Slavery and Liverpool

[Kev]

THE country's first museum dedicated to the slave trade will be established in Liverpool.

A £10m plan to set up the National Museum and Centre for the Understanding of Transatlantic Slavery at Albert Dock was unveiled today.

The new attraction, which won Lottery funding, will feature dynamic and thought-provoking displays about a shameful chapter in British history.

A resource centre where people will be able to research information about the slave trade will also be set up.

The facility is to be split between exhibition space at the Maritime Museum and the former Dock Traffic Office, which is currently home to Granada television.

It is hoped the new museum will be ready for 2007, Liverpool's 800th birthday and the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The resource centre will open two years later.

Loyd Grossman, chairman of National Museums Liverpool, said: "The new museum will challenge preconceptions and address issues of relevance to everyone today."

Museum bosses believe Liverpool is the perfect location for the national archive because of the key role it played in the industry.

Thousands of slaves were brought to the city from Africa before crossing the Atlantic to work in the West Indies and North America.

Displays at the new museum will cover issues such as freedom, identity, human rights, reparations, racial discrimination and cultural change.

The Maritime Museum already has a gallery dedicated to transatlantic slavery, but the new facility will allow it to expand.

The Heritage Lottery Fund today announced it would donate 1.65m to the museum.

Source (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=16211383%26method=full%26siteid=50061% 26headline=waterfront%2dsite%2dfor%2dslave%2dtrade %2dmuseum-name_page.html)

:PDT11

[Paul D]

This was first mentioned a while back and then it all went quiet but I'm glad to see it's back on the agenda again.:cool:

[Kev]

10m slave trade museum will be biggest in country (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=16214643%26method=full%26siteid=50061% 26headline=%2dpound%2d10m%2dslave%2dtrade%2dmuseum %2dwill%2dbe%2dbiggest%2din%2dcountry-name_page.html)

Read more :unibrow:

[Kev]

http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/icliverpool/nov2005/5/4/0007541C-6872-1378-AD0D0C02AC1BF824.jpg

National Museums Liverpool are appealing for private investors to finance the centre, which they claim will become as significant as New York's Holocaust Museum.

More (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=16368507%26method=full%26siteid=50061% 26headline=slave%2dtrade%2dmuseum%2dwill%2dcapture %2dworld%2ds%2dattention-name_page.html)....

[Paul D]

According to the New Internationalist there are currently an estimated 27 million people who are enslaved around the world. They define slavery as being 'Forced to work through violence or the threat of it, they are under
the complete control of their ‘employers’. They are treated
as property and sometimes bought and sold.'.

Under this definition modern slavery falls into 6 categories, bonded labour, trafficking, child slaves, forced labour, forced marriage and traditional slavery.

[Bluescouser]

Reading in the Echo about the WOOLTON councilour who wants us to change our street names.
She wants to do this because of the streets association's with the slave trade
Can't help but feel this lady is doing a little PR exerzise for herself.
This is our City not the councils they are elected to run the City for our benifit not change it for their's
Gooodness knows they make enough out of us with all their meetings they put their names down for.
These things happened in the past.
It is not the faullt of the present dwellers of the City what thier forebaers did.
Why not go the hole hog and get the Italians to to apoligse and cowtow for what the Romans did to our Celtic ancestors.

[Tomo-CIL]

exactly - its history, rather than moan about street names, why don't all these councillors spend time doing what they're paid to do.

[Waterways]

exactly - its history, rather than moan about street names, why don't all these councillors spend time doing what they're paid to do.

They are trying to air-brush history. It happened. The city apologised, but as yet no African nation has. The African tribes would enslave another - round them up, take them to the coast where Liverpool ships, amongst others, would take them across the Atlantic to the Caribbean or the southern States of the USA. Many of the slaves lived better lives in the Caribbean than being enslaved in Africa.

The Africans did most of the slave trade work – which has also been air-brushed from history. White people could not go much into "darkest Africa" because they would contract diseases easily. They could only stay on the coast. Only when drugs came along could white people go inland - quinine and the likes. It was called Darkest Africa because no white people had been or could go there. The Portugese established coastal trading ports on the West Coast of Africa in the 1400s. White people had been on the West Coast of Africa a long time, yete only entered the interior not much more than 100 years ago - the late 1800s.

[Tomo-CIL]

I never knew that Waterways - does make a lot of sense indeed.

Obviously these councillors don't do their homework!

[Louis]

yeah its true, focus on the slavery that still exists, not the slavery that existed 200 + years ago

[Max]

Does the MP forget that the African kings sold off heit own people as slaves too!

[Paul D]

Time to remember city's slave past.

NEXT month's Slavery Remembrance Day will set the scene for the opening of Liverpool's International Slavery Museum in 2007.

Otterspool Promenade will play host to an afternoon of free cultural events and entertainment on August 23.

And the artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Ekow Eshun, will be the key speaker.

This year's day will start with an interfaith service at St Nicholas parish church at the Pier Head. Events at Otterspool include a food and exhibition marquee, as well as children's activities .

There is also a chance to learn more about Merseyside Maritime Museum's new International Slavery Museum due to open on August 23, 2007. :celb (23):

[Kev]

Its all going down at Otterspool eh? Cheers Paul :)

[Paul D]

Its all going down at Otterspool eh? Cheers Paul :)

It certainly is that might be worth a visit also great news about our new museum eh.:)

[Kev]

brill news :celb (23):

[Paul D]

I was really impressed with the maritime museum when I last payed a visit and the slavery museum blew me away even though it was pretty small so I can't wait for this bigger version dedicated solely to the International slave trade,and it'll be open for 2008 when we will finally start to see signs of us getting our city back to were it belongs.:celb (23):

[bazzacat]

Pleased to hear this. should be a welcome "attraction", certainly somewhere to contemplate what went on

[Paul D]

Forget all the developments that are going on because it's little things like this that makes a city great in my opinion.

[Waterways]

THE country's first museum dedicated to the slave trade will be established in Liverpool.

A £10m plan to set up the National Museum and Centre for the Understanding of Transatlantic Slavery at Albert Dock was unveiled today.

The new attraction, which won Lottery funding, will feature dynamic and thought-provoking displays about a shameful chapter in British history.

A resource centre where people will be able to research information about the slave trade will also be set up.

The facility is to be split between exhibition space at the Maritime Museum and the former Dock Traffic Office, which is currently home to Granada television.

It is hoped the new museum will be ready for 2007, Liverpool's 800th birthday and the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The resource centre will open two years later.

Loyd Grossman, chairman of National Museums Liverpool, said: "The new museum will challenge preconceptions and address issues of relevance to everyone today."

Museum bosses believe Liverpool is the perfect location for the national archive because of the key role it played in the industry.

Thousands of slaves were brought to the city from Africa before crossing the Atlantic to work in the West Indies and North America.


That is totally wrong. Few came to Liverpool. They were taken directly from Africa and the Caribbean.

[Louis]

yeah thats totally wrong

[Scousemouse]

The Trade Triangle

The transatlantic slave trade generally followed a triangular route. Traders set out from European ports towards Africa's west coast. There they bought people in exchange for goods and loaded them into the ships. The voyage itself generally took 6 to 8 weeks. Once in the Americas, those Africans who had survived the journey were off-loaded for sale and put to work as slaves. The ships returned to Europe with goods such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice and later cotton, which had been produced by slave labour.

Source Merseyside Maritime Museum (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/slavery/triangle.asp)

[Kev]

British ignorant over history of slave trade-poll



http://eur.i1.yimg.com/eur.yimg.com/i/uk/rc/cobrand/reuter

s5.gif (http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/reutersonline/SIG=114rh0n4s/**http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.co.uk%2F)

LONDON (Reuters) - Only one in 10 Britons knows when the transatlantic slave trade was abolished and almost half the population has no

idea who campaigned to end it, a poll showed on Tuesday.

The findings prompted human rights groups to call for schoolchildren to learn more about the

trade and Britain to mark next year's bicentenary of its abolition in a meaningful way.



"This is a clarion call for education," said Richard Reddie, project director for Set All Free, a church umbrella

group coordinating bicentenary commemorations.

"For too long it has been written out of history as just a footnote," he told Reuters. "It needs to be as

central to teaching as the Battle of Trafalgar or the Second World War."

Reflecting on how successful Britain had been as a multi-cultural society, he

said of abolition: "I think there is a collective amnesia and embarrassment over Britain being one of the prime movers in the slave trade.

"The idea of

one person owning another is a despicable one."

The Mori poll commissioned by his group showed that only one in 10 people questioned could name 1807 as

the year the trade was abolished.

Forty-six percent said they had no idea who had campaigned -- like abolitionist William Wilberforce -- for an end to

the trade.

The human rights group Anti-Slavery International said the findings showed that teaching pupils about the slave trade should be made

compulsory in British schools.

"This research reveals the need for much greater awareness and education," it said in a statement. "At least 12 million

people are in slavery today. No region is free from this abuse and slavery is found in most countries."

The pressure group has warned that most of those

12 million people are children, ensnared in pornography and prostitution, exploited as cheap labour and forced into being child soldiers.

In the run-up

to the bicentenary, the government has said it is contemplating whether to issue "a statement of regret" but no decision has been made

yet.

Liverpool, the northern port which transported about one million slaves from West Africa to the United States

and the Caribbean, issued an apology in 1999.

In February, the Church of England apologised for profiting from the "dehumanising and shameful" slave

trade two centuries after its members helped bring about its abolition in Britain.

[george roberts]

THE country's first museum dedicated to the slave trade will be established in Liverpool.

A £10m plan to set up the National Museum and Centre for the Understanding of Transatlantic Slavery at Albert Dock was unveiled today.

The new attraction, which won Lottery funding, will feature dynamic and thought-provoking displays about a shameful chapter in British history.

A resource centre where people will be able to research information about the slave trade will also be set up.

The facility is to be split between exhibition space at the Maritime Museum and the former Dock Traffic Office, which is currently home to Granada television.

It is hoped the new museum will be ready for 2007, Liverpool's 800th birthday and the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The resource centre will open two years later.

