Welcome to our second newsletter.
Since we were last in touch, back in January, there has been real, tangible progress in the campaign for reparative justice for transatlantic enslavement. The announcement of the Church of England's Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice has made headline news. Meanwhile, as a group we have been busy forging connections across both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. Also cheering has been the publication of the Repair Campaign's recent poll showing that a majority of Britons support a governmental apology for enslavement.
With thanks for your continuing interest and support,
Alex, Charlie, David, John, Laura, Richard, Robin and Rosemary
The Church of England’s repair initiative
The Church of England's reparations fund for the harms done by transatlantic enslavement now has a name – The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice. It is hoped that this will start disbursing money before the end of 2024, now that the Church Commissioners – the body that manages the finances of the C of E – has accepted the recommendations of an independent ‘oversight group’ on the aims and scope of the initiative. Heirs co-founder Alex Renton is a member of this consultative group.
The Commissioners acted after new research showed a significant amount of the £10.3bn that the Church currently has under investment derived from the proceeds of enslavement enterprises. To address that, the Commissioners decided to assign £100m for a perpetual investment fund. The oversight group recommended that the Fund should aim to build itself to £1bn, accepting donations from other institutions, individuals and eventually more from the Church itself.
The Fund will be tasked with spending the proceeds of its investments in the UK, the Caribbean and West Africa, with an emphasis on education, health and equality initiatives. Anyone can donate – you can get in touch with the Fund via its website.
This is a historic move. No other institution in Europe has yet come up with so grand a plan, with such wide scope, or such potential for others – individuals and organisations – to join in. It has caused a stir: sections of the British media, meanwhile, have roundly condemned the Fund, with Nigel Farage proclaiming that he plans to quit the Church of England.
In early April the Archbishop of Canterbury defended the initiative, writing: ‘The new Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice has an invaluable catalytic potential to help change the very mindsets and attitudes that produced Transatlantic Chattel Slavery, and so many other atrocities around the world, and to seek that they do not happen again. So this is about setting up a fund which seeks justice for all. This isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s about mutual flourishing for all God’s children. Through the power of example, however messy, difficult and imperfect, the fund seeks to create a model that could be leveraged elsewhere.’
Talking slavery repair with France
On 25 March, the UN’s International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Clive Lewis MP moderated a discussion in the Jubilee Room of the House of Commons called ‘A dialogue between Heirs of Enslavement’. Dieudonné Boutrin, of La Coque Nomade-Fraternité in Nantes, France and his colleague Pierre Guillon De Prince, a descendant of shipping merchants involved in the slave trade, travelled to Westminster to appear on Clive’s panel along with Laura Trevelyan.
The following day, John Dower accompanied Dieudonné and Pierre to the Museum of London, Docklands where they met the French-Caribbean curator Jean-François Manicom and were shown around the London, Slavery & Sugar exhibition. The museum is housed in a former warehouse in the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs. In the evening, at Bayes Business School in the City of London, the Guardian journalist Paul Lashmar moderated a discussion between Dieudonné, Pierre, Laura Trevelyan and Tonika Stephenson of Liverpool Advocates for Windrush – Tonika having graciously stepped in at the last minute after Clive Lewis had to drop out due to parliamentary business.
The next morning Dieudonné and Pierre travelled, complete with film crew, to Liverpool’s Royal Albert Dock where they were hosted by Michelle Charters, head of the International Slavery Museum. They also met the Deputy Major of Bristol Asher Craig, representatives of Bristol Legacy Foundation, Liverpool Black History Research Group, Lancaster Black History Group and Michelle Gayle, co-founder of The World Reimagined. The day ended with a tour of Liverpool Town Hall given by the city's deputy mayor, where they were photographed (above) on the staircase below a statue of George Canning, ex-prime minister and arch-anti-abolitionist. Liverpool’s connections with the transatlantic trade remain evident in its docks and many of its buildings.
Dieudonné and Pierre are motivated by the need to acknowledge the link between France’s historical involvement in enslavement and the present-day legacies of inequality and discrimination in France and the French Caribbean. They originally reached out to the Trevelyan family in the search for allies from across La Manche, initiating a lively Anglo–French dialogue about how descendants of the enslaved and of enslavers might work together to make reparative justice a reality.
Most Britons back slavery apology
The Repair Campaign, an initiative of the CARICOM Reparations Commission in conjunction with the Irish businessman and philanthropist Denis O’Brien, commissioned the first polling in years on British people's attitude to the history of transatlantic enslavement and its consequences.
Beyond the headline figure showing that 60 per cent of British people support an apology, other interesting details emerged from the survey of more than two thousand people. Four in ten agreed that Caribbean nations should receive financial compensation for the legacies of slavery and colonialism.
