The city’s political class and self-styled ‘leaders’, with strings openly being pulled by the Society of Merchant Venturers, continue to undermine any chance of memorialising the city’s links to the slave trade. Any site proposed for a memorial over the last seven years has been knocked back by the mayor who has chosen to prioritise boozy food halls and gastropubs as his legacy.
One way to get around the mayor and the city’s ragbag of crap ‘leaders” intransigence is to get a site for a memorial agreed in the forthcoming Local Plan. Potential sites available in the centre include: the Old Seaman’s Chapel (SA403) on Royal Oak Avenue on the corner of Queen Square and Prince Street, ideal for an abolition museum and history centre; 16 Narrow Quay (SA404), the empty space between Arnolfini and the YHA, ideal for a memorial garden and The Grove Car Park (BDA0801) by the Thekla, a, potentially large space to develop.
Details of the sites are in the document and all you need to do is respond to the forthcoming Local Plan consultation and request that each site is designated for “Community Facilities, in particular a museum exploring the history of slavery and it’s abolition from a Bristol viewpoint.”
Simple. Go tell the city’s useless self-serving ‘leaders’ what you want!
Since Colston came off his pedestal and went for a swim on June 7th social media, TV and the press have been dominated by politicians, journalists and so-called ‘community spokespeople’ gushing with praise for the statue coming down.
The Mayor’s Office even banged on in a press statement that the Reverend Rees had an audience of 10 million around the world, from Bangladesh to Tokyo after Colston’s ‘burial at sea’. However, while seizing this new opportunity for pontificating, Rees conveniently failed to give a toss about the people who had put him on the world stage. That was the 17 or so demonstrators who had been identified under Home Secretary, Priti Patel’s orders to “get these people” – the statue topplers.
So as Rees was boring the masses in Bangladesh, Avon & Somerset Police were being forced to line up charges of criminal damage that could put the protestors away for up to 10 years. And what did Rees do? Intervene at the Council for the good of the city and agree not to press charges, allowing the cops to give two fingers to Patel? Like fuck he did … Far better to bathe in the glare of global publicity and forget about those who put him there.
Campaigners who have fought for many years for the Colston statue to be removed and to get a permanent memorial to the victims of slavery in the City have been astounded by the two-faced hypocrisy of these turncoats. Rees told Points West:
“When I first came in, myself and a number of black people in the creative sector said that the best thing to do is to keep that [Colston] debate away from me.”
So Mr Civil Rights’s major contribution to the struggle to get the Merchant Venturers pet slave trader off our streets and schools was not just to do nothing but to actively discourage others from getting involved.
When calls came to change the name of the Colston Hall in 2017 Rees was silent, refusing to make his position clear until he was caught like a rabbit in the headlights at the end of a TV programme. Martin Luther King, who Rees idolises, must be turning in his grave.
In 2019 after the Merchant Venturers had spent months sanitising the wording on a plaque for the statue that was meant to correct the history of Colston, Rees only intervened to avoid becoming a laughing stock. Finally using some of his executive power to block the Venturer’s sanitised plaque before heading to the hills faster than Dominic Cummings in a top of the range Land Rover, leaving the project in limbo for over a year.
Bullies? Abolition Shed campaigners
Meanwhile Rees’s second in command Asher Craig’s hardly covered herself in glory in dealing with persistent calls by campaigners for a permanent memorial to remember the victims of the trans-atlantic slave trade. Bristol lags far behind other ports like Liverpool and Nantes in France that were involved in the ‘vile trade’ and have made major efforts to both memorialise the victims and tell the history – warts and all.
One historian from Bristol University stated in a meeting with Asher Craig in March 2019 “that Bristol’s reputation abroad, when referring to the city’s response to its slaving past, was very bad”. He also said that Bristol shouldn’t limit its ambitions regarding a slavery museum, “the city should think big and be better than Liverpool”.
Bristol City Council have missed opportunities to right this embarrassing wrong many times. In 1996 around the Festival of the Sea, in 1999 when the Respectable Trade exhibition was launched, in 2007 with the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade and again in 2015 when the Colston protests began.
In 2017 campaigners from three groups and local residents proposed the Abolition Shed project, which wanted to convert two council-owned warehouses on Welsh Back into a memorial for the victims of the African slave-trade with a visitor centre to tell the history. When they approached Asher Craig to get support from Bristol City Council she basically told them to clear off and get some private funding.
Despite this slap in the face campaigners continued the fight to halt the council’s proposed development of the warehouses into more restaurants and bars and to finally do something. This persistence and enthusiasm by unpaid Bristolians who gave a fuck about the memorial, the history and the city’s reputation was clearly starting to annoy Rees and Craig.