Loyd Grossman, chairman of National Museums Liverpool, said: "The new museum will challenge preconceptions and address issues of relevance to everyone today."

Museum bosses believe Liverpool is the perfect location for the national archive because of the key role it played in the industry.

Thousands of slaves were brought to the city from Africa before crossing the Atlantic to work in the West Indies and North America.

Displays at the new museum will cover issues such as freedom, identity, human rights, reparations, racial discrimination and cultural change.

The Maritime Museum already has a gallery dedicated to transatlantic slavery, but the new facility will allow it to expand.

The Heritage Lottery Fund today announced it would donate 1.65m to the museum.

Source (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=16211383%26method=full%26siteid=50061% 26headline=waterfront%2dsite%2dfor%2dslave%2dtrade %2dmuseum-name_page.html)

:PDT11
Kev-I have a theory and I want to bounce it about to see how it measures up to reality.
My theory is that the original cavern club premises was, at some point in it's history. 'A slave hold'.
Further to that, I think that the old building was connected in some way or other to the waterfront, 'underground'.
The topography between that building in mathew street, down to, what is now the museum of slavery, lends a little credence to that notion!
Do you have a thought on that?

[Sloyne]

My theory is that the original cavern club premises was, at some point in it's history. 'A slave hold'.Prior to the warehouse becoming "The Cavern Night Club" the space was occupied as an egg storage facility owned by a firm named 'Fell & Company'. Also and prior to Fell & Company the space ws used to store dry goods. I believe the company was named Irwin or something like that.

Liverpool had only a ad hoc slave market and it would have not been cost effective to transport slaves from the African West Coast to Liverpool when the industry was set up to deliver slaves to the major markets in the Americas. The "Middle Passage" between Africa and the Americas was the quickest and most cost effective route to those markets. Selling slaves in Europe would have been at a financial loss, what, with the abundance of cheap labour in Europe. Also, the goods that the slaves were traded for, spices, sugar, cotton, herbs, etc., were worth far more in Europe than were slave, for the aformentioned reason.

The market for slaves in Europe was almost non-existant due to the very meagre, if any, returns realised. Capitalism back then was no different than present day capitalism, maximising profit being the criteria.

[FKoE]

There is also a lot of myth surrounding the slave trade especially post 18th century.

I doubt there is a house a cellar or a building which exists in Modern Day Liverpool that has housed slaves.

[Max]

**** hippies need to get over it.

We acknowledge it already and relised it happened but times goes on and it sucks to hold a grudge, especially since it was our ancestors not us!

[Sloyne]

We acknowledge it already and relised it happened but times goes on and it sucks to hold a grudge, especially since it was our ancestors not us!If "OUR" ancestors were the priviledged class and thier agents, which mine were not. Just a very few British people benefitted from the nefarious trade in human misery. Later those same people, to protect the loot they stole from the Empire, built a wall the full length of the docks, seperating us from our river.

While millions of humans were being impressed into bondage, millions in Europe, including children, we being exploited by being used to depress the wages, meagre as they were, of thier fathers and mothers by being employed down mines, up chimneys, in mills and those were hailed as the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were left to beg on the streets of European cities while surrounded by ostentatious wealth and abundance.

[Waterways]

**** hippies need to get over it.

We acknowledge it already and relised it happened but times goes on and it sucks to hold a grudge, especially since it was our ancestors not us!

Not one African nation has apologised for its role in the enslavement. The Liverpool ships transported them, the Africans rounded them up in the first place.

[Waterways]

If "OUR" ancestors were the priviledged class and thier agents, which mine were not. Just a very few British people benefitted from the nefarious trade in human misery. Later those same people, to protect the loot they stole from the Empire, built a wall the full length of the docks, seperating us from our river.

While millions of humans were being impressed into bondage, millions in Europe, including children, we being exploited by being used to depress the wages, meagre as they were, of thier fathers and mothers by being employed down mines, up chimneys, in mills and those were hailed as the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were left to beg on the streets of European cities while surrounded by ostentatious wealth and abundance.

Forced slavery and one by circumstances.

[Sloyne]

Not one African nation has apologised for its role in the enslavement. The Liverpool ships transported them, the Africans rounded them up in the first place.Originally it was the Portuguese, Spannish, Dutch, French and English who "rounded them up". Seeing the example and how one could trade human flesh for desired goods, guns, powder, knives, pots, pans, etc., Africans joined in the profitable practice and sold thier fellows (usually captives from enemy tribes) for gain. Not unlike the practice of North American First Nation warriors taking European scalps, which was, originally, a practice instituted by the Dutch in North America. The authorities placed a bounty on the lives of "Indians" and to stop the fraud, of claimind killings that didn't happen, by the Dutch settlers, demanded proof of the killing. The ever so civilized Dutch settlers decided to take scalps because a scalp was light and easy to transport. And because the stipend was on a sliding scale from children through women to men, the scalp could prove what the age and gender of the murdered native was.

Shall we demand that Africans apologize for not driving the Europeans from thier shores? Africans armed with stones, spears, bow & arrows and protected by skin shields against muscat, balls, cannon, knives and cutlasses.

Waterways, might I suggest some reading to you? Try reading 'Guns, Germs & Steel' by Jared Diamond.?

[Waterways]

Originally it was the Portuguese, Spannish, Dutch, French and English who "rounded them up". Seeing the example and how one could trade human flesh for desired goods, guns, powder, knives, pots, pans, etc., Africans joined in the profitable practice and sold thier fellows (usually captives from enemy tribes) for gain. Not unlike the practice of North American First Nation warriors taking European scalps, which was, originally, a practice instituted by the Dutch in North America. The authorities placed a bounty on the lives of "Indians" and to stop the fraud, of claimind killings that didn't happen, by the Dutch settlers, demanded proof of the killing. The ever so civilized Dutch settlers decided to take scalps because a scalp was light and easy to transport. And because the stipend was on a sliding scale from children through women to men, the scalp could prove what the age and gender of the murdered native was.


The Africans were already into slavery before the Europeans turned up. The Portugese were the first Europeans to enslave Africans in the modern sense. Although Romans did it before..

Africans are still enslaving people even today.



Shall we demand that Africans apologize for not driving the Europeans from thier shores? Africans armed with stones, spears, bow & arrows and protected by skin shields against muscat, balls, cannon, knives and cutlasses.


This comes across as incomprehensible. What do you mean?



Waterways, might I suggest some reading to you? Try reading 'Guns, Germs & Steel' by Jared Diamond.?

[snappel]

Yeah, native Africans were selling slaves themselves... usually kidnapped from other tribes...

[Waterways]

Yeah, native Africans were selling slaves themselves... usually kidnapped from other tribes...

Yet, western, and world, media portrays this as something only Europeans did to Africans. I wonder if the new slavery museum will tell the real story.

[scouserdave]

Never heard of Captain Crow until I read Marky's thread. Just done a google (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/07/liverpool.html)

Liverpool's Heart of Darkness

News: It was strictly business: The city's era of prosperity rested on the profits of the transatlantic slave trade. Today its idle docks are home to the memories of an ancestral crime.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

July/August 2002 Issue

On the 27th of July, 1807, a ship named the Kitty's Amelia sailed from Liverpool, England, under the command of Captain Hugh Crow, a one-eyed Manxman turning 42. Earlier that year, Parliament had abolished the British slave trade, but the Kitty's Amelia had received legal clearance before the first of May, when abolition took effect. Though she left port almost three months after the slave trade officially ended in Great Britain, the Kitty's Amelia sailed legally, as legally, that is, as a slave trader -- the last of the English slave traders -- could sail. The ship carried 300 tons burden and 18 guns, a concession not only to England's war with France but also to conditions on the Guinea coast of Africa, where Captain Crow -- called "Mind-Your-Eye Crow" -- was bound.

I have no idea whether the Kitty's Amelia was finally dismasted, her timbers knocked apart, her ship's furniture salvaged or burned. The ship may have ended its days benignly. It might have become a prison hulk, like the ones in Great Expectations, or been wrecked at sea. There's no knowing precisely where Captain Crow's human cargo finally ended up after being sold in the West Indies or where and in what circumstances they lived and died, apart from those captives, that is, who died of disease aboard ship during the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World.

As for Captain Crow, his days ended in 1829, and he was buried on the Isle of Man. In his autobiography, Memoirs of the Late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool, he does his best to make a slave's voyage aboard the Kitty's Amelia sound almost pleasant. "I always took great pains to promote the health and comfort of all on board, by proper diet, regularity, exercise, and cleanliness, for I considered that on keeping the ship clean and orderly, which was always my hobby, the success of our voyage mainly depended." How you interpret this passage depends entirely on the meaning you give the word "success."

I recently stood at the edge of the Mersey River, trying to imagine the July day 195 years ago when the Kitty's Amelia worked her way into the tide. The thought of that day brought with it a sense of the irrevocable, of lives lost, fortunes gathered and dispersed, the peculiar distortions of human and economic justice we like to call history. Perhaps someone in Liverpool, watching the Kitty's Amelia work her way downstream in 1807, had the sense of an era ending. But human flesh was just one among many cargoes, and a risky one because slaves found it so easy to die aboard ship. The end of the slave trade in Great Britain ratified the outrage of the abolitionists -- people who, as Captain Crow saw it, knew little or nothing about the subject of slavery -- but it also confirmed the shifting of markets and the growing importance of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. When Captain Crow arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, he found the harbor crowded with slave ships, their human wares going unsold.

Today, Liverpool stands where it always has, rising above the Mersey and above a chain of now disused docks. From the river's edge, you can look across the water and see the Wirral, a spur of land that divides the Dee River from the Mersey and, in a sense, England from Wales. Standing on the embankment, watching the tidal chop on the Mersey's brown water, which empties into a sea framed by Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and northern England, you get none of the land's-end feeling you get at the westernmost tip of Cornwall, where the waves breaking against the headlands seem to have come direct from America. The Mersey these days could be almost any large river flowing past the engineered edge of almost any city. Except that between 1760 and 1807 Liverpool built and the Mersey floated the largest fleet of slave ships in the history of the trade. Between 1795 and 1804 alone, Liverpool authorities cleared nearly 1,100 ships for the triangular traffic that carried manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa, slaves to the West Indies, and sugar, tobacco, and rum to England.

