 1762 to an African-born woman called Rosanna whom James had enslaved and raped, and with whom he had fathered at least three children. Robert would later write that ‘by him my mother was made the object of his brutal lust, then insulted, abused, and abandoned’ – noting that James had sold Rosanna while she was pregnant with him. On the plantation, the brute violence of human ownership ensured that economies of sex and labour were intricately intertwined.
It is difficult to ascertain what Robert believed would be the likely outcome of his journey to Inveresk. He writes that he made the journey in hope of financial support, being ‘out of work’ and with his wife ‘lying in’ (i.e., either heavily pregnant or in recovery from childbirth). From what he already knew about his father’s treatment of his mother, it is easy to imagine that these hopes might have been tempered by modest expectations. But Robert was taken aback by the fullness and fury of James’s refusal, made all the more striking by his tacit acknowledgement of their relation: ‘[James had] the inhumanity to threaten to send me to gaol if I troubled him… he did not… deny me to be his son, but called me a lazy fellow, and said he would do nothing for me’. Rebuffed and spurned, Robert travelled back to London on a Berwick fishing boat.
I travelled to Inveresk with my young daughter in January in order to see the estate built by my family’s plantation wealth, and the site of Robert’s petition. The house has not been in the Wedderburns’ possession since 1911, and is now managed by the National Trust for Scotland (visiting details here). Only the gardens are accessible, but these run right up to the house’s fine south-facing profile. One can peer through the ground-floor windows at an interior that appears unoccupied, though I suspect the house’s residents simply inhabit its other, less exposed wings. The gardens themselves are expansive and well-kept.
Robert would almost certainly have seen neither the gardens nor the stately southern aspect of Inveresk Lodge that now comprise its only publicly accessible features. Instead, he would likely have entered through the main gateway off Inveresk Village Road into the house’s front courtyard. Although this space is now marked ‘PRIVATE’, one can gaze through the open gates at the house’s front door and imagine Robert’s arrival almost 250 years ago. His biography and writings do not suggest a man beholden to timidity or fear, but one can certainly imagine him torn by a profound ambivalence, as he stood on the porch of a father whose depredations disgusted him. Meanwhile, for James, Inveresk must have felt a universe apart from the western Jamaican plantations where he had made his money: one can imagine his fury, his confusion, perhaps even his panic, as these two worlds suddenly collided through the unexpected knock at his door.
In the garden at Inveresk, a small plaque details the estate’s various changes of ownership, while elsewhere in the village the Wedderburn name adorns two roads and the old poorhouse, now converted into flats. Of the source of the family’s fortune, and of Robert, there is no mention anywhere. These are grave, if common oversights. A forthcoming biography entitled British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist, by the historian Ryan Hanley, promises to reveal much about Robert’s life, animated by a fierce and uncompromising radicalism deriving at least in part from his first-hand experience of Jamaica’s racialised slave economy.
While I await its release, however, I find myself coming back to Inveresk, and to Robert’s arrival at his father’s house. The incident stages an encounter between the institution of slavery and its material and human legacies – a dialogue that many Black scholars and activists, in particular, have continued to lead in the centuries, decades and years since. As heirs, we all have legacies at our own proverbial doorsteps, and the choice we face – whether to open the door, or to keep it closed – is in some ways not unlike that faced by James Wedderburn at Inveresk back in the late eighteenth century. His choice, it need hardly be said, was – and remains – the wrong one.
Inveresk Lodge, ancestral home of the Wedderburns.
A gathering of the first recipients of the Trevelyan Bursary.
Investing in Future Leaders
Three years after publicly apologising for their ancestors’ role in transatlantic slavery, members of the Trevelyan family returned to Grenada – this time, to meet the first recipients of educational bursaries. As Laura Trevelyan explains, this marks the next step in an evolving commitment to acknowledge historical harms by investing in the future.
On 6 February it was my great pleasure to meet the first recipients of the Trevelyan Bursary at the University of the West Indies Global Campus in Grenada. Hearing about how these students are finding time to study remotely for undergraduate degrees, while juggling work and families, was truly inspiring. Among them were aspiring economists, head teachers of the future, clinical psychologists and entrepreneurs with a vision for tourism in Grenada.
Reaching this point has been quite a journey. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, members of the Trevelyan family were part-owners of ten sugar plantations in Grenada. Slavery came into the family in 1757 when Louisa Simond, the daughter of a slave trader, married Sir John Trevelyan. In 2022, I explored these ancestral links to slavery in a BBC documentary, working closely with Grenadian historian Nicole Phillip, Deputy Director of the University of the West Indies Global Campus Sites – pictured here in the black suit on the right.
In this documentary Nicole told me that it would be meaningful to the people of Grenada if I apologised for the actions of my ancestors, and that I should pay reparations for the harms they did. As you might imagine, this sparked quite a debate in the wider Trevelyan family, the upshot being that in 2023 seven of us travelled to Grenada and made that apology. My uncle Tom Trevelyan – in the bright blue patterned shirt, standing on the top step near the right side of the picture – wrote our apology letter with the clarity that only a former GP can provide!
Fast-forward three years, and here we are again in Grenada. It’s the eve of the Independence Day celebrations, and in honour of the occasion Tom and I are dressed in the colours of Grenada’s flag. Nicole’s vision of a British family apologising for the actions of their enslaver ancestors, and paying reparations, has become reality. Twenty-one of the twenty-four students receiving Trevelyan Bursaries are from the parishes of St. Andrew, St. David and St. George, where the Trevelyans once had property.