The Labour MP Clive Lewis told the Guardian: ‘These results give us the clearest indication yet of the open-minded, progressive and reasoned position that many of our fellow citizens have on the issue of reparatory justice.
‘This is a fantastic place to build on, to begin a nationwide conversation about tackling many of the unresolved legacies of 400 years of slavery and empire. I take great heart from these results. Despite what some politicians and those on the right might say, it’s quite clear that the British public is ready to have this conversation.’
The Repair Campaign is focused on all former colonial powers that were involved in transatlantic chattel slavery. It works ‘to amplify Caribbean voices calling for reparations and produce evidence-based socio-economic reparatory justice plans.’ More here.
Doing the right thing with family papers
Heirs co-founder Richard Atkinson is currently in the midst of cataloguing his family papers, prior to depositing them at Cumbria Archives.
Like most people newly tussling with the knowledge that their ancestors profited from the transatlantic slave trade, it started for me with a startling moment of discovery.
Stories about ancestral slaveholdings do not tend to be recounted at the dining table, buffed up like silver, a reassuring reminder of past glories. On the contrary – these stories were likely buried several generations ago in an unmarked family vault of shame. And that’s where they would likely have remained, were it not for the radical transparency of the internet.
Most newly enlightened British ‘heirs’ will have first learnt of their ancestors’ involvement in slavery through UCL’s trailblazing Legacies of British Slavery database, which shone light on records relating to the 1830s ‘compensation’ of slaveholders for the loss of their human ‘property’. For me, though, the discovery came about in an altogether more low-tech way – through reading my Georgian ancestors’ correspondence.
The papers had come down to me from my grandparents, and were stowed in a 1950s cardboard box printed with the incongruously cheery insignia of Batchelor’s Peas. For decades this box had lurked in a cupboard, out of sight but never quite out of mind. I was predisposed to find its contents daunting, due to all the spidery handwriting that I knew would need deciphering. But, if I’d felt daunted beforehand – how much more so did I feel afterwards, having read and digested the letters? One document in particular – an inventory of the enslaved population of the Windsor estate in St Elizabeth parish, Jamaica, in 1801, listing the names of 196 individuals, their employment and value in pounds sterling (shown above) – placed my ancestors’ culpability beyond doubt.
A disturbing discovery – but I also knew how privileged I was, to be able to access my ancestors' innermost thoughts through the prism of these revealing family letters. The descendants of the enslaved people listed in this document likely knew nothing of these ancestors, not even their names. As I later learnt – because this discovery would mark the start of a decade’s research, culminating in a warts-and-all biography of my ancestors – slaveholders were stubbornly resistant to the keeping of records that might today have assisted the genealogical research of descendants of the enslaved.
Most correspondence relating to the slave trade, and its myriad offshoots, was destroyed generations ago, which makes the small proportion that survives all the more significant. However, for those ‘heirs’ who find themselves in possession of family papers relating to this history, they can represent a burden. Too important to be destroyed, obviously, but tainted, incriminating, a Pandora's box... what to do with them? Clearly there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this conundrum. As a starting point, though, the aspiration must be to make them publicly available, whether by depositing them in an archive, or through digitisation and placing them online.
Certainly, for someone researching their family history, even the tiniest crumb of information can prove revelatory. And surely, given the sheer chaos that was forced upon millions of enslaved Africans – deprived of their names, their families, their homes, their cultures and their liberty – the very least that those of us who are descended from their enslavers can do is to make our documents available to their descendants – even if such documents can only ever offer crumbs?
Britain today is a multi-racial, post-colonial nation, and we are currently negotiating a necessary, cathartic process of reckoning with our past. There can be no hiding the darkest aspects of our history. The act of making private papers public is an important expression of acknowledgement – and acknowledgement is the first step on the road to repair.
Richard would love to hear from any heirs who are grappling with the question of what to do with their family papers.
UK stealing teachers?
Many reparations plans see improving education as a key way of helping the descendants of the enslaved address today's poverty and inequality. Some of the donations made by members of Heirs of Slavery – see this list for some of the organisations we support – go towards scholarships and other educational activities in the UK and the Caribbean.
Some of us have visited schools in Jamaica and elsewhere where shortages of teachers, especially in maths and science, are a serious problem. Thousands leave every year for better salaries in richer anglophone countries.
So it is disappointing to discover that the UK has stepped up its recruitment drive for teachers in its former colonies in the Caribbean and West Africa. A new £10,000 sign-on bonus has doubled the number of Jamaican teachers coming here every year, to 486 in 2023. It’s a conundrum – people have a right to migrate in order to further their careers and improve their lives. But isn’t it right that Britain, which now spends very little in development aid in Jamaica, should at least recompense the country for extracting this vital resource? Do please contact us if you have a view.