To most of late 18th-century Liverpool, to almost everyone except the ships' captains and their crews, slavery was an economic abstraction, a matter of so much return on so much investment. It was an exercise in the convertibility of capital. A successful voyage -- one in which the majority of slaves survived and reached the sales block in good health -- performed the miracle of turning Manchester cloth or Sheffield steel into human beings. The human beings were then turned into several kinds of sugar, coffee, cotton, and bills of exchange, which, in Liverpool, were converted once again into the opulence of an increasingly opulent city. The trade fed the increasing girth of its merchants; it supported their luxuries and charities alike. The enormous prosperity of this three-sided trade did more to justify the practice of slavery than any of the philosophical arguments that a man like Captain Crow might make, who argued that "the traffic in negroes was permitted by that Providence that rules over all, as a necessary evil," and that English slavers had a regard for human life that other nations, which continued slave trading after 1807, did not share. That the solid flesh of slaves might melt away mattered vastly less than the very solid returns that materialized when a ship like the Kitty's Amelia completed her round- trip. No apology like a dividend.

In a sense, the convertibility of capital converted Liverpool. The city that had once competed with Bristol and London for the slave trade dominated it completely by the time it was abolished. However you measure the relative profits of slave trading in Liverpool, the West Indian traffic that breasted the Mersey River year after year laid the foundation for a nautical and mercantile prosperity in Liverpool that reached right through the 19th century. Prosperity may selectively preserve some elements of the past -- its finery, especially -- but it quite thoroughly wipes the past away too. A visitor to Liverpool now sees a fundamentally Victorian city, a fraying monument to a latter-day prosperity. That Victorian city, one of the greatest ports of Europe, was founded in part on the profits of the slave trade. As the city has dwindled, the fabric of Victorian Liverpool, much of it now labeled with signs saying "To Let," seems to have grown larger and larger, the ghostly reminder of richer times.

Were Captain Crow to make one last passage up the Mersey and into harbor at Liverpool, it's hard to say what would surprise him most. Some of the street names and their layouts would remain as he knew them. He would find unexpected structures like the Custom House, the Cunard Building, and the Royal Liver Building looming over the river, constructions of a magnificence, a commercial pomposity he could scarcely have imagined. But what would surely have surprised him most, like anyone who knew the Liverpool waterfront before World War II, are the docks themselves. The forest of ships' masts and spars is long gone, the crowds of men loading and unloading, the merchants and ships' owners striding among them. All the waterfront cacophony is gone, replaced by quiet rectangular pools of water whose river gates, where ships entered, were opened for good more than 20 years ago. The shipping has gone, and the warehouses have been turned into office space, into restaurants and wine bars and museums, including the Merseyside Maritime Museum, with a gallery devoted to transatlantic slavery, which opened in 1994. The opening of that gallery began a process that culminated last year in an official apology by the City Council for Liverpool's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Like all such apologies, this one was made from descendant to descendant, from the distant political heirs of the slavers to the distant blood heirs of the slaves. And though the gesture -- including a purification ceremony by African chiefs flown in for the occasion -- is emotionally and symbolically significant, it has, in Liverpool's case at least, the strange effect of ratifying the grander apology that time itself has made. The same dispassionate economic logic that made slaves part of the currency of Liverpool's transatlantic trade also brought Liverpool's shipping -- the economic and emotional heartbeat of the city -- to an end in the second half of the 20th century. The thing that would have seemed inconceivable in the late 1700s, the extinction of Liverpool as a nautical force, has come to be. The very first person I met on my recent trip to England was a cab driver whose father had been a Liverpool dockworker back in the days, only a generation ago, when there were still ships for Liverpool dockworkers to work.

Where the shipping went is another story, a tale of containerization, labor struggles, Margaret Thatcher, and, ultimately, the loss of empire. The deep-water pools that are Liverpool's docks have quietly silted in since then. Some days, down at the Albert Dock, the most nautical sights are a propeller from the Lusitania and a Yellow Submarine, commemorating the Beatles, that seems to have surfaced in the lawn just across from the entrance to the Albert Dock. A small sailboat rests at berth in the pool where merchantmen once docked, its owner pressure-scrubbing its deck while gulls scream overhead, their cries echoing off the warehouse walls. The more portentous sign of the shift in Liverpool's fate, more portentous by far than Victorian grandiosities with unoccupied floors, is the modern building that once housed the Transport and General Workers Union -- the dockworkers union -- which is also empty and posted "To Let."

The loss of a city's way of life is no atonement for an ancestral crime. It does nothing to redeem the loss of all those African lives, the slow execution of whole peoples. The shift of seagoing traffic away from Liverpool does nothing to expropriate the wealth of those whose fortunes were built, in part, on the slave trade.

In the end, the City Council's apology for Liverpool's history of slave trading, like all such apologies, requires an act of instructed imagination, an effort to understand the dimensions of the crime, without which contrition and gesture are meaningless. In that sense, few museum exhibitions are more aptly sited than the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. At the center of the gallery is a reconstruction of the hold of a slave ship, the sullen chamber in which Africans would have found themselves chained during the long transit from the Guinea coast to the West Indies. What a visitor can discern from such a reconstruction is only a sense of rough proportion, at best. Building codes prevented the gallery designers from making the ceiling as low as it would have been in a real slave ship. In other words, a legally mandated concern for the proper headroom of modern visitors prevented the museum from showing how little headroom the Africans who had been snatched illegally from their lives would really have had.

The very structures of the present forbid us from seeing the past with any ease. Only a few of the visitors to the museum can ever have experienced the rolling of a ship under sail in the mid-Atlantic. Fewer still can ever have been kidnapped or shackled or whipped or forcibly separated from their families, much less have known that they were being sold into a life of worse-than-penal servitude. It's no criticism of the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, which is a moving experience in and of itself, to say that it cannot impart to its visitors the intensity of grief and suffering that would have prevailed in the hold of the Kitty's Amelia. To do so would of course be intolerable and prohibited.

By most modern standards of museum craft, the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery is an educational success. But, like most museums, including museums of conscience, it's also a reminder that our efforts to understand the past, experientially, are always aesthetic. A visit to the slave ship's hold is just one of the attractions of the Albert Dock, after all. It coexists with a branch of the Tate Museum, the Museum of Liverpool Life, and an underground exhibition devoted to the Beatles' story. You can go straight from viewing the iron shackles any slaver would have carried to a cozy English tea with a view of Liverpool Cathedral in the distance. It takes just a short walk along the Mersey.

[Howie]

History of the Slave Trade
05 March 2007
Roscoe Lecture, 5pm Wednesday 7 March

As the UK celebrates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, LJMU will host a lecture by Adam Hochschild, acclaimed author of Bury the Chains, which traces the movement to end Slavery in the British Empire.

Professor Hochschild will deliver a Roscoe Lecture entitled 'History of the Slave Trade' on Wednesday 7 March 2007, starting at 5pm in the Adelphi Hotel.

There are still a few tickets remaining for this Lecture. To reserve yours, please contact Barbara Mace, ext 3852, b.mace@ljmu.ac.uk

During his lecture, Professor Hochschild will show how a small group of committed citizens managed to change the world thanks to their campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Writing in Mother Jones, the most widely read progressive publication in the United States, which he co-founded in the 1970s, Professor Hochschild said:


"Though born in the age of swords, wigs and stagecoaches, the British anti-slavery movement leaves us an extraordinary legacy. Every day activists use the tools it helped pioneer - consumer boycotts, newsletters, petitions, political posters and buttons, national campaigns with local committees, and much more.

"Far more important is the boldness of its vision. Look at the problems that confront the world today: global warming, the vast gap between rich and poor nations, the habit of war. To solve any one of these, a realist might say, is surely the work of centuries, to think otherwise is naïve.

"But many a hard-headed realist could, and did, say the same thing to those who first proposed to end slavery. Was it not in one form or another woven into the economy of most of the world? Was it not older, even than money and the written word? But the realists turned out to be wrong."

Professor David Alton, who chairs LJMU's Foundation for Citizenship, which hosts the Roscoe Lecture series, added that while it is right to commemorate emancipation, we should also remember that contemporary forms of slavery still persist on a vast scale.


"Over the last 200 years, many human rights campaigns have been modelled on the successful actions of William Roscoe, William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equanio, Thomas Clarkson and other abolitionists.

"What, however, is abundantly clear is that if were merely to indulge in some rather smug self-congratulations, we will have entirely missed the point. As many as 27 million people are still thought to be enslaved today, and slavery and trafficking generate billions of pounds worldwide. Perhaps compared to 1807, slavery tip-toes in carpet slippers but it remains a pernicious and all too real contemporary reality."

Source: LJMU News Update (http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/NewsUpdate/index_86732.htm)

[taffy]

History of the Slave Trade
05 March 2007
Roscoe Lecture, 5pm Wednesday 7 March

As the UK celebrates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, LJMU will host a lecture by Adam Hochschild, acclaimed author of Bury the Chains, which traces the movement to end Slavery in the British Empire.

Professor Hochschild will deliver a Roscoe Lecture entitled 'History of the Slave Trade' on Wednesday 7 March 2007, starting at 5pm in the Adelphi Hotel.



Long after slavery was supposedly abolished in the British empire( Jamaica etc ca 1835), slavery continued on the sugar planatations in Queensland, Australia. These poor souls from the south Pacific Islands were not traded for trinkets etc by their black slave masters as happened in Africa, but rather were truly kidnapped and taken to Queensland. I wonder if Prof Hochschild's talk will feature this aspect of our past

[PhilipG]

Barnardo's sent children to Canada well into the mid 20th Century to work on farms. :disgust:
Slavery in all but name.

[ChrisGeorge]

http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk/images/roscoe02.jpg

Liverpool should not be castigated for its slavery past but also praised for having produced one of the great abolitionists, humanitarians, art collectors and man of letters, the great William Roscoe (1753-1831). The Liverpool-born M.P., poet and children's author fought slavery in Parliament, as an ally of William Wilberforce. He also wrote a great book-long poem, The Wrongs of Africa, talking of what was done to the Africans. He was a man of courage who made himself unpopular among his peers in Liverpool due to his stand against the slave trade.

