Slavery and Liverpool

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Originally Posted by 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:

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

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Originally Posted by 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)

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

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...


"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...

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Originally Posted by Howie

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.”

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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.

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.

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...

The Bishop of Liverpool = Retarded.

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.

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.

http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/his...ictorian1.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

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Originally Posted by SteveFaragher

http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/his...ictorian1.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

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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.

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Originally Posted by taffy

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.