The National Trust seems to have just discovered that Britain once had colonies – who would have known such a thing if they had not informed us!? And – shock, horror, - Britain was once involved in the African slave trade. I can’t imagine that this would be startling news to anyone who was given a half decent education. I learnt about such things at junior school in the late 1950s.
Be that as it may, in order
to keep up with the wokies in academia the National Trust’s historians have compiled
a list of properties which have links with colonialism and the slave trade. The fact that practically everything British
has such links does not appear to have occurred to them, therefore the national
list, not surprisingly, is a long one.
In Somerset there are four properties
listed: Clevedon Court, Bath Assembly Rooms, Barrington Court and, amazingly,
Glastonbury Tor.
Barrington Court’s presence
on the National Trusts dossier is due to the fact that the house, acquired by the
Trust in 1907, was leased in 1920 to Colonel Arthur Abram Lyle, the grandson of
the founder of Abram Lyle & Sons, a sugar producing company. The business was founded after the abolition
of slavery so for some reason the Trust went to great lengths to find a
connection to a supposedly morally dubious past.
Here is Barrington Court’s “crime
sheet” from the Trust’s national report “Interim
Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of
the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery.”:
The National Trust acquired
Barrington Court in 1907, in a derelict condition. From 1920, Barrington was
leased and restored by Colonel Abram Arthur Lyle (1880–1931), using
architectural salvage collected from other houses. Lyle was the grandson of the
founder of Abram Lyle & Sons, a sugar-producing company of which the
colonel became director, and which merged to form Tate & Lyle in 1921. Both
businesses were established after the abolition of slavery. The early nineteenth
and early twentieth century British sugar industry was predominantly supplied
by Caribbean plantations, founded under colonialism and supported by enslaved
labour.
As for Glastonbury Tor being
on the Trust’s dossier, words fail me!
It strikes me that those running the National Trust cannot be happy in
their job if they think many of the properties in their care have dishonourable links. Perhaps they should
resign and let pragmatists take their place.
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