Above image of the Roscoe Memorial in the Cloisters, Ullet Road Unitarian church is courtesy of http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk. For more on William Roscoe, see http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/citizen/71798.htm

Chris

[wsteve55]

Sorry Kev,
but no slaves were actually brought to liverpool(of any real consequence!)the ships sailed from liverpool loaded with money,trinkets,etc, to north african ports,where slaves, who had already been rounded up by other african or arab slave traders, were then sold/exchanged. Then, they were transported to america,and sold. The ships returned to liverpool with cargo's of cotton,tobacco,etc.As for the museum,i'd feel better about the idea if i knew they would explain, that this trade in human cargo, was already in existence,(and to some degree,still is!) from time immemorial,the european traders just tapping into, and massively developing,what was a human resource,literally!!! The street names i think, should stay, it's our past,like it or not!

[Ged]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/england/F2770282?thread=3931899&phrase=London

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/england/F2770282?thread=3945202&phrase=Leicester

A couple of BBC message board threads on the subject.

[scouserdave]

Just reading the London thread, Ged. I think the people who have the biggest problem are the Whites. Most Black/Asian people I know just want to get on with their lives and do what's best for their kids.

[Ged]

Yes, not least the liberal white p.c. brigade who love to beat themselves up over it. It shouldn't be forgotten but never a year seems to go by when a programme isn't made about it, a museum exhibition opened or added to, an apology sought or street name changing idea. It would appear that no one is seeking appeasement and how could this generation's apology do so anyway. Time to draw a line under it I think and as you say, just move on.

[scouserdave]

Yes, not least the liberal white p.c. brigade who love to beat themselves up over it.
They're the ones Ged. :PDT_Xtremez_12:

[snappel]

Time to draw a line under it I think and as you say, just move on.Yeah and all these idiots like Kanye West crying their eyes out about it. Today's blacks living in the USA enjoy the best quality of life of any black community on the planet. So it wasn't all in vain... things have come a long way since the slave trade.

[scouserdave]

Kanye West is so up his own backside. I luv people like that, because they make my laugh:PDT11

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West)
"In January 2006, West again sparked controversy when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in the image of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. Later that month, he suggested in Playboy that if a bible were written in the present day, he is famous and important enough to be included in it. "I throw up historical subjects in a way that makes kids want to learn about them." West claimed, "[I'm] definitely in the history books already.""

[Howie]

I agree with much of what has been said but we do need to learn lessons from our past.

[stan]

I think we have.But we don't constantly need to be told we have to apologize.I didn't do anything.Shall we ask the Italians to apologize for the Romans invading most of Europe?

[Sloyne]

Shall we ask the Italians to apologize for the Romans invading most of Europe?But didn't the Romans bring civilisation to the areas they conquered and occupied? Also, the habitants of those lands conquered, were made full citizens of Rome with all that that entailed. A citizen in Helsby was as much a Roman as was a citizen in Herculaneum.

No doubt Romans exploited the conquered lands and peoples but I would suggest that Roman conquest was far less brutal (a 1000 years + difference in sensibilities) than European conquest of Africa, the Americas and the far east islands of Indonesia and Philipines. And although the natives of these lands were called Dutch, British, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., none had full rights with representation in the "Motherland".

Some will disagree, i'm sure.

[Ged]

Yes, it was far less brutal throwing the peasants to the lions and all that - couldn't we do that now. Young white kids working up chimneys, down mines and in mills was slavery - so was the Egyptian Pyramid building. There's human trafficking going on right now and the Chinese cockle pickers were exploited in Morecambe by, you guess it, Chinese gang masters. Off out now to pick someone up, see what Roger Phillip's listeners have got to moan abo....sorry, say.

[Sloyne]

Yes, it was far less brutal throwing the peasants to the lions and all tha- couldn't we do that now. Young white kids working up chimneys, down mines and in mills was slavery - so was the Egyptian Pyramid building. There's human trafficking going on right now and the Chinese cockle pickers were exploited in Morecambe by, you guess it, Chinese gang masters. Off out now to pick someone up, see what Roger Phillip's listeners have got to moan abo....sorry, say.What is it they say about sarcasm? You obviously missed my reference to the fact that more than a thousand years had passed, with times "civilising" effect, between lions gorging on humans, for sport and/or punishment, and trading in human beings or, it was lost on you. And of course your reference to nineteen and twentieth century excessives of capitalism wasn't lost on me. However, those same "white kids" became "black, brown, yellow and red kids" in colonial locations.

[Howie]

History of the Slave Trade, Roscoe Lecture
09 March 2007

Adam Hochschild: "Though born in the age of swords, wigs and stagecoaches, the British anti-slavery movement leaves us an extraordinary legacy."

http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/MKG_Global_Images/roscoe_hoch(1).gif

Adam Hochschild delivered a fascinating Roscoe Lecture on the history of the slave trade to an audience of around 800 people on 7 March 2007.

The acclaimed author of 'Bury the Chains', which traces the movement to end slavery in the British Empire, began by reminding the audience that in the late 18th century, when early abolitionists first began to campaign against the slave trade, around three-quarters of the people on earth were in bondage of one form or another, be it as outright slaves or as bonded labourers and serfs.

During his lecture, Hochschild attempted to redress the historical imbalance which he believes over emphasises the role of Wilberforce. Instead he highlighted the work of abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, who actively campaigned to end slavery between 1785 and 1838. During his campaign, Clarkson travelled over 35,000 miles on horseback around the UK and survived numerous attempts on his life. He also helped to secure over 60,000 signatures, many more people that where entitled to vote at the time, on a petition asking for the abolition or reform of the slave trade.

Hochschild also stressed how the actions of slaves themselves helped weaken the pro-slavery case, through slave revolts and rebellions in the West Indies and beyond, and through the actions of former slaves, such as Olaudah Equiano, who went on a five year book tour of the British Isles promoting his best-selling autobiography, a vivid account of his life in slavery and freedom.

The British anti-slavery movement has, said Hochschild, left us an extraordinary legacy. Not only did it pioneer approaches such as consumer boycotts, newsletters, petitions, political posters and much more, but more importantly it proved that ordinary people could secure wide-reaching political and social change.

Professor David Alton, who chairs LJMU's Foundation for Citizenship, which hosts the Roscoe Lecture series, added that while it is right to commemorate emancipation, we should also remember that contemporary forms of slavery still persist on a vast scale. He said: "Over the last 200 years, many human rights campaigns have been modelled on the successful actions of Roscoe, Wilberforce, Equanio, Clarkson and other abolitionists.

"What, however, is abundantly clear is that if were merely to indulge in some rather smug self-congratulations, we will have entirely missed the point. As many as 27 million people are still thought to be enslaved today, and slavery and trafficking generate billions of pounds worldwide. Perhaps compared to 1807, slavery tip-toes in carpet slippers but it remains a pernicious and all too real contemporary reality."

Picture: Dr Roon Noon, who teaches on the abolition of slavery as part of LJMU's social science programmes, Adam Hochschild and Professor David Alton.

Source: LJMU News Update (http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/NewsUpdate/index_86781.htm)

[Howie]

Star of anti-slavery film in city
Mar 12 2007
by Caroline Innes, Liverpool Daily Post

http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/icliverpool/mar2007/3/9/457F82B0-B78C-BB7D-592F02D9F6F6E917.jpg

ONE of Hollywood’s hottest properties is coming to Liverpool to promote his new film, which explores one man’s struggle to end slavery in Britain.

Fresh from playing Mr Fantastic in blockbuster Fantastic Four, Black Hawk Down star Ioan Gruffudd takes on the role of anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce in the historical epic Amazing Grace.

The Welsh actor chose the city for a special preview screening where he will introduce the film with acclaimed director Michael Apted.

Liverpool surpassed both London and Bristol to become Europe’s number one slave port by the 1740s.

Story continues (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpooldailypost/news/regionalnews/tm_headline=star-of-anti%2Dslavery-film-in-city%26method=full%26objectid=18740807%26siteid=50 061-name_page.html#story_continue)...

[ChrisGeorge]

I just picked up on this Associated Press story that ran worldwide in newspapers on March 14, 2007.

Anniversary revives images of slavery
English bicentennial of abolition recalls Liverpool’s role in trade
By ROBERT BARR

LIVERPOOL, England – Beatles lovers who seek out Penny Lane imagine it as that magical place “in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies.” But it has a sinister undertone that still reverberates.

The street in Liverpool, hometown of the Fab Four, is named after James Penny, a slave trader and investor in 11 voyages which took 500 to 600 captives at a time to the New World.

Penny was among the many who enriched themselves and their city on human trafficking until the slave trade was abolished 200 years ago. Their ships carried millions of human beings from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas in a triangular trade which also brought profitable cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum to England.

Liverpool’s rise, says local historian Ray Costello, is summed up in the carving on a bank facade: two Black children supporting Liverpool as Neptune.

”What it really means is that this bank was founded on the slave trade,” Costello said.

It resonates all the more with the approach of the March 25 anniversary of the British parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in Britain’s colonies 200 years ago – though not slavery itself. Liverpool’s problem is its “hidden history – nobody wants to talk about it,” said Eric Lynch, a Black Liverpudlian who leads walking tours in the west coast city.

However, the past has not gone unacknowledged.

The city council formally apologized in 1999, expressing “shame and remorse for the city’s role in this trade in human misery.”

It has commissioned statues titled “Reconciliation,” two abstract bronze figures embracing, which will be dedicated this year in Richmond, Va., and Benin, a West African port of call for Liverpool’s slave ships.

On Aug. 23, the anniversary of the slave uprising in French-ruled Haiti in 1791, Liverpool will open the International Slavery Museum. Part of its mission is recovering Liverpool’s history, which remains a fraught issue.

Lynch, the tour guide, finds the echoes in the streets named for slave traders – Bamber, Banastre, Cunliffe, Gascoyne, Oldham, Seel, Tarleton; in a balcony railing made of chains by one of the businesses which depended on the trade; in the face of an African woman in the frieze around the ornate Town Hall.