This is history in action – reparations in action, Nicole told me. Tom and I know that nothing we can do will ever make up for what our ancestors did, robbing Grenadians of their right to freedom in the cruellest way imaginable. But we are grateful to partner with Nicole and Arley Gill, chair of Grenada’s Reparations Committee, in trying to address a painful past and look to the future. My financial contribution made these bursaries possible, and now the wider Trevelyan family has established a pathway that supports both Grenadian schoolchildren and students at the University of the West Indies.
It’s a start, as Nicole likes to say.
A few of the stories on Harewood’s Legacies of the Caribbean website.
Opening the Gates
Harewood House was built on the proceeds of transatlantic slavery – a fact that the house’s educational trust and the Lascelles family continue to confront. As David Lascelles explains, the Harewood website tells the history to engage people and to collaborate with a resilient local Black community.
Our long-standing commitment to the exploration of Harewood’s historical ties to transatlantic slavery continues this spring with the launch of the website’s Legacy of the Caribbean section, where difficult stories are not just being told – a dialogue is being actively invited about how this history resonates today.
The initiative is part of the Harewood Digital Masterplan, the purpose of which is to make Harewood more welcoming to descendant communities. In a series of focus groups – facilitated by Mel Larsen – local people of Caribbean and African heritage were invited to give their perceptions of Harewood and their thoughts on how the Trust can engage with their communities. Mel’s subsequent report has informed the rest of the project.
The website offers a range of resources, starting with Mireille Harper’s powerful article about Harewood’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade. It also features retrospectives on past exhibitions such as Arthur France: Son of a Small Island, and a moving series of interviews titled Voices of Leeds, sharing local Black residents’ experiences of growing up in the city.
The digital platform doesn’t just revisit history – it also highlights Black resilience and achievement. A collaboration with St Matthew’s Primary School saw children envisioning the next Missing Portrait, our ongoing series at Harewood. Their creative responses are a joyful reminder that while we learn from the past, we also build on it. Harewood has also reimagined its educational work, launching a digital version of its long-running Transatlantic Slave Trade learning session. Inspired by BBC Bitesize, this resource is designed to boost teachers’ confidence in addressing challenging histories in the classroom.
We hope this initiative shows how heritage spaces can use digital tools to grapple with the legacies of enslavement – bridging the gap between the past and the present to foster understanding, inclusion and hope. For those who may never visit Harewood in person, this ongoing project ensures that its reckoning with its past extends far beyond its gates.
The panel of the first UNESCO Dialogues for Reparatory Justice in Paris.
News in brief…
In October, Heirs co-founders John Dower and Laura Trevelyan were on the panel of the first UNESCO Dialogues for Reparatory Justice – aimed at developing a long-term action plan in collaboration with multiple stakeholders. This was part of the celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Programme in Paris, with speakers from the Caribbean, Brazil, France, Canada and the UK.
Funded by the Scottish government, Stirling University and Glasgow University’s Beniba Centre are running workshop weekends to give practical help to secondary school teachers who want to make the story of the Scots and transatlantic slavery more vivid and relevant to their pupils. Heirs co-founder Alex Renton has been taking part, telling his Scottish family’s story as enslavers in Jamaica and Tobago and sharing images from the archive that can be used in teaching.
An inaugural meeting was held last October in the Palace of Westminster of the 1833 Commemoration Group, dedicated to marking the forthcoming bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery Act. Chaired by Professor Penelope J. Corfield, the group was addressed by Dele Ogun, Olivette Otele, Asher Craig, Iyamide Thomas and James Fookes. More information as plans develop.
In November, Laura Trevelyan went to Grenada’s island of Carriacou, devastated by Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, for a PBS Newshour special report on how the islanders are recovering from the strongest storm ever to form in the Atlantic so early in the hurricane season.
Heirs co-founder John Dower was moderator on the second UNESCO Dialogues for Reparatory Justice held in December, this time in Barcelona. On the panel were the Rev. Keith Magee, chair of The Guardian Foundation, Dieudonne Boutrin, co-founder of La Coque Nomade Fraternité (France), Dennis O’Brien, CEO of Repair Campaign (Caribbean/Ireland), Pierre Guillon de Prince, co-founder of La Coque Nomade Fraternité (France), Fernando Macías, Director-General of the Office of Nondiscrimination and Equality (Spain), Fernanda do Nascimento Thomaz, General Coordinator of the Ministry of Human Rights (Brazil) and Arley Gill, chair of the Reparations Commission (Grenada).
The Good Law Project launched ‘No Room for Slavery’, a campaign to encourage the British Museum to mount a permanent exhibit about the slave trade. Their video has had more than 500,000 views so far. A new film, Omitted, made by the Black Curriculum, features interviews with Professor Gus John, Malik Al Nasir, Lavinya Stennett, Heirs co-founder John Dower and others.
Two major exhibitions on either side of the Atlantic confront the legacies of slavery. Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (to 1 June 2025) examines resistance movements that challenged enslavement, highlighting voices often silenced in history. In Slavery’s Wake at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC (to 8 June 2025) immerses visitors in the freedom-making practices of Black communities.
Asher Craig addresses the 1833 Commemoration Group in the Palace of Westminster’s Jubilee Room.
Looking forwards...
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