Thanks, Mike, for delving into the background of Highdown and Brightling Park. Your descriptions are alluring and have put them on my ever-lengthening wish list of places to visit.
I wonder, though, if your polemic concerning our country’s attitude towards its history is entirely deserved.
I remember as a boy being shocked at stumbling across some undergraduate history notes describing the grotesque conditions in which the nascent urban working class were living. Such matters were only touched on at school in the context of their being overcome thanks to the vision and work of the great and the good. The positive spin distracted us from how and why millions of people were condemned to such circumstances in the first place.
These are matters which demand our examination and discussion, both as worthy academic pursuits and for the ethical purpose of preventing such exploitation and abuse.
Similarly for the slave trade.
At the same time, it’s not unreasonable for any country to nurture a positive national mythology. Indeed, I’d say that such a mythology is a critically important contribution to social cohesion and, depending on the values exhibited by these foundational myths, to social progress.
Your own research demonstrates the interplay between the positive and negative aspects of national development, which is usually lost when people – of whatever political disposition – “froth at the mouth”: the gardens’ origins lie as much in the UK’s admirable extinction of the slave trade as they do in the slave trade itself.
A reminder, perhaps, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs? (Or, in this case, you can’t grow flowers without manure.)
Stalinist cynicism aside, we now have these gorgeous public leisure sites that can be “savoured with unconfined joy” whether or not we’re aware of their history. The merits of knowing the history relate, then, to our sense of nationhood and our collective aspirations.
As you point out, some people feel threatened by this historical exposition. But I wonder if more of them would be amenable, appreciative even, if the new research were shared in a different spirit.
Take, for example, the case of Edward Colston: were angry riots and criminal damage a desirable way of manifesting our condemnation of the tawdry business he conducted more than 300 years ago? Is it historical to erase any mention of his being a public benefactor? Or is such ideologically motivated indignation ironically whitewashing our history? The conduct that preceded the toppling of Colston’s statue makes the “frothing at the mouth” by critics appear little more than a dribble.
Whether one is indifferent or ashamed, the fact is that we continue to benefit collectively from infrastructure built on the backs of exploitation and abominable abuse of our fellow human beings. Our indignation would be better directed at contemporaneous injustices rather than historic evils; learning about the latter should, ideally, inform and enhance our response to the former.
I was horrified to discover from the UCL database that the mansion house that my great great grandfather bought with proceeds from supplying the timber for sleepers on the new north of Scotland railways had been built on the proceeds from a West Indian sugar cane plantation. And the map showed several properties nearby with similar links. The proceeds of slavery really did reach every corner of the UK.
(Sadly great great grandfather's fortune was all spent by the next generation, so I didn't get a penny!)
Thanks, Mike, for delving into the background of Highdown and Brightling Park. Your descriptions are alluring and have put them on my ever-lengthening wish list of places to visit.
I wonder, though, if your polemic concerning our country’s attitude towards its history is entirely deserved.
I remember as a boy being shocked at stumbling across some undergraduate history notes describing the grotesque conditions in which the nascent urban working class were living. Such matters were only touched on at school in the context of their being overcome thanks to the vision and work of the great and the good. The positive spin distracted us from how and why millions of people were condemned to such circumstances in the first place.
These are matters which demand our examination and discussion, both as worthy academic pursuits and for the ethical purpose of preventing such exploitation and abuse.
Similarly for the slave trade.
At the same time, it’s not unreasonable for any country to nurture a positive national mythology. Indeed, I’d say that such a mythology is a critically important contribution to social cohesion and, depending on the values exhibited by these foundational myths, to social progress.
Your own research demonstrates the interplay between the positive and negative aspects of national development, which is usually lost when people – of whatever political disposition – “froth at the mouth”: the gardens’ origins lie as much in the UK’s admirable extinction of the slave trade as they do in the slave trade itself.
A reminder, perhaps, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs? (Or, in this case, you can’t grow flowers without manure.)
Stalinist cynicism aside, we now have these gorgeous public leisure sites that can be “savoured with unconfined joy” whether or not we’re aware of their history. The merits of knowing the history relate, then, to our sense of nationhood and our collective aspirations.
As you point out, some people feel threatened by this historical exposition. But I wonder if more of them would be amenable, appreciative even, if the new research were shared in a different spirit.
Take, for example, the case of Edward Colston: were angry riots and criminal damage a desirable way of manifesting our condemnation of the tawdry business he conducted more than 300 years ago? Is it historical to erase any mention of his being a public benefactor? Or is such ideologically motivated indignation ironically whitewashing our history? The conduct that preceded the toppling of Colston’s statue makes the “frothing at the mouth” by critics appear little more than a dribble.
Whether one is indifferent or ashamed, the fact is that we continue to benefit collectively from infrastructure built on the backs of exploitation and abominable abuse of our fellow human beings. Our indignation would be better directed at contemporaneous injustices rather than historic evils; learning about the latter should, ideally, inform and enhance our response to the former.
I was horrified to discover from the UCL database that the mansion house that my great great grandfather bought with proceeds from supplying the timber for sleepers on the new north of Scotland railways had been built on the proceeds from a West Indian sugar cane plantation. And the map showed several properties nearby with similar links. The proceeds of slavery really did reach every corner of the UK.
(Sadly great great grandfather's fortune was all spent by the next generation, so I didn't get a penny!)