Liverpool council member Barbara Mace last year proposed renaming streets associated with slavery, and was surprised to learn that Penny Lane was among them. After a lively controversy the proposal was withdrawn.

Liverpool was once the home of John Newton, the slave ship captain who became an ardent abolitionist and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Liverpool in 1787, collecting horrifying stories from sailors and buying tools of the trade: chains, manacles, iron collars and branding irons which made effective publicity for William Wilberforce’s 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the trade.

”By the end of the 19 th century, a lot of rich families were trying to sanitize their wealth, and every trace of slavery they got rid of,” said Costello, who has been researching the history of fellow Blacks in his city for nearly half a century.

What Liverpool needs to do, Costello says, is “take off its shades and see the Blacks,” who have been in the city since the 18 th century but still find themselves mistaken for recent immigrants.

Blacks now represent 7 percent of the work force in the city of 450,000.

Because the slaves sailed direct from Africa to the New World, Liverpool saw little of the trade at close quarters. Richard Benjamin, director of the new museum, said that only 11 slaves are known to have been sold in the city. Some slaves who were given their freedom for fighting against the American Revolution made their way to Liverpool, while others came as crewmen on ships, Costello said.

The abolition act in 1807 was a milestone, but Britain waited another 26 years to outlaw slavery in the colonies; the United States followed in 1865 and Brazil in 1888.

Anti-Slavery International, founded by the leaders of Britain’s abolition movement, estimates that 12 million people are in some form of slavery today, as bonded laborers or in the sex trade.

Slavery is now illegal everywhere, said Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International, but “laws today are not being implemented.”

”We have to not just reflect on the reality and horrors of the slave trade but to see that people power had a very important role in overthrowing the trade, and that people today still have a role to play,” she said.

Liverpool joined the slave trade in 1699 when a ship named Liverpool Merchant put to sea, carrying 220 slaves from West Africa to Barbados. Sir Thomas Johnson, a part-owner of the ship, is known as the founder of modern Liverpool; Sir Thomas Street is named for him.

By 1750, Liverpool had surpassed London and Bristol as a slave-trading port; 45 years later it controlled 80 percent of the British slave trade, representing two-fifths of the European total. In the peak year of 1798, 149 ships set off from Liverpool for Africa, officially with the capacity to carry 53,000 slaves.

By one accounting, Liverpool’s traders transported 1,364,930 Africans in 5,249 voyages between 1699 and 1807.

Africans, often the captives of local chiefs, were paid for with cloth, kitchen pots and pans, muskets, gunpowder, flints, hats, mirrors, candles, beads and brandy.

A page displayed at the trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool details the profits of the voyage of the Enterprize in 1794. The ship sold 356 slaves and cleared a profit of 10,000 pounds – equivalent to about $2 million today.

It was a brutal trade, killing untold numbers of Africans in slave raids, by disease, shipwreck and mistreatment. Women captives were raped. Ship crews suffered heavy death rates from disease.

Alexander Falconbridge, a Bristol ship captain who became an abolitionist, said slaves on some ships were forced to lie on each other in crowded holds during a voyage of at least six weeks. Writing in 1788, he said, “the floor of their rooms was so covered with blood and mucus ... that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful and disgusting.”

Some denied it. Robert Norris, a former slave ship captain who was one of Liverpool’s lobbyists in Parliament, claimed that after dinner the slaves aboard ship were given pipes, tobacco and musical instruments, “and when tired of music and dancing, they then go to games of chance.”

Penny, another Liverpool lobbyist, told legislators that slaves slept aboard their ships “better than the gentlemen do on shore.”

One of the worst atrocities was aboard the Liverpool slave ship Zong, which was wracked with disease; Capt. Luke Collingwood ordered the crew to throw 133 sick slaves overboard, then tried to claim against insurance for “loss of merchandise.” The abolitionist Granville Sharp demanded a murder prosecution, but the government’s attorney responded: “It is madness; the Blacks were property.”

The Zong incident was one among many that fired the zeal of abolitionists – a mass movement built on networks of Quakers, with Sharp, Wilberforce and Clarkson in prominent leadership roles.

Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery pioneer, made an engraving of a kneeling slave in chains with the words “am I not a man and a brother?” Reproduced in the thousands on medallions, hatpins and brooches, it was worn by fashionable supporters of the cause.

In retrospect, the attitudes of some abolitionists now appear puzzling. Newton made two slave voyages even after being converted by the “amazing grace ... that saved a wretch like me.”

”During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was, upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me,” Newton wrote.

However, he added, “I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts and shackles.” – (AP)

[Howie]

Stamp release marks delivery from slave trade
Mar 23 2007
by Catherine Jones, Liverpool Echo

ANTI-slave trade campaigners have been honoured on a new set of stamps to mark the 200th anniversary of its abolition this weekend.

The Royal Mail chose Liverpool to unveil the six stamps - the second time the city has hosted a national stamp launch this year.

Tony Tibbles, keeper of the Merseyside Maritime Museum (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/), was commissioned to write the presentation pack for the special stamps, and was one of several experts Royal Mail consulted for the issue.

He is part of the team developing the new International Slavery Museum (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/).

The stamps combine contemporary portraits of key individuals set against backgrounds linked to their work.

Source: icLiverpool (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpoolecho/news/echonews/tm_headline=stamp-release-marks-delivery-from-slave-trade%26method=full%26objectid=18795431%26siteid=5 0061-name_page.html)

[Silverbuttons]

Long time no post.

Kev asked me yesterday to post about me attending the prem of Amazing Grace last week, I've written a very long post in my Live Journal and it's quicker if I direct you there. I will warn you now that I am a fangirl of Ioan's (for about 8 years or so) and that the post contains gushing. You have been warned!!! :unibrow:

Click here to go to my LiveJournal post (http://hhhatholder.livejournal.com/28348.html#cutid1).

I also have pictures from the night. All of them are clickable thumbnails. I didn't take the pictures, my friend took them. My camera conked out on me. :disgust:

http://thumbs.villagephotos.com/19747293.jpg (http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/ioan02.jpg)

That's Ioan over my shoulder with some woman from Radio Merseyside and someone from the Echo/Daily Post.

http://thumbs.villagephotos.com/19747295.jpg (http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/ioan10.jpg)

Ioan signing a card that I was sent from a friend that she'd got attending the showing of the film at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

http://thumbs.villagephotos.com/19747296.jpg (http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/ioan11.jpg)

Ioan and me. GUH! http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/thud.gif http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/swoon.gifhttp://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/sm192.gif

http://thumbs.villagephotos.com/19747297.jpg (http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/ioan12.jpg)

I don't know what I'm saying. Maybe "Phowar" hehehehe :unibrow:

[Kev]

lol, thanks Ceri, much appreciated :PDT11. I bet you were made up to say the least....

I'm gonna read your journal now...

[Kev]

http://thumbs.villagephotos.com/19747296.jpg (http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/ioan11.jpg)



^^The face on that woman, how jealous is she?!!^^




http://thumbs.villagephotos.com/19747295.jpg (http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-4/166789/ioan10.jpg)



Why was Dean Gaffney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Gaffney) there? :unibrow:

[Silverbuttons]

^^The face on that woman, how jealous is she?!!^^

Ha I know! What a cow!

Why was Dean Gaffney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Gaffney) there? :unibrow:

:eek: Oh Ioan's much more handsome than Dean. :p

[Kev]

:eek: Oh Ioan's much more handsome than Dean. :p

LOL - I thought you were gonna strike me down for that one :PDT10, glad u had a good night. Any others u are planning to go to?

[Silverbuttons]

I attended the Cardiff premiere of Ioan's film, King Arthur 2 years ago. If there's one for Fantastic4 2 in Cardiff and I'm not in work then I might HAVE to go!

Not that I'm a stalker or anything! :ninja:

[Kev]

I attended the Cardiff premiere of Ioan's film, King Arthur 2 years ago. If there's one for Fantastic4 2 in Cardiff and I'm not in work then I might HAVE to go!

Not that I'm a stalker or anything! :ninja:

If u are caught in the grounds of his home, I don't know u, ok? :unibrow::PDT11:PDT10

[Libertarian]

I just picked up on this Associated Press story that ran worldwide in newspapers on March 14, 2007.

Anniversary revives images of slavery
English bicentennial of abolition recalls Liverpool’s role in trade
By ROBERT BARR

LIVERPOOL, England – Beatles lovers who seek out Penny Lane imagine it as that magical place “in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies.” But it has a sinister undertone that still reverberates.

The street in Liverpool, hometown of the Fab Four, is named after James Penny, a slave trader and investor in 11 voyages which took 500 to 600 captives at a time to the New World.

Penny was among the many who enriched themselves and their city on human trafficking until the slave trade was abolished 200 years ago. Their ships carried millions of human beings from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas in a triangular trade which also brought profitable cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum to England.

Liverpool’s rise, says local historian Ray Costello, is summed up in the carving on a bank facade: two Black children supporting Liverpool as Neptune.

”What it really means is that this bank was founded on the slave trade,” Costello said.

It resonates all the more with the approach of the March 25 anniversary of the British parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in Britain’s colonies 200 years ago – though not slavery itself. Liverpool’s problem is its “hidden history – nobody wants to talk about it,” said Eric Lynch, a Black Liverpudlian who leads walking tours in the west coast city.

However, the past has not gone unacknowledged.

The city council formally apologized in 1999, expressing “shame and remorse for the city’s role in this trade in human misery.”

It has commissioned statues titled “Reconciliation,” two abstract bronze figures embracing, which will be dedicated this year in Richmond, Va., and Benin, a West African port of call for Liverpool’s slave ships.

On Aug. 23, the anniversary of the slave uprising in French-ruled Haiti in 1791, Liverpool will open the International Slavery Museum. Part of its mission is recovering Liverpool’s history, which remains a fraught issue.

Lynch, the tour guide, finds the echoes in the streets named for slave traders – Bamber, Banastre, Cunliffe, Gascoyne, Oldham, Seel, Tarleton; in a balcony railing made of chains by one of the businesses which depended on the trade; in the face of an African woman in the frieze around the ornate Town Hall.

