statues to remove and statues to reinstate

[Ozexpatriate]

4 hours ago, Ohmisterporter said:

In the USA a slave owner named Patrick Henry made a famous quote, "Give me liberty or give me death". He had a narrow view as to what liberty meant. Even so, he and his quote are still revered in the country.

 

5 hours ago, Fenman said:

History's a funny thing.

Indeed it is. Written by the winners and not necessarily accurate.

 

5 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

No doubt if we are not simply going to regard enslavement of people , including those snatched from their homes in England by foreign slave traders in the 17th century, or those shipped from their homes in Britain to the American colonies as 'bonded servants' (i.e. slaves in all but name) prior to 1776 as being relevant  but are going to apply racial distinctions when talking about it we are selling ourselves very short of reality and common humanity.

 

The United States is struggling with it's original sin. It has been plastered over many times but the cracks keep reappearing. They won't just go away.

 

My personal theory is that the notion of "liberty" is venerated in the United States because of the point Mike makes. Almost 75% of all people who came to the colonies in the 18th century before 1775 did so without their freedom.

 

They came as convicts (remember that the Colony of New South Wales was created in 1788 because Britain could no longer dump undesirables in the North American colonies), indentured servants and African slaves. Of course at the time transportation was considered humane - at least compared with the hangman's noose.

 

Immigrants to the 13 colonies 1700 – 1775

Convicts                                52,200                       9%

Indentured servants          96,600                     18%

African Slaves                   278,400                     47%

Free                                     151,600                     26%

 

All of these people were treated like property by those that owned them or their indentures. Convict sentences were "sold" on the docks, much like slaves, to plantation owners. The difference of course is that the white convicts and indentured servants had periods of servitude that, once expired, were"freed". The term manumission is equally applicable to freeing convicts, indentured servants and slaves. 

 

Their history is largely whitewashed in the American mind. Naturally those who crossed the Atlantic without personal liberty probably did not share these experiences with their children and their descendants today have no idea. Better forgotten than remembered. After the revolution there was a conscious effort to hide this history  of under the banner of personal liberty. Nevertheless, having experienced the loss of "freedom", "freedom" was precious.

 

As the descendant of a transported convict (to Australia) I can tell you that it took extensive genealogical research to uncover this fact.

 

Sadly the African slaves would remain property for almost another 100 years and the systemic racism required to maintain this system then, persists.

[Nick C]

5 hours ago, Fenman said:

 

That I'd agree with. The traditional "kings and queens"-type history that was endemic in many schools does us a profound disservice. It's also, today, ridiculously partial (endless repetition of the rise of Nazi Germany; nothing about the very foundation of England, for example. I don't know of any other country which so completely ignores its own formation in its school history. And there's usually almost nothing on the history leading to the Treaty of Union between England (sic) and Scotland)

 

 

My wife grew up under the communists, and briefly worked as a teacher after moving here. She abhors the method and content of UK history lessons as they omit or skip over so much important stuff and focus on tedious things like the dates of kings and queens. 

[Ozexpatriate]

5 hours ago, rovex said:

I'm waiting for the first of our modern image members to build a model of an offensive statue being pulled down by a rioting mob.

The artist Banksy has proposed this for Bristol.

 

"Something for everyone"

[Ozexpatriate]

8 hours ago, Torper said:

So presumably statures of George Washington (a major slave-owner ) and Thomas Jefferson (600+ slaves) should be torn down?  Not to mention Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Polk and Taylor, all of whom were presidents who owned slaves while in office.

This is regularly asserted in the US by opponents of the removal of Jim Crow-era, Confederate monuments as an attempt at reductio ad absurdum.

 

There is no escaping the "original sin" of the founding.

 

Having said that, for the descendants of former slaves to live surrounded by slogans like "The South Will Rise Again" is intolerable. Such messages are not about history. They are about a potential future - desired by, at least, some.

 

Edited June 10, 2020 by Ozexpatriate

[Bernard Lamb]

2 hours ago, chris p bacon said:

 

Also in Bedfordshire, but there aren't any statues to Transits, conifer cutting, UPVC fascia and fly tipping that can be torn down in protest.

It is well known who is behind these slave gangs. Several former military sites in the Leighton Buzzard area have been raided, with victims freed and culprits imprisoned. A few years ago when I was on the local advisory panel to the council we were asked about suitable sites for these people. My immediate though was at the bottom of the canal but I thought better of it and made a sensible response. Several people made honest replies and we all got a rather snotty letter from the council about taking our responsibilities seriously. However the wording was so ambiguous as to give the impression that we were not that far apart from official thinking.

Bernard 

[Reorte]

22 minutes ago, Nick C said:

 

My wife grew up under the communists, and briefly worked as a teacher after moving here. She abhors the method and content of UK history lessons as they omit or skip over so much important stuff and focus on tedious things like the dates of kings and queens. 

