Statue Wars: pull them down or ‘retain and explain’?

More than three years have passed since the dumping of the statue of Edward Colston into the Bristol dock by a group of anti-racist campaigners grabbed the headlines. The incident ignited a debate about whether statues of those who built the British Empire, or were associated with slavery, should still stand in public places in today’s society.

Earlier this month, the Government finally published its guidance on what to do with “contested” statues. It is fairly straightforward: rather than being shifted out of sight, turned around, dumped in a dock, covered with graffiti or, indeed, any of the fates that have befallen or been proposed for such statues in recent years, they should be kept where they are — but, where deemed necessary, with contextual information displayed alongside. The new policy has been dubbed “retain and explain”.

So how did we get here? It is not really a new issue, but the treatment of Colston in Bristol and the colonialist Cecil Rhodes in Oxford show how statues became swept up into contemporary culture wars.

On one side of the argument, the culture warriors, the “defenders” of statues, were spoiling for a fight. Figures on the Right of politics saw controversy over statues as a “wedge issue” with which they could define themselves as guardians of traditional British values against the unpatriotic woke hipsters of the Left. In particular, they seized on any perceived maligning of previously revered historical figures.

Take for instance the reaction to the daubing of the word “…is a racist” on a statue of Churchill outside Parliament during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in June 2020. The populist bruiser and, since earlier this year, Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson and a small group of fellow Conservative MPs courted publicity by rolling up their sleeves and attempting to clean the graffiti off themselves — that is, until they were asked to stop by a Heritage Warden, concerned that using the wrong cleaning materials could have done permanent damage.

On the other side the of the argument, passions were equally fired up. Typically, campaigners would centre on a statue that went up in the late nineteenth century, a period of great pride in the Empire and after slavery had been abolished, celebrating one of the Empire’s pioneers from earlier times, before abolition. When it came to light that the individual had actively participated in or been a direct beneficiary of the slave trade, anti-racist campaigners began demanding their de-memorialising, irrespective of any good works they may have funded, which they often had. And it was not just statues, but the names of streets, buildings, schools, scholarships and even foodstuffs that caused hackles to rise.

First, there is the Colston statue. To mark his benefactions to his home city of Bristol, streets, a tower, a hall and even a local delicacy, the Colston Bun, had been named after him. And, of course, there was a statue of him in the city centre. But the revelation that he had made much of his money out of the transatlantic slave trade (on which Bristol had grown rich during the 17th and 18th centuries) led to his status as civic dignitary being widely questioned. The Colston name started to be dropped from things. But opinion was not clear-cut; before the Colston Hall music venue became the Bristol Beacon, a petition calling for the retention of the Colston name had reached almost 10,000 signatures.

Consultations on what to do with the Colston statue dragged on until June 2020, when, during a BLM march, a mob took the law into its own hands, wrenched the statue from its plinth and threw it into Bristol dock. The then Conservative Home Secretary, Priti Patel, weighed in, using language similar to that which she had used on the graffiti-ing of the Churchill statue: “utterly disgraceful”, “completely unacceptable” and “sheer vandalism”.

But Ms Patel’s outrage was not universally shared, not even by all members of her own party. The then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, admitted he “absolutely…understood…the strength of feeling [of the protestors]”. Even the local police superintendent described Colston as “a historical figure that’s caused the black community quite a lot of angst over the last couple of years”.

Charges were brought against the four ringleaders for criminal damage, but by the time they came to trial, public sympathy had shifted. Despite the fact that it was clear that they had done what they were accused of, all four were acquitted. The statue was fished out of the dock; no one wanted it back on its city centre plinth and it is now on display in a local museum minus some broken-off bits but covered with its spray-canned graffiti and with the ropes used to pull it down still attached. It is the toppling rather than Colston that is now being memorialised.

Next, Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes was a 19th-century colonial magnate made wealthy by South African diamonds and so prominently involved in the politics of the region that the colony of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was named after him. Widely memorialised in statues, his legacy soon started to arouse strong passions. Yet the first to call for the statues to go were Apartheid-supporting Afrikaner white South Africans who, by the 1950s, had come to resent his vitriolic condemnation of their forebears and his involvement in the 2^nd Boer War against them.