That Rees/Craig proposed slave trade memorial
In August 2019 Marvin angrily demanded to know “who the campaigners were” and in response to their proposals cited a record in office of being amazing, without, of course, any concrete commitment to a memorial and museum. Asher was even more furious claiming“the City was now taking this seriously” and accusing the campaigners of being “bullies”. One local historian from the Counter-Colston group commented:
“Despite the fact that it is just not true, for Asher to characterise people as ‘bullies’ who have, without ‘funding’ and political power given lots of time and energy over several years to try to get something done after decades of failure, is disgraceful.”
Needless to say the Abolition Shed project was strangled at birth by Rees, Craig and the Council as they voted to turn the warehouses into pizza restaurants whilst wasting a million quid on moving a barge to appease the developers. Another missed opportunity in Bristol’s tradition of failure.
Asher’s only response to persistent demands for a memorial was to set up a ‘roundtable’, which descended into the usual talking shop while those who wanted to get a concrete commitment from the Council were seen as ‘troublemakers’.
It is also no surprise that Marvin’s response to Colston’s statue coming down was to propose a ‘history commission’. Looking into the “true history of the city”, which sounds like another opportunity for free-loading academics to fail to do anything.
So here we are, kicking the can down the road again….
A report in the Nazi Post on 29 January announced that the homeless have been FORCED to pitch tents on Rosemary Green, just by Greenbank Cemetery. Not only was this an EYESORE for the hordes of wealthy hipsters in the area but, screamed the Post in an attempt to dial-up further controversy, the homeless had set their tents up next to a ‘WAR MEMORIAL’.
How disrespectful, setting up tents by a memorial for our fallen heroes in wars. However, some basic RESEARCH revealed this ‘war memorial’ was actually a memorial to 4,000+ paupers who DIED in the now demolished Eastville workhouse. All died of POVERTY and NEGLECT in the workhouse and were dumped in UNMARKED GRAVES.
A few years ago, local historians wrote a book detailing the CRIMES of this workhouse and then raised funds for a MEMORIAL to these people who had been FORGOTTEN. So historians and locals were scratching their collective heads at references to a “war memorial” in Greenbank Cemetery. Concluding that it was either more CRAP JOURNALISM or, maybe, the Nazi Post is recognising a “CLASS WAR MEMORIAL“? Whatever the case, all references to a “war memorial” have now been disappeared from the newspaper. Funny that.
Busy spouting the usual blather from Mr Angry, the Nazi Post missed THE REAL STORY here. This memorial to the workhouse was about people who DIED due to a system that CRIMINALISED POVERTY. People who could not work – like the old, infirm, those with learning difficulties or, even, those who suffered industrial accidents – were dumped in workhouses. Families were split up and the able-bodied poor were set to work undertaking MINDLESS TASKS.
Food was cheap and INADEQUATE and the regime BRUTAL. The theory of our Victorian CITY LEADERS was that if people were treated harshly, they would stop being poor. No, we’re not taking the piss, that’s the size of it.
Before burying those that died from CHRONIC neglect and starvation, the Church of England came down and consecrated ground on Rosemary green for the burial of the workhouse dead. Not once but three times at £50 a pop. Enough money to feed all of the incarcerates well for a year. But at least their bodies were safe … Er, not bleeding likely.
Most were DUG UP by a JCB in 1972, taken to Avon View cemetery and DUMPED in a hole without any marking. Historians are still trying to get the CofE to pay for a headstone at Avon View but getting the BISHOP OF BRISTOL to give a shit about anyone that’s not a wealthy creep or a Merchant Venturer is like getting blood out of a stone.
Today, with austerity cuts, ‘CITY LEADERS’ won’t be building any workhouses, feeding the poor gruel or dumping their bodies in MASS UNMARKED GRAVES with the CofE’s support. Instead, the homeless and destitute are left to crawl off to a tent or a shop doorway and FUCKING DIE. As long as the shoppers or commuters don’t have to look at them, there’s not a problem.
But you better look at them, because YOU COULD BE NEXT. A workplace accident, divorce or a death in the family could see you reduced to LIVING IN A TENT in Bristol – as long as the council don’t nick it off you, of course. That’s the reality of Bristol today. The benefits system is INADEQUATE and support services are COLLAPSING due to a lack funds. The inhumanity must stop. Surely the media and everyone else need to stop demonising the homeless and poor and have a pop at those who put them there, innit?
We don’t want historians writing books about the cruelty of today’s city leaders while people build memorials to our dead homeless in a hundred years do we?
war memorial’ was actually a memorial to 4,000+ paupers who DIED in the now demolished Eastville workhouse. All died of POVERTY and NEGLECT in the workhouse and were dumped in UNMARKED GRAVES.