 

GCSE history for me was the Russian Revolution and the Cold War. There were dates and facts but the main thrust of it really seemed to be sifting through sources, learning how to recognise the reliable from unreliable ones, for reasons both of bias and ability to actually know, first hand accounts or not, and use all of that to put together a picture of whatever event was being examined. I think this should be an essential compulsory part of the curriculum, even though it wasn't quite as directed at understanding the picture of how lives were and how we got to where we are now.

 

Really dates and kings and queens are the framework of history, which chart the large paths through time. An emphasis on the social aspects of life at different times is IMO almost a separate, albeit related, subject (an equally worthy one, just different).

[Catkins]

All this talk of removing statues, and other monuments, to people and places of old smacks very much of the youth of today not educating themselves, nor being educated, about the past.

It also runs wider than statues, monuments, and street names, but peoples circumstances and opportunities.

[Ozexpatriate]

I think many Britons are justifiably proud of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

 

The defeat of Napoleon and the industrial revolution lead to a period of great social change which included acts like Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. Victoria would become queen in 1837.

 

Despite this, I'll mention that system of convict transportation to the Australian colonies did not end until the last convict ship (to Western Australia) in 1868, five years after the emancipation proclamation and three years after the 13th amendment.

 

Transportation to NSW was officially abolished in 1850, but continued to other colonies.

 

 

[rab]

Do we have to discuss this here.

RMWeb is my place for getting away from the world.

[Ozexpatriate]

1 hour ago, maico said:

Woke brigade would need a lot of explosives to deal with half the carvings of Mount Rushmore..

You might find this op-ed interesting.

[Ozexpatriate]

6 hours ago, Ohmisterporter said:

... In the USA a slave owner named Patrick Henry made a famous quote, "Give me liberty or give me death".

I forgot to mention earlier that there were no contemporaneous records of this speech given on March 23 1775 at St. John's Church in Richmond (not at the capitol in Williamsburg).

 

William Wirt, whose written version in his biography of Henry popularized the quote, was three years old in 1775.

 

Wikipedia

Quote

The speech was not published until The Port Folio printed a version of it in 1816. The version of the speech that is known today first appeared in print in Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, a biography of Henry by William Wirt in 1817.

 

It was printed over 40 years after it was spoken. It's like quoting speeches by Maggie Thatcher purely from the collective memory with no recordings or Hansard. Make of that what you will.

[brianusa]

Now 'they' want to have a go at old films!  GWTW of all films and a great movie, is removed form HBO's prime listing, to be moved elsewhere.  Slowly all our histories are being altered to suit current political correctness irrespective of the future.  What about the rest of the US Civil War era, The General, a harmless and very funny movie, is that on the list also?

  Last night  I  watched a WW2 movie about the Resistance in Norway,  Errol Flynn was successful in defeating the Hollywood type heel clicking Germans who loved to shoot the local populace.  It was quite a good film, better than watching the interminable parades and riots, but the Germans must be fed up seeing this kind of thing after such a long time.  Hopefully they won't topple Churchill's statues and other tributes to what we consider the good cause!

  Brian.

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, rab said:

Do we have to discuss this here.

RMWeb is my place for getting away from the world.

Brian,  

 

This is in the Wheeltappers section of RM Web, which is the non model railway section.

 

I can sympathise that you may not wish to see this sort of stuff,    so if you go to the top of the page you can click the 'ignore this topic' button and once you navigate away from the page, the deleted topic will no longer appear in your browser.

 

I have done it to a number of topics in the past with a great deal of relief and satisfaction.

 

You can also do it to individuals as well.

 

Hth

 

 

Edited June 10, 2020 by Happy Hippo

[brianusa]

Richard, not my posting, mine was the one above, this one belongs to Brian aka RAB from Plymouth,  Too many Brians here and they seem to be like me, from Plymouth, 

    Brian.

[Nearholmer]

Attempting to think of answers to the "reinstate" part of the question, I wonder whether the ancients got it right by having a set of ideals and concepts personified by deities*, which could then be represented in the form of statues.

 

In doing this they were creating statues of abstract concepts, rather than choosing real individuals who exemplify positive qualities (and are later found to exemplify a stack of un-positive qualities besides, as real human beings usually do).

 

If we could have statues of "mercy", "compassion", "humility", "equality", etc, without them being specific people, we might be on better and safer ground. Have to a bit careful how they were represented though, because some of the C18th and C19th takes on this sort of classical statuary tend to evoke lustful, rather than noble, thoughts.

 

Animals or plants as symbols? Wasn't there a rich symbology of this kind used in art in the Middle Ages, which we've forgotten how to use?

 

Does Islamic art use words to do the job? If it does, I'm not sure that would work in English ........ it would look like slogans, which are things that don't have good cultural resonances; too 1984.

 

 

 

 

 

* That's the term usually used, but I'm not convinced it is quite right. "The Godess of XYZ" and "The Godess representing XYZ" are slightly different things.

[Bernard Lamb]

Quote

 

Where do you draw the line as to acceptability?

