Interim Report on the Connections Between Colonialism and Properties Now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery

Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery EDITORS Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable Head Curator, National Trust Professor Corinne Fowler University of Leicester Dr Christo Kefalas World Cultures Curator, National Trust Emma Slocombe Textile Curator, National Trust © National Trust, September 2020 Published by the National Trust, Heelis, Kemble Drive, Swindon, Wiltshire SN2 2NA Authorship and Acknowledgements REPORT EDITORS Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Head Curator, National Trust Professor Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester Dr Christo Kefalas, World Cultures Curator, National Trust Emma Slocombe, Textile Curator, National Trust AUTHORS Frances Bailey, Dr Rachel Conroy, Sophie Chessum, Professor Corinne Fowler, Jane Gallagher, Dr Rupert Goulding, Dr Liz Green, Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Dr Christo Kefalas, Lucy Porten and Emma Slocombe. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Editors would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this interim report. We wish to extend our gratitude to Professor Corinne Fowler of the University of Leicester. As Global Connections Fellow at the National Trust (September 2019 to June 2020), Corinne was commissioned to write an earlier version of the gazetteer section of this report, and for the first time brought together and edited this wide-ranging research from a number of authors and scholars on the histories of slavery and colonialism at National Trust places. We are also grateful for the contributions of the researchers and schoolchildren involved in the Colonial Countryside project that Corinne led at a number of our places. Particular thanks go to Christopher Tinker, Publisher (Curatorial Content) and Katie Knowles, Assistant Curator (Collections), for their excellent work bringing the report together. We would also like to thank colleagues and volunteers at the National Trust who have helped and supported this work, including Dr John Chu, Dr Tarnya Cooper, Alison Dalby, Tom Freshwater, Tate Greenhalgh, Charlotte Holmes, Nadia Hussain, Dr Hannah Kershaw, Liz Luck, John Orna-Ornstein, Emma Pearson, Celia Richardson, Caroline Sigley and Hannah Squire. We are grateful to everyone whose expertise has informed this report, including Dr David Blundell, Dr Oliver Cox, Richard Dean, Audrey Dewjee, Dr Misha Ewen, Elspeth M. Gould, Elizabeth Grass, Dr Adrian Green, Dr Marian Gwyn, Asha Hall-Jones, Dr Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, Tiana Kelly, Dr Cherry Ann Knott, Dr Frederick Lauritzen, Peter Lauritzen, Ruth Longoni, Laurence Maidment-Blundell, Raj Pal, Binny Sabharwal, Dr Kate Smith, Nino Strachey, Anthony Tibbles, Laurence Westgaph, Dr Becky Wragg Sykes, and the Legacies of British Slavery project team at University College London. Sally-Anne Huxtable, Christo Kefalas, Emma Slocombe Contents Authorship and Acknowledgements 2 Foreword 4 Dr Gus Casely-Hayford Introduction 5 Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Dr Tarnya Cooper and John Orna-Ornstein 1. Wealth, Power and the Global Country House 7 Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable 2. Trade in Enslaved People 15 Jane Gallagher 3. Abolition, Resistance and Protest 25 Dr Christo Kefalas 4. Compensation for Slave-ownership 31 Dr Elizabeth Green, Dr Christo Kefalas and Emma Slocombe 5. Merchant Companies 42 Dr Rupert Goulding 6. The East India Company 45 Lucy Porten 7. Banking and Bankers 49 Frances Bailey 8. The British Raj in India after 1857 53 Dr Rachel Conroy 9. Industrialisation and the Import of Cotton 56 Emma Slocombe 10. Research 59 Sophie Chessum Gazetteer of National Trust Properties 62 Appendix: Next Steps 110 Bibliography 111 Further Reading 115 Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, 3 Including Links with Historic Slavery • September 2020 Foreword Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, Inaugural Director V&A East and former Trustee of the National Trust I look back with great fondness on my time as a Trustee of the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I have never sat on a board and felt more welcomed, felt more inspired by an institution’s ambition, felt more in awe of the dedication and enthusiasm of its staff. I fell utterly under the spell of the organisational ethos, of the timeless belief of Octavia Hill, that through inspiration, through contact with heritage and countryside, we might not just be uplifted, but that culture might help us forge an important, critical commonality, the sort of shared understanding that is important to healthy societies. This is the stuff that, in my mind, makes the arts and heritage really important. What we do is not just about