Liverpool council member Barbara Mace last year proposed renaming streets associated with slavery, and was surprised to learn that Penny Lane was among them. After a lively controversy the proposal was withdrawn.

Liverpool was once the home of John Newton, the slave ship captain who became an ardent abolitionist and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Liverpool in 1787, collecting horrifying stories from sailors and buying tools of the trade: chains, manacles, iron collars and branding irons which made effective publicity for William Wilberforce’s 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the trade.

”By the end of the 19 th century, a lot of rich families were trying to sanitize their wealth, and every trace of slavery they got rid of,” said Costello, who has been researching the history of fellow Blacks in his city for nearly half a century.

What Liverpool needs to do, Costello says, is “take off its shades and see the Blacks,” who have been in the city since the 18 th century but still find themselves mistaken for recent immigrants.

Blacks now represent 7 percent of the work force in the city of 450,000.

Because the slaves sailed direct from Africa to the New World, Liverpool saw little of the trade at close quarters. Richard Benjamin, director of the new museum, said that only 11 slaves are known to have been sold in the city. Some slaves who were given their freedom for fighting against the American Revolution made their way to Liverpool, while others came as crewmen on ships, Costello said.

The abolition act in 1807 was a milestone, but Britain waited another 26 years to outlaw slavery in the colonies; the United States followed in 1865 and Brazil in 1888.

Anti-Slavery International, founded by the leaders of Britain’s abolition movement, estimates that 12 million people are in some form of slavery today, as bonded laborers or in the sex trade.

Slavery is now illegal everywhere, said Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International, but “laws today are not being implemented.”

”We have to not just reflect on the reality and horrors of the slave trade but to see that people power had a very important role in overthrowing the trade, and that people today still have a role to play,” she said.

Liverpool joined the slave trade in 1699 when a ship named Liverpool Merchant put to sea, carrying 220 slaves from West Africa to Barbados. Sir Thomas Johnson, a part-owner of the ship, is known as the founder of modern Liverpool; Sir Thomas Street is named for him.

By 1750, Liverpool had surpassed London and Bristol as a slave-trading port; 45 years later it controlled 80 percent of the British slave trade, representing two-fifths of the European total. In the peak year of 1798, 149 ships set off from Liverpool for Africa, officially with the capacity to carry 53,000 slaves.

By one accounting, Liverpool’s traders transported 1,364,930 Africans in 5,249 voyages between 1699 and 1807.

Africans, often the captives of local chiefs, were paid for with cloth, kitchen pots and pans, muskets, gunpowder, flints, hats, mirrors, candles, beads and brandy.

A page displayed at the trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool details the profits of the voyage of the Enterprize in 1794. The ship sold 356 slaves and cleared a profit of 10,000 pounds – equivalent to about $2 million today.

It was a brutal trade, killing untold numbers of Africans in slave raids, by disease, shipwreck and mistreatment. Women captives were raped. Ship crews suffered heavy death rates from disease.

Alexander Falconbridge, a Bristol ship captain who became an abolitionist, said slaves on some ships were forced to lie on each other in crowded holds during a voyage of at least six weeks. Writing in 1788, he said, “the floor of their rooms was so covered with blood and mucus ... that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful and disgusting.”

Some denied it. Robert Norris, a former slave ship captain who was one of Liverpool’s lobbyists in Parliament, claimed that after dinner the slaves aboard ship were given pipes, tobacco and musical instruments, “and when tired of music and dancing, they then go to games of chance.”

Penny, another Liverpool lobbyist, told legislators that slaves slept aboard their ships “better than the gentlemen do on shore.”

One of the worst atrocities was aboard the Liverpool slave ship Zong, which was wracked with disease; Capt. Luke Collingwood ordered the crew to throw 133 sick slaves overboard, then tried to claim against insurance for “loss of merchandise.” The abolitionist Granville Sharp demanded a murder prosecution, but the government’s attorney responded: “It is madness; the Blacks were property.”

The Zong incident was one among many that fired the zeal of abolitionists – a mass movement built on networks of Quakers, with Sharp, Wilberforce and Clarkson in prominent leadership roles.

Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery pioneer, made an engraving of a kneeling slave in chains with the words “am I not a man and a brother?” Reproduced in the thousands on medallions, hatpins and brooches, it was worn by fashionable supporters of the cause.

In retrospect, the attitudes of some abolitionists now appear puzzling. Newton made two slave voyages even after being converted by the “amazing grace ... that saved a wretch like me.”

”During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was, upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me,” Newton wrote.

However, he added, “I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts and shackles.” – (AP)

Will the new museum have a section on the Cornish slaves who were captured by Islamic ships?

[Howie]

Remember shame of city’s slave trade
Mar 24 2007
by Michelle Fiddler, Liverpool Echo

MERSEYSIDERS were gathering at Liverpool cathedral today for a service to mark the 200th anniversary of abolition of the slave trade.

The 11.30am Service of Penitence, open to all, is one of a series of weekend events to commemorate the event.

On March 25, 1807, the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act which abolished the trade in the British Empire.

Liverpool grew rich on the proceeds of slavery and in 1999 the city made a formal apology for its role.

The Bishop of Liverpool, Dr James Jones, is due to preach the sermon The Real Blasphemy at this morning’s service with other Merseyside church leaders, including the Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, in attendance.

Story continues (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpoolecho/news/echonews/tm_headline=remember-shame-of-city%2D%2D8217%2Ds-slave-trade%26method=full%26objectid=18800766%26siteid=5 0061-name_page.html#story_continue)...


"Anthony's murder was caused by legacy of slavery"
Mar 24 2007
by Nicola Rowlands, icNorthWest

THE Bishop of Liverpool believes that the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker was caused by the legacy of slavery.

James Jones made the statement during a service earlier today (Saturday) to mark the 200th anniversary of the decision to abolish slavery in the British Empire.

In front of a 400-strong congregation at Liverpool Cathedral, Bishop Jones said: “As I have immersed myself in the history of slavery, the more I believe that our racism is rooted in the dehumanising treatment of black people by white people during the slave trade.”

The Bishop also read out an account given to Parliament by John Newton, the former slave ship commander-turned-Abolitionist. It highlighted the practice of “jointing” in which slaves were slowly hacked to death with an axe and their body parts thrown into the midst of other captives as a warning.

Bishop Jones added: “In this very cathedral 18 months ago we gathered to bid farewell to Anthony Walker, whose murder, also with an axe, was driven by the same brutal racism.

Story continues (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpoolecho/news/echonews/tm_headline=%2Danthony%2Ds-murder-was-caused-by-legacy-of-slavery%2D%26method=full%26objectid=18803997%26sit eid=50061-name_page.html#story_continue)...

[snappel]

In front of a 400-strong congregation at Liverpool Cathedral, Bishop Jones said: “As I have immersed myself in the history of slavery, the more I believe that our racism is rooted in the dehumanising treatment of black people by white people during the slave trade.”
Oh what rubbish! It's a fear of those that are different that's to blame, and hence gays and disableds suffer the same. And the church is more to blame than anyone for instilling fear in people, and for condemning those that are different.

I wish people would stop clinging onto the slave trade and move on. We all know the history, we all know there were black slave traders. It's just your classic human greed.

[Libertarian]

As the church has apologised for its role in the slave trade perhaps in 200 years they will apologise for what they have done to gay people.

[snappel]

I doubt it. And even then they'd have to apologise to what they've done to white heterosexual persons as well. I was once a confirmed Christian, but I 'saw the light' and got out. Whilst I don't mind people choosing to believe in something, I hate the way religion can be used to force people into a way of thinking, and into unjust guilt and Christ know's what (ha ha!).

Anyway...

[Max]

The Bishop of Liverpool = Retarded.

[SteveFaragher]

In the past ten years or so the study and explanation of the Slave Trade has been drawn into sharper focus and of course the whole period of British history is quite deplorable.

The history of black people came into sharp focus because of the raising of black consciousness in the USA in the 60's and 70's, culminating inAlex Haliley's "Roots" and every black person in America adopting an African name rather than their "slave name".

In Liverpool there seems to be a reliance on promoting the slave trade, becuase it is an "easy" history to tell , it was so obviously "bad" time in the history of the UK. I've even heard stories that some history tours in liveprool at the moment have been pointing out the slave rings down at the albert dock, and the black men in chains on exchange flags are all to do with the slave trade. The rings were for tying up ships and the black slaves are in fact french prisoners of war.

It was **** for everyone then, black white chinese.......life was short and brutal......

There is also the argument about whether we (white people) shoudl apologise for what happened and whethe we should feel guilty or guilty. I would feel guilty if I was the heir to the Chatsworth estate or Lord Bath, but the strange truth is my background means that we won't be celebrating the bicentenial of the emancipation of my ancestors for quite a while yet. UK indigenous (and I am including all races here didn't get the vote until the late 19th C), and the working, housing and health conditions for theworkign classes in Industrial Revolution Britian were probably worse than living and workign on a plantation in the West Indies.

Because we are looking back at all this with more than rose coloured specs, as though all the white people in the UK were as emancipated and as well off then as we are now, which defintitly wasnt the case.

Another truism is that a slave as "property" might have been better looked after than employees, after all if you did work thme to death then you ahd to pay for a new one, you work an employee to death then there were plenty more factory fodder in Victorian Britain to replace. This aspect of victorian and pre georgian britain isnt talked about as indigenous working class people havent been radicalized pr theri consciounous rasied for a long long long time.

[SteveFaragher]

There aren't many "good" stories told in all this slavery discussion at the moment, and surely there must have been.

The bad stories are a very lazy way of telling history. I'm offering challenge, and this came to me the other day, has anyone ever seen a plan of the layout of a slave ship other than the one of the vessel "The Brookes". I remember seeing it in a book over forty years ago when we were studying the triangulalr trade at primary school. the same plan is on the display in the Maritime Museum , it has regularly been used in TV programmes about the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

The planof the Brookes was actually originally published by the abolishionists movement in 1789 to forward and support their case, it's actually a piece of spin. Let's put it this way if you were shackeld together for up to eight weeks unable to move wouldnt you have a severe case of muscle wastage, and be virtually worthless as a commodity to sell on.