But it was from the other end of the opinion spectrum that the campaign was picked up in recent years. Slavery was long gone in the Empire by Rhodes’ day, but the academic and media historian David Olusoga described Rhodes as “a man who launched wars of aggression, killed thousands of Africans…stripped thousands more of their land and their rights…and…drove [them] on to black reserves”. In 2015, the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign succeeded in getting a statue removed from the campus of the University of Cape Town, as part of a move to “decolonise” the curriculum. But, as with Colston, the issue was clouded by Rhodes’s philanthropy. Famously, he had left much of his fortune to found scholarships named after him for students from former colonies, but irrespective of ethnicity, to study at the University of Oxford, as Rhodes himself had done — scholarships that were universally highly regarded. (Bill Clinton was one beneficiary among thousands.)

In the UK, the campaign focused on a statue prominently placed on the High Street façade of Oxford’s Oriel College. The Oxford Union debating society voted in favour of a motion calling for the statue’s removal, even Rhodes scholars had joined the campaign and answered criticism of hypocrisy by countering that “this scholarship does not buy our silence”. One suggestion was to replace it with statues of former Rhodes scholars of colour, while sculptor Anthony Gormley proposed it simply be turned around. But a backlash suggested that as much as £100 million could be lost to the college if angry donors withdrew funds. Oriel’s governing body convened a Commission of Inquiry, but said its submission to the inquiry would be that the statue be removed. (To date, it remains in place.)

Controversies such as this made the Government realise it needed to do something.

The number of statues and other memorials of prominent historical figures being contested multiplied. The statue of slave-owner Robert Milligan, father of the West India Dock company, that stood outside east London’s Museum of Docklands, was moved to storage. There was a very handy dock close by. Admiral Lord Nelson (opposed slavery’s abolition), Sir Francis Drake (pioneer of the slave trade), Sir John Cass (the City of London authorities renamed a school named after him), Edinburgh’s Henry Dundas, Cardiff’s Sir Thomas Picton…the list is a long one.

The arguments about whether to “remove or retain” are complex, but can be briefly summarised as follows. On the “remove” side: since the statues were erected, Britain has become a diverse nation and the descendants of those who had been enslaved now live here and can feel “oppressed” by the statues. On the “retain”side: their removal would be the editing of history and based on judging the past by the standards of the present.

But the central argument is over Britain’s Imperial past. Historians are divided; on the “con” side are figures such as Olusoga and writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, who point to the extent to which the Empire’s riches derived from slavery and exploitation. On the “pro” side, the transatlantic scholar Niall Ferguson emphasise the Empire’s positives and the Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar argues that the Empire spent as much time suppressing slavery as it did benefitting from it. One practical solution — the wholesale removal of out-dated statues to a museum like the Memento Park in Budapest for Soviet-era statues or the Citadel Museum in the Berlin suburb of Spandau for Imperial and Nazi-era statues — looks attractive, but both were cases of new regimes cleansing their past, while there is not a settled view of whether Britain’s past needs cleansing. Another practical solution is the counter-balancing of the UK’s large number of statues of white men, mostly military and often colonialists, with more statues that modern Britain would be proud of, examples being the 2018 statue of Suffragist campaigner Millicent Fawcett outside Parliament and the statue of a Kindertransport family in London’s Liverpool Street station and a Windrush one in Waterloo.

But these were long-term solutions and the Government needed a quick fix. A summit was held, cases studied, a Heritage Advisory Board set up and Guidance for custodians on how to deal with commemorative heritage assets that have become contested published at the beginning of October. It concludes: “There are times when a commemorative heritage asset in a public space depicts people or events that we might disapprove of today. On some occasions, this disapproval may result in calls for the commemorative heritage asset to be removed or relocated. Government policy is that these commemorative heritage assets should remain in situ.” However, consideration was needed of “what were the prevailing attitudes at the time of the subject’s life” and if an explanation was considered necessary, examples could include “a separate, publicly-accessible exhibition close by, allowing a fuller story of the heritage asset to be told in its context… (including)…making a digital account of the history available (which)… allows for a variety of viewpoints to be shared easily”.

The guidance has generally been welcomed by the Heritage sector with only a few grumbles about how long it had taken. The culture war protagonists from the Right should be happy to see that statues are to be “protected”, while those from the Left will like the idea of a “variety of viewpoints” being allowed. A truce has been called in the culture wars and the Government is trying to pursue a very British, neutral, path between the warring protagonists. It is, however, worth pointing out that there has long been another, equally British, approach to dealing with contested memorials, which we can only describe as “non-violent direct action”. Few can remember a time when Glasgow’s statue of the Duke of Wellington hasn’t had a traffic cone on its head.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.