beautiful things, it has the potential to operate as the glue that meaningfully binds us as a people. Octavia Hill’s aspiration that the National Trust should speak to, and for, everyone was not part of a diversity action plan – these were the founding aspirations of the organisation. This is not just about serving a broad constituency, it is about recognising that, in part, our role is to constantly push at boundaries, to never become complacent, but to have a conscious aim to be ever more inclusive; to see the ongoing diversification, the broadening of those we serve, as being a core, consistent and unending goal. As Hill intimated, she did not want to feel satisfied serving a loyal minority – her goal was to sincerely drive to engage, to touch us all. And to genuinely become that place in which we can all seek solace and inspiration, we must be thoughtful and rigorous in how we reflect changing times, changing attitudes, and changing demographies. The National Trust has an outstanding track record in the stewardship of our nation’s most beautiful spaces and is unrivalled in the care that it takes of our loved houses and treasured collections. It must deliver a similar kind of delicate stewardship to the curatorial narratives that animate them. Occasionally, it should thoughtfully prune, pollard, train and graft to remain healthy, sensitive and relevant. And, as with the rest of the heritage sector, it should be proud to do so. Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, 4 Including Links with Historic Slavery • September 2020 Introduction Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Head Curator, National Trust Dr Tarnya Cooper, Curatorial and Collections Director, National Trust John Orna-Ornstein, Director of Culture and Engagement, National Trust The National Trust has made a commitment to research, interpret and share the histories of slavery and the legacies of colonialism at the places we care for. Those histories are deeply interwoven into the material fabric of the British Isles; a significant number of the collections, houses, gardens and parklands in our care were created or remodelled as expressions of the taste and wealth, as well as power and privilege, that derived from colonial connections and in some cases from the trade in enslaved people. We believe that only by honestly and openly acknowledging and sharing those stories can we do justice to the true complexity of past, present and future, and the sometimes-uncomfortable role that Britain, and Britons, have played in global history since the sixteenth century or even earlier. This report provides an overview of current research into the connections that our places have to slavery and colonialism. It offers a summary of research undertaken by colleagues both within and outside the National Trust, exploring some of the most significant links to the places and collections in our care and focusing on the sources of wealth that helped to f und them. We know that it is by no means comprehensive, but we will continue to undertake further work in this area and develop it as part of our commitment to exploring a wide range of histories. Working in collaboration with academic and other expert partners, this research will help us to create strong foundations of knowledge upon which to build. We also intend to work with individuals and communities in order to share stories that have been forgotten, obscured, overlooked or insufficiently explored at many of our places. Of course, these histories of slavery, legacies of colonialism and the lives of people of colour are not the only stories that we will tell. We will continue to highlight the histories of place, architecture, families, estates, staff, communities, artisanal practice and our remarkable collections told from a variety of perspectives. The research presented here indicates that 29 properties now in the care of the National Trust have links to successful compensation claims for slave-ownership and somewhere in the region of one-third of properties can be directly connected to colonial histories (see criteria listed in the Gazetteer on page 62). This conclusion is perhaps not that surprising, as the practice of enslaving African people was a fundamental part of the British economy in the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Large numbers of landowners and members of the wealthy middle classes invested in commerce that was linked directly to the slave trade, including sugar production in the Caribbean, and many people with surplus funds had investments in merchant companies involved in the slave trade, such as the South Sea Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, 5 Including Links with Historic Slavery • September 2020 Company and the Royal African Company. The research also highlights interesting evidence

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