As stated previously I am not trying to demean or understate the scale and evilness of the Slave Trade, what I am trying to say is that maybe as in the case of the Brookes, what appears on the face of it to be a fact, may not be the reality.

I am more concerned that well meaning and guilt ridden middle class white folk who work for the BBC and Museum's on Merseyside stop trying to make the us all feel guilty about this. I dotn even mind apologising but I'm apologising for the British aristocracy and The Church of England, not for anything my ancestors never actually did.

It would ebe worth lookign at the relationships between cotton workers in the southern states of america in the 1870'sand the plight of the lancashire cotton mill workers of the same period- lookignat pay life expectancy and living conditions. Maybe even start a campaign to get the Artistocracy to apologise the working classes for teh Industrial revolution, that wont happen because it's not balck and white enough.

[SteveFaragher]

http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/history/victorian/Victorian1.html

Life expectancy for males was as young as 17......35,000 children employed this was in 1830 23 years after the abolition of slavery, and in lancashire

[taffy]

http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/history/victorian/Victorian1.html

Life expectancy for males was as young as 17......35,000 children employed this was in 1830 23 years after the abolition of slavery, and in lancashire

Much the same in the coal mining industry too. Child labour in mines ( underground) was stopped in the early 1840s from memory but this still meant that when they reached 12 years, they were classed as adult and went underground usually as door keepers sitting in the dark operating the ventilation flaps in the tunnels.

One minor point, the slave trade stopped in 1807. Slavery as such was abolished theoretically, in the British Empire, in about the mid 1830s. In practice it still occurred in places like the sugar plantations of Queensland, Australia into the 1860s or so.

[ChrisGeorge]

Much the same in the coal mining industry too. Child labour in mines ( underground) was stopped in the early 1840s from memory but this still meant that when they reached 12 years, they were classed as adult and went underground usually as door keepers sitting in the dark operating the ventilation flaps in the tunnels.

One minor point, the slave trade stopped in 1807. Slavery as such was abolished theoretically in about the mid 1830s. In practice it still occurred in places like the sugar plantations of Queensland, Australia into the 1860s or so.

Life was brutal for anybody who wasn't well to do until the twentieth century. Just read Dickens or Hardy or other writers who wrote about social conditions in the nineteenth century. I am sure life for indentured servants was little better than it was for slaves.

Chris

[PhilipG]

This argument about the Victorian working-class being treated as bad as slaves leaves me rather uneasy.
I get the impression that we are even being told the slaves were perhaps in a better position in some respects.
Let's not forget the major difference here is choice.
The slaves had no choice in the matter.
Admittedly the working-class didn't have much choice, but there is still a vast difference between the two groups.

Pleae stop making excuses for the slave trade.

[SteveFaragher]

I was trying to make the point that everyone was getting shafted by the Englsih Aristocracy and the people who started the Industrial revolution, we are also looking back at the 18th and 19th from a blinkered (21stC) perspective that people who worked had any choice, they were as much chattels as slaves were.

I call it the Charlotte Bronte effect, we all hypnotised into thinking we all lived in a bloody Jane Eyre, genteel, elegant and a rural idyll, when in fact the vast majority of folk lived jsut over the hill form the Eyre's in a ****ty hovel, dying of choldera, TB or just starving to death.

I am also critical of the way museums and to some extent the BBC have been moralising and over simplifying everything over the anniversary, and as a working class bloke I hate being preached at or castigated by the sons and daughters of the people or class who instigated the atrocities in the first place.

I hate middle or upper class angst being shifted onto everyone elses shoulders, especially mine.

It's purely a class argument I'm tryng to put here. I hate what happened during the time of the slave trade.

Perhaps the media and politicians shoudl be interested in sorting out modern slave trading from eastern europe and china, otherwise lessons arent being learnt from talkign about the past.

[PhilipG]

I understand what you're saying, Steve and agree with most of it.
In the 1950s (when I had no choice) I had to go to church 3 times each Sunday, and soon realised that it was all a con, designed by the clergy and the wealthy to keep us in our place.
"All things bright and beautiful" even says: "The rich man in his castle. The poor man at his gate. God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate."
Of course these were still the remnants of the Victorian 'Paternal' society, which in itself was morally wrong.
I think what I'm trying to say is that there is still a vast difference between servants and slaves.
Because true slavery still exists in various parts of the world, and needs eradicating.

[Ged]

When Muslims (who traded slaves long before and long after anyone in Britain, who after all, were behind the abolition in the end) and when Romans (who threw Christians to the lions) apologise, then so will I - maybe. But as Steve says, it won't be on behalf of any of my ancestors so it'll be hollow.

It's also interesting to note that a scholar who rang into Radio Merseyside pointed out that Liverpool's trade wealth with Ireland and the Isle of Man (of all places) far outweighed any profits made from the slave trade at the time. Source: LRO (A project apparently undertaken by him when told by an angry slave protester to go and get his facts straight)

What worries me is - what follows?

Is it the blaim claim again. And who do we make the cheque out to?

[Ged]

Blame even :shock:

[SteveFaragher]

I think we also had a lot of trade with north germany and the baltic too, (after all that's were Lob Skause came from) it would be interesting to see what the percentages of trade from 1700 to 1900 with different parts of the world were, especially after 1807, anyone know?

[SteveFaragher]

Maybe the italian government should apologise for killing all the druids on anglesey.....o..but you've got to ask yourself if there was any reparation for the slave trade how on earth would you allocate the compo.

If you are half Irish half African then you've cracked it on both counts, famine and slavery compo.

Im half manx half yorkshire so I wouldnt get a sniff unless I get a trip claim in agaisnt the corpy

[lindylou]

What happened on Anglesey ? I havn't heard about this.

[shytalk]

What happened on Anglesey ? I havn't heard about this.
http://www.anglesey-history.co.uk/anghist.html

[SteveFaragher]

While Boedicea was sacking Colchester the main Roman army was slaughtering the Druids up in sunny north wales, well it had to be done their cooking smelt, they wee stealing all the building jobs, marrying our girls and opening Druid shops, oh sorry that's the Poles.....

[Jericho]

In terms of the original question, I think the whole of history is becoming 'Disneyfied'. Complexity, contradictory versions of the same event, motives of the historian, politics etc are out. Tony Robinson is in.

Son et lumière:PDT11

Victoria Wood is making the journey Queen Victoria never made.:snf (41):

[Ged]

And now I take it you all know what's happening to a lot of the poles in Scotland?

[MissDemenour]

I doubt it. And even then they'd have to apologise to what they've done to white heterosexual persons as well. I was once a confirmed Christian, but I 'saw the light' and got out. Whilst I don't mind people choosing to believe in something, I hate the way religion can be used to force people into a way of thinking, and into unjust guilt and Christ know's what (ha ha!).

Anyway...

I completely agree with you on this. I stopped being catholic two years ago in favour of a religion with alot less propoganda. I once remember my mum telling me that when she was married she was told to go forth and procreate by the priest. Then once she had her first daughter (my eldest sister) she was expected to go to church, kneel down in front of the whole congregation at the front and beg for forgiveness for her cardinal sin of lust. She was insulted that my dad didn't have to beg for gods forgiveness for his lust.

I still occasionally have pangs of guilt for something that is not wrong or do things certain ways because of my catholic up bringing.

On to slavery. Liverpool actually played quite a small part in the slave trade compared to an awful lot of other places. I don't think we should of been forced to appologise or that we should change street names. Yes a memorial is a good idea because it is something that was wrong and should never happen again but we shouldn't have to grovel for the small part we played as a port which slave ships mainly used just to restock supplies before they went to america.

[snappel]

Only today I was updating my website, this page (http://www.level-two.co.uk/gallery.php?locname=stjosephs) specifically. It was wierd looking round there. So regimented and strict, every book, poster, notice and piece of artwork was God-related. I think it would be better if kids were put in a totally non-religious school and educated accordingly. Parents should be banned from making their kids go to a religious school. I find it strange now that at my bog-standard comprehensive junior school we had to pray in assembly...

I can see how blissfully ignorant religious people enjoy religion, but most of the time it seems to bring uncertainty, a lack of confidence, individual thought and a whole lot of misery.

Back to slavery, it was interesting reading about the number of people who were used as slaves during WW2 by the Nazi's. Seems a bit closer to home in a way, as it was only 60 years ago. I think it'd be better to look ahead and try and prevent slavery where possible in the future rather than getting hung up on what happened so long ago. Britain moved to abolish slavery - is that not enough?

[knowhowe]

THE country's first museum dedicated to the slave trade will be established in Liverpool.

Thousands of slaves were brought to the city from Africa before crossing the Atlantic to work in the West Indies and North America.

Source (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=16211383%26method=full%26siteid=50061% 26headline=waterfront%2dsite%2dfor%2dslave%2dtrade %2dmuseum-name_page.html)

:PDT11

Wonder who got it so wrong- a hack in the local rag or the writer of the press release from the museum itself?
Unforgiveable, whoever it was, considering the subject matter.

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi all

I came across a bizarre ebay listing for a seller who has listed a 1794 Liverpool ship halfpenny for sale.

The listing says "RARE 1794 LIVERPOOL SLAVER'S COIN! HOME OF THE BEATLES!" (http://cgi.ebay.com/RARE-1794-LIVERPOOL-SLAVERS-COIN-HOME-OF-THE-BEATLES_W0QQitemZ220201619061QQihZ012QQcategoryZ33 96QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp 1638Q2em118Q2el1247)

At the head of a long long listing about Liverpool's history and culture, which quotes Gerry Marsden's "Ferry Across the Mersey", Beatles links, and other links, the seller states in large glary black and red lettering:

'Dear Ebay,

'Please do not end this listing for an allegedly "misleading headline"!!! This is a Liverpool Half Penny. It is a well-known fact that Liverpool was a major link in the slave trade at the time this coin was issued. The issuer of this coin, Thomas Clarke, was engaged in the Slave trade. This can be verified at: http://www.merchantnetworks.com.au/periods/1775after/1789slaversbrit.htm Therefore, it is not misleading to call the issuer a "slaver". Thank you.