Our Island Stories
Dr Corinne Fowler is the University of Leicester-based historian whose report for the National Trust on its country houses’ connections to empire caused a furore on publication in 2020. Now she has written Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain, which will be published by Penguin on 2 May. In this conversational, challenging book, which takes the form of ten rural rambles, Fowler explains how the British countryside and the British empire are inseparably entwined.
Chapters include walks linking Jura and Jamaica (sugar), Whitehaven and Virginia (tobacco), Grasmere and Canton (the East India Company), Hampshire and Louisiana (banking), and Cornwall and the Americas (copper). On each of these excursions, Corinne walks alongside a descendant of those who suffered the sharp end of the colonial sword, and together they explore this shared British scenery, and what it means today – including uncomfortable reminders that people of colour continue to feel unwelcome in the landscape to which their ancestors contributed so much. This fascinating book should inspire anyone who perceives British heritage in any way monoculturally to look again, and to view the cultural wealth of our variegated nation with new appreciation.
A round-up of some more of our recent activities...
The second instalment of Harewood’s Missing Portraits project has just ended. The project aims to redress the imbalance of the hundreds of historic portraits of rich white people at Harewood, by commissioning photographic portraits of men and women of colour with a contemporary connection to the house. The most recent subject was the actor David Harewood OBE. His portrait is now part of the permanent collection, hanging on the wall alongside family portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough. Missing Portraits had a very positive mention in a recent review in the New York Times of the ‘Entangled Pasts’ show at London’s Royal Academy, which ends on 28 April – well worth seeing if you haven’t yet.
In February, the Trevelyan family launched the Trevelyan Grenada Reparations Fund, a registered UK charity which in its first year of operation will support education in Grenada. Laura Trevelyan, Tom Trevelyan, chair of the charity’s trustees, and vice-chair Clare Trevelyan visited the country for the 50th anniversary of its independence from Britain. Arley Gill, chair of Grenada’s National Reparations Committee, and Laura Trevelyan, one of the charity’s trustees, gave a joint interview to the Daily Telegraph from Grenada.
In March, at the invitation of Dr Dennis Hamilton of the University of Wolverhampton, Arley Gill, chair of Grenada’s National Reparations Committee, and Laura Trevelyan took part in a public panel discussion about reparatory justice for transatlantic chattel slavery. Laura travelled to Wolverhampton for the event, while Arley beamed in remotely from Grenada.
In March, Laura Trevelyan gave the inaugural Sir Tom Hopkinson lecture at Cardiff University’s school of Journalism, Culture and Media. Her theme was ‘Confronting the Past’, and she used her speech to call for the preservation of the Caribbean’s historical archives, many of which are threatened by climate change. Laura, who trained in print journalism at Cardiff, was subsequently interviewed by Tristan Rees, a postgraduate student at the university.
Looking forwards...
John Dower and Tom Trevelyan will be travelling to Nantes on 4 May to take part in Paroles de descendants (Words of Descendants), a conference of descendants of enslavers and the enslaved.
Heirs of Slavery co-founders David Lascelles and Laura Trevelyan will both be speaking at ‘The Public Country House: “treasure of quiet beauty” or a site for public histories?’ This two-day symposium at London’s V&A, in partnership with the National Trust, will be held on 16 and 17 May, and will address the contemporary debate about the relevance of country houses in the twenty-first century.
Notice board...
We get many journalists asking to be put in touch with people addressing their family history of involvement in enslavement. Here’s one such request from a documentary-maker whose interest in telling the story with sensitivity seems genuine.
I’m Chris Hackett, a senior Producer-Director at ITN Productions, the documentary arm of ITN News. We are one of the UK’s leading production companies and make factual programmes for major UK broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, as well as international streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and Discovery. We are in tentative talks with the BBC about producing a documentary looking at the heirs of slavery – it feels like the right moment to truly delve into Britain’s past, including slavery’s impact on institutions but also individuals.
We want this programme to be led by human stories and we are looking to speak to people with a huge variety of experiences and stages of their journey. We want to hear from those currently researching their ancestral history, those coming to terms with their discoveries and those who are trying to work out what to do with that knowledge. My understanding from speaking to those who have gone public is that it can prove a cathartic moment. We want this documentary to be bold and hopefully raise awareness of the issues and its complexities and generate a wider conversation.
We are still in development stages and any contact before would be in total confidence with no commitment to take part. Anyone interested in speaking to me about the project should get in touch via my email.
chris.hackett@itn.co.uk