Quentin Letts has written a blistering op ed in the Mail, railing against the Welsh Taliban’s Labour Party’s efforts to erase Wales’s links to the British Empire. This is how it begins:
That bibulous rogue Sebastian Dangerfield, hero of J.P. Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man, declares: “When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs of Dublin.“
Why not? Given the politicised filth currently being thrown at prominent historical figures, there seems little purpose in leaving this mortal life in a more dignified or altruistic manner.
What is the point, certainly, in leaving a fortune to good causes or in having a monument or building erected to your memory if future generations of political non-entities are going to disown you for their own tawdry purposes?
Yesterday brought the latest in a long list of such stunts. Welsh librarians were instructed to distance themselves from ‘racist’ buildings. Buildings can be racist? You learn something new every day.
Under no circumstances, stated the taxpayer-supported Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, should libraries hold staff-training events at venues that ‘represent a racist legacy’. What sort of places did they have in mind? Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, Flintshire, was reportedly one. It is named after William Gladstone, the snowy-haired Victorian prime minister who is generally considered to have been rather a benevolent fellow.
That butters no parsnips with the remorseless, grievance-seeking commissars of today’s Britain. In 1833 Gladstone’s father received compensation for his West Indies business interests after the abolition of slavery. It happened two centuries ago but never mind: cancel the memory of that man’s son!
The Chartered Institute’s campaign against ‘racist’ buildings took forward the work of the Welsh Labour government’s 2022 Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan which itself built on an ‘audit of commemoration’ ordered by the then first minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, who was Cardiff’s answer to Jeremy Corbyn.
You may recall that Brother Drakeford stepped down in March after the (ahem) tremendous success of his 20mph motoring rules. His racist buildings audit, enthusiastically conducted by the Welsh heritage regulator Cadw, appraised 93 buildings for links to ‘the slave trade and the British Empire’. Note the casual linking of those two, as if slavery and imperial power were one.
It was not just buildings that were investigated. The 135-page audit also hunted for racist streets and pointed an accusing finger at hundreds of blameless addresses.
Those denounced included: York Drive in Llantwit Fardre, mid-Glamorgan, one of many thoroughfares and pubs named after the pro-slavery Duke of York who became James II; Stanley Street in Mold, Flintshire, which commemorates arch-colonialist Henry Morton Stanley, the central-African explorer who said ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’; Nelson’s Walk in Tenby which honours – quite rightly, many would say – the victor of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson.
Another long-dead admiral came in for a battering a couple of days ago. At Gloucester cathedral there stands an unostentatious memorial to a 19th century naval officer, Henry Christian.
Admiral Christian later became chief constable of Gloucestershire and he must have been a reasonably popular chap because after his death in 1916 the cathedral chapter gave its blessing to the small plaque in his honour. There it stayed, pretty much unnoticed, until the Gloucester Monuments Review was paid (by the then Tory-run Gloucester City Council) to start checking local memorials for any links to the slave trade.
It concluded that Admiral Christian may once have helped the pro-slavery Confederacy in the American Civil War (1861-65) but the claims were so tenuous that the review called them “problematic” and “uncorroborated”. In Justin Welby’s Church of England, however, that was enough.
Despite the review recommending that no action be taken, Gloucester cathedral’s authorities rushed to distance themselves from Admiral Christian. His monument will now carry a QR code linking visitors to a health warning about his possible (but, as we know from the review, unproved) assistance to the losing side in a war that ended 159 years ago.
Madness is at work here. Actually, it is more sinister than that. These things are being stirred up by ministers and officials for political reasons – that is, out of a desire for temporal power every bit as naked and rather less creditable than the empire-building of our forefathers.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Robert Tombs in the Telegraph is equally unimpressed by the Welsh branch of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals’ counselling its members not to hold meetings in ‘racist buildings’.
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