Outside Bow church is a statue of WE Gladstone. A fairly liberal and Liberal chap by UK standards.

However he has red hands. Painted long ago as a protest against his attitude to the girls who made matches for Bryant & May and suffered from the chemicals used. Blood on his hands was the slogan. Every so many years the red paint is touched up. Should the statue be removed? If he becomes a bad guy then a heck of a lot worse need dumping. Is vandalism acceptable in any circumstances? At what point, if ever, does it become tradition?

It is not such a simple question as it might first appear.

I took a walking group on a tour of Stepney last year and pointed out what must be the finest house in the area. The group all admired it. I let them look for a few moments and then said that it was built by a merchant with overseas interests. A couple of people cottoned on straight away but  the "overseas interests" had to be explained to a few members of the group.

Bernard

 

Bernard

 

[runs as required]

1 hour ago, rab said:

Do we have to discuss this here.

RMWeb is my place for getting away from the world.

So far, apart from my opening proposal, I haven’t seen anyone post of any fantasy they would like to put on, even say a model layout, plinth !
 

Sorry hadn’t read Kevin’s post when l stuck this up

Edited June 10, 2020 by runs as required

[Ozexpatriate]

15 minutes ago, runs as required said:

So far, apart from my opening proposal, I haven’t seen anyone post of any fantasy they would like to put on, even say a model layout, plinth !

Given the title you gave to your thread, did you really expect wheel tappers to comport to the text of your initial post?

[runs as required]

Here’s another suggestion for a ‘Positive’  Statue outside Jarra (or less used Bede) Metro station of the Venerable Bede.

He alone, in Early Christian Europe, stuck to ancient Greek Ptolomy’s proposition that the World was a sphere In his writings  - even, unlike Pt. working out a better guess at the circumference. Without even leaving the NE !
It wasn’t until Galileo and his telescope  (excommunicated by the Pope) and Magellan, that Europe begrudgingly accepted it was round once again.

[runs as required]

33 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Given the title you gave to your thread, did you really expect wheel tappers to comport to the text of your initial post?

Quite simply YES

 

PS

in terms of BLM, should I have called the thread "Downupping" - which i remember as the Ashanti street English word for a rough ride on a 'tro tro' truck's hardwood bench along an unmade road? 

Edited June 10, 2020 by runs as required

[Dagworth]

Re the Colston statue, the people of Bristol never wanted the damned statue in the first place. The statue was raised by a guy called James Arrowsmith who tried to fund it by public subscription, and failed. He had to put in the last £150 of the £1000 it cost himself as he couldn't get enough from the residents of Bristol to fund it. 

 

There had been long running petitions in Bristol for its removal (and the renaming of Colston Hall among other commemorations of Colston), this from a friend of a friend in Bristol

Quote

I worked on the Slavery exhibition alongside Madge Dresser at MShed 10 years ago and we were exhausted even at that point from the petitioning and pleading to have the statue removed. Hearing people’s uninformed judgements have been painful at times, but the positives that are going to come from this weekend’s actions will be SO powerful! If the statue had been removed quietly at a different time, it would probably have gone unnoticed. This has been a great opportunity to show that our community in Bristol is actively anti-racist and  fully supportive of our beloved black community

 

 

 

Chucking Colston in the river is one way of dealing with him that has brought him out into much better discussion of his legacy and the 19000 people who died in transit and were just dumped in the sea as well as the people who were sold once they got there, how would we react to a statue of Jimmy Savile? 

 

As for the plinth? Put Wallace And Gromit on it, with the train! 

 

Andi

Edited June 10, 2020 by Dagworth

[Compound2632]

11 minutes ago, runs as required said:

It wasn’t until Galileo and his telescope  (excommunicated by the Pope) 

 

Point of information: a telescope, being an inanimate object, cannot be excommunicated. Moreover, Galileo himself was not excommunicated. 

 

On the same theme, I'd like to propose a statue of William Herschel observing Uranus in Slough.

[Nearholmer]

Uranus was in Slough? The crash-landing of an entire planet probably explains all the hasty reconstruction that has obviously happened there.

 

(I won't do the schoolboy jokes)

[Compound2632]

5 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Uranus was in Slough? The crash-landing of an entire planet probably explains all the hasty reconstruction that has obviously happened there.

 

(I won't do the schoolboy jokes)

 

Well, to be exact, he and his sister Caroline first observed Uranus when he was living in Bath. When they moved to Slough, they set up an observatory with an even more powerful telescope. Caroline ground the lenses, William gets the credit. His first proposal was to call it "George" in honour of the King. I've done the Solar System with Year 7 - it's pronounced "you're a knuss", get over it. It's got nothing on the "reproduction" topic.

Edited June 10, 2020 by Compound2632
Modified fonetic spelling to overcome the autocensor's squeamishness - it's as bad as a Year 7,

[Gibbo675]

Hi Folks,

 

We need a statue signifying Marmite:

 

 

 

Gibbo.