'LUCKY HALF PENNY from LIVERPOOL
FERRY CROSS THE MERSEY

Life goes on day after day
Hearts torn in every way. . . '

I have no way of knowing without researching whether Thomas Clarke was or was not a slaver or whether the seller has the right Thomas Clarke but it seems to me this ebay seller is doing Liverpool an injustice in both making hay out of Liverpool's connection with slavery while also building up the city as the City of Culture.

As I say, it just comes across to me as a strange listing. See what you think.

Chris

[taffy]

Not heard of this before. here's some more info

http://www.abccoinsandtokens.com/DH.Lancs.062.001.html

[ChrisGeorge]

Not heard of this before. here's some more info

http://www.abccoinsandtokens.com/DH.Lancs.062.001.html

Thanks, Taffy. That site says,

"Thomas Clarke was a grocer living at 12, Cable Street, and had a warehouse at No. 4, Marshall Street in Liverpool."

If Thomas Clarke was a grocer could he have been a slave trader as well? I am not sure, although of course many merchants of the day had interests in a number of enterprises.

All the best

Chris

[taffy]

Thanks, Taffy. That site says,

"Thomas Clarke was a grocer living at 12, Cable Street, and had a warehouse at No. 4, Marshall Street in Liverpool."

If Thomas Clarke was a grocer could he have been a slave trader as well? I am not sure, although of course many merchants of the day had interests in a number of enterprises.

All the best

Chris

Yes. Thomas Clarke is listed in the 1807 list of slave trading merchants. Like other Liverpool merchants he simply speculated in slave trading alongside his other business interests. Also many people in Liverpool bought shares in each slave ship's voyage. Typically these were 1/16 ths or 1/12 ths shares in the voyage. So like others, Thomas Clarke probably sold on part of the risk in his slaving trips to other speculators

[ChrisGeorge]

Yes. Thomas Clarke is listed in the 1807 list of slave trading merchants. Like other Liverpool merchants he simply speculated in slave trading alongside his other business interests. Also many people in Liverpool bought shares in each slave ship's voyage. Typically these were 1/16 ths or 1/12 ths shares in the voyage. So like others, Thomas Clarke probably sold on part of the risk in his slaving trips to other speculators

Okay, thanks, Taffy. I will say that the term "slave trader" that the ebay seller is using probably brings to mind to most people a man who is fully engaged in the trade not someone who only has a part interest. Although I am sure some people might say that even that share of interest made Clarke a slave trader or at least a willing participant in the trade.

Chris

[gustave]

No one surely is denying that this Black Holocaust took place? The guilt is not yours to take on, I can't think of any free thinking person who denies that people of the same hue cannot be utter @*&@$£d's towards their nieghbours etc.

It's almost the children's playground, 'my dads bigger than your dad'. I'm not trying to dictate the discussion rather I came on here to find out more about our various histories.

With no photographs (for obvious reasons) to clarify history, we rely on drawings litho's which tend to be verified by at the time...

The following link contains a variety images other than The Brooke. some are actually from a Navel Officer.

http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/return.php?categorynum=5&categoryName=Slave%20Ships%20and%20the%20Atlantic% 20Crossing%20(Middle%20Passage)


These are images by Gustave Dore about poverty in London, no-one denies them, except btw for the Wealthy people of that time who argued that he was showing a biased opinion of their fair city.

http://www.victorianweb.org/graphics/dore/gallery1.html

[Ged]

I don't think anyone is denying it, nor that black chiefs sold captured slaves on, nor the fact very few landed here, nor the fact we led the abolition, nor the fact it was abolished almost a century before most of our civic buildings were erected, nor that Liverpool's biggest trade was with Ireland and Isle of Man at that time, nor the fact it was the way of the whole world back then, nor the fact other races had slavery long before and after.

Hope putting it into perspective helps us to see the overall picture.

It was abominable but let's not beat ourselves up about it again.

[Waterways]

I don't think anyone is denying it, nor that black chiefs sold captured slaves on, nor the fact very few landed here, nor the fact we led the abolition, nor the fact it was abolished almost a century before most of our civic buildings were erected, nor that Liverpool's biggest trade was with Ireland and Isle of Man at that time, nor the fact it was the way of the whole world back then, nor the fact other races had slavery long before and after.

Hope putting it into perspective helps us to see the overall picture.

It was abominable but let's not beat ourselves up about it again.

Slavery was still official in Saudi Arabia in 1962 .

[taffy]

No one surely is denying that this Black Holocaust took place? The guilt is not yours to take on, I can't think of any free thinking person who denies that people of the same hue cannot be utter @*&@$£d's towards their nieghbours etc.



Remember also the white slave holocaust at the hands of the Muslim slave traders.

http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/SStephan/islamic_slavery.htm

They even took slaves from the Irish coast, as of course did the Vikings before them

[gustave]

Lord Muck... "Surely It's allowed M'lud to send that 7 year old up the chimmney my G. grandfather did it and he was never charged with 'cruelty to a child and you can still do it now in some other countries".

M'lud... "Previously acceptable deeds which are now deemed criminal acts in this Country, is not an excuse you can use, neither do the mis-deeds of other countries have any bearing on the way you are presenting your case Lord Muck. Indeed my G.G.grandfather, M'lud the 4th, hung drawn and quartered the last person in England in this very city for stealing 5 pounds.
I sentence you to a fine of 500 pounds".

[Ged]

I wonder who supplied Lord Muck with that 7 year old child - tut tut.

We know who supplied the slave traders though don't we?

[Waterways]

Remember also the white slave holocaust at the hands of the Muslim slave traders.

http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/SStephan/islamic_slavery.htm

They even took slaves from the Irish coast, as of course did the Vikings before them

Arab Corsairs were mainly into white slavery. Where do you think Madelaine is?

[gustave]

WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

THE PATRIOT GAME
Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame, 

And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

My name is O'Hanlon, and I've just turned sixteen. 

My home is in Monaghan, and where I was weaned 

I learned all my life cruel England's to blame, 

So now I am part of the patriot game.

This Ireland of ours has too long been half free. 

Six counties lie under John Bull's tyranny. 

But still De Valera is greatly to blame
For shirking his part in the Patriot game.

They told me how Connolly was shot in his chair, 

His wounds from the fighting all bloody and bare. 

His fine body twisted, all battered and lame 

They soon made me part of the patriot game.

It's nearly two years since I wandered away 

With the local battalion of the bold IRA, 

For I read of our heroes, and wanted the same 

To play out my part in the patriot game.

[I don't mind a bit if I shoot down police

They are lackeys for war never guardians of peace

And yet at deserters I'm never let aim

The rebels who sold out the patriot game

And now as I lie here, my body all holes 

I think of those traitors who bargained in souls 

And I wish that my rifle had given the same 

To those Quislings who sold out the patriot game

THE BOXER

I am just a poor boy and my storys seldom told
Ive squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jest, still the man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmmmm

When I left my home and my family, I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station, runnin scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters, where the ragged people go
Looking for the places only they would know

Asking only workmans wages, I come lookin for a job, but I get no offers
Just a comeon from the *****s on 7th avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there

Now the years are rolling by me, they are rockin even me
I am older than I once was, and younger than Ill be, thats not unusual
No it isnt strange, after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same

And Im laying out my winter clothes, wishing I was gone, goin home
Where the new york city winters arent bleedin me, leadin me to go home

In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him
til he cried out in his anger and his shame
I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains
Yes he still remains

[ChrisGeorge]

Hello all

This American seller continues to sell copies of the Liverpool penny of 1794 in a most exploitative fashion.

Re: RARE 1794 LIVERPOOL SLAVER'S COIN! HOME OF THE BEATLES! (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220201619061&_trksid=p2759.l1259)

I have just sent them the following message:

Hello Seller

Your listing continues to be a rather nasty take on Liverpool history, both taking advantage of and exploiting the connection with the Beatles and the Merseybeat era, and exaggerating Clarke's minority interest in the slave trade. What if you were to sell American stamps and money with the images of Washington and Jefferson on them and play up their slave ownership? Would you do that? No I don't think so. You should be ashamed of what you are doing to exploit your sale of this token and Liverpool history. Back off.

[JMLE]

Looks like he's already responded to you in his listing.

[ChrisGeorge]

Looks like he's already responded to you in his listing.

Hi JMLE

Not sure about that. He has had the disclaimer to try to stop ebay removing his listing for some time so I am not sure that he has responded to my complaint specifically. The disclaimer or appeal to ebay to not remove his listing does show that he has had complaints from others. What gets me is that he has a rather complete even if not entirely accurate rundown of Liverpool history and accomplishments so why does he have to play up the slave trade connection? The token should sell on its own merits and its connection to historic seaport city of Liverpool, I should think. I am also not convinced that the Liverpool ship halfpenny is quite as rare as he makes out.

Chris

[ChrisGeorge]

Received this from the ebay seller:

Hello, Who is being exploited by my listing? And yes, I remind people all the time that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners. In fact, the whole U.S. economy was built on slavery (first of blacks, later of other ethnic minorities in the form of wage slavery), genocide, and land theft (Native Americans). There is nothing wrong with stating historical truths however negative or positive (Beatles, Merseybeat) they may be. I'm not referencing slavery to make anybody look bad but to pique interest in the item. I'm just trying to make a living in very difficult times, so please give me a break. Thanks for your input. Regards, Robert

My response to him is:

Hi Robert

I am not trying to minimize the role of slavery in England or the Americas either, although it would appear to me that you have an interesting and saleable merchant's token, the token of a man who only had a part share in slavery without emphasizing that it is as you say a "LIVERPOOL SLAVER'S COIN!" which is a distortion of the facts. Clarke had maybe a 1/12 share in some slave ship so that does not quite jive with your claim that he was, as your listing appears claim he was, a "slaver." And once again you have in your listing enough interesting Liverpool history, connections, and accomplishments without relying on the slave trade connection.

Chris

[ChrisGeorge]

I received a more conciliatory reply, so we'll see:

mmm. you've got a point there. i'll check out the listing again to see what changes can be made without making it less saleable. thanks, Chris!
Robert