Cattle, chattel, property in humans
‘The property in slaves which the British parliament sold them is in the rights, the natural – the born rights of the negro – a right to his labour – to all he can acquire, to the possession of him as mere chattel – destitute of will – subject to absolute power. Cruel as this may be, it is the contract between parliament and slave owners’
– Augustus Hardin Beaumont, slave owner, Jamaica
In the slim world of brick-wall fanaticism, one wall is famed above them all. The Great Wall of Dorset is the longest brick wall in England and if you can believe one devotee (its owner), it has cast such a spell on its commoners that during the 2010 general election, in spite of rising house prices and cuts to social benefits, they could talk of little else. The wall is owned by the former army captain, current MP for South Dorset and serial hoarder of syllables, Richard Grosvenor-Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. Two months after his election, Richard wrote one of his breezy blogs to set the record straight:
During my four years as the Conservative candidate, ‘the wall’ was a major topic of interest. In fact, I can say with some certainty that it was the most popular topic. The interest came in the form of ridicule, humour and genuine interest. Let me reveal the most popular question: ‘Richard, how many bricks are in the wall?’ The answer is more than two million. For better or worse, ‘the wall’ is a Dorset landmark.
Richard goes on to describe how the wall was erected as a money-making venture, creating a new turnpike along the road that eventually became the A31. But there’s a little more to it than that. Fifteen years before the wall was built, Richard’s ancestor John Sawbridge had married into the Drax dynasty and, in so doing, he had acquired six more syllables, the magnificent Charborough estate and the business that had propelled the Draxes into the premier league of English landowners: their sugar plantations in Barbados. Just before the wall was built in 1841, John Sawbridge had received a handsome dividend from his estates, not from his sugar, but from his slaves.
We climb the wall at dusk. We are at the north-west end of the 14,000-acre estate, just to the left of the three-storey brick archway, with a stag at its pediment. This would once have been the gateway to a long drive leading directly to the great house, but now it is sunk in nettles, blocked with an iron gate and a couple of felled tree trunks. The A31 is a nasty road, loud and fast, but as we drop to the other side of the wall, it is quieter and calmer, muted by the trees. We haven’t got long until dark, so we walk quickly along the inside of the wall and, checking the map on our phones, cut into the woods to find a place to sleep. A path leads us to a wide stream that opens out into a lagoon, beautiful in the dimming light. We briefly consider this grove for our camp, but the ground is boggy, the air clouding with mosquitoes, so we press further on into the gloom.
When James Drax arrived on the island of Barbados in 1627, he was eighteen, with barely a syllable to his name. The son of an Anglican vicar in Warwickshire, he had secured a place on a boat skippered by Henry Powell, whose brother John had landed on the island two years earlier. John Powell and his men had finally found the empty Eden long dreamed of by John Locke and his contemporaries. The former inhabitants, 10,000 or so Arawak Indians, had been driven off the island by the vicious combination of a shortage of water and a surfeit of Spanish pirates and for over a century the island had remained deserted. On arrival, John Powell and his men had crossed the white sands to the forests and erected a wooden cross on a tree, inscribed with the words ‘James, King of England’, the first notice of possession to the only remaining inhabitants of the island, the herds of wild pig. When his brother arrived, he had both the king’s blessing and all the tools they needed to set up a colony. They dug wells, built barracks and in no time at all hunted the hogs to extinction.
Their first venture was tobacco. They cleared the trees, grubbed their roots and tilled the soil into arable fields. They sent word to England and received their first consignment of labour: the vagrants that were swelling the workhouses. Between 1645 and 1650, 8,000 men and women were transported to Barbados, strange cargoes of disparate and factional peoples. Alongside the ‘sturdy beggars’ (vagrants deemed fit enough to work) there were the Irish prisoners of war from Cromwell’s military campaigns, the royalist prisoners from the English civil war and, finally, the soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army, who had been disbanded without pay and left to roam the country in search of work, before being rounded up as vagrants.
We have found our campsite: a small clearing in between three trees from which we can hang our tarp. We are in a thin strip of mixed woodland, 200 yards from the wall and the same distance from Drax’s arable fields, which cover the north end of his territory. All day the air has been muggy and thick with the threat of rain, and though the weather forecast says clear skies, we don’t want to risk it. We erect the shelter, build a small fire and sit with a couple of beers to dissect the day.
We had arrived late in the morning at the south end of the property, under heavy grey clouds, and spent a good deal of time trying to find a way into the land. Walls and fences are easy, it’s the hedges that cause problems: the tangled arms of oak, hawthorn and beech, bill-hooked and pleached into themselves to form living nets of wood and spikes are nearly impenetrable. But, eventually, we follow the fox’s lead and on hands and knees we sneak through a smeuse widened through use, one just big enough to allow a human through. We drag the bags after us and walk up the perimeter of a ploughed field to a forest of planted pines.
When James Drax’s preparations finally yielded its first crop of tobacco, there was instant disappointment: it wouldn’t smoke, it tasted foul and no one wanted it. So within a few years Drax had changed his crop to cotton, a move mirrored by many of the other English farmers who had settled on the island. But though this crop fared better, it was still a cottage industry and a far cry from the industrial ambitions of Drax and his neighbours. It was only in the 1630s that Drax saw an opportunity, borrowed from the Dutch who were shipping hundreds and thousands of tonnes of sugar from their colonies in Brazil. With political unrest in the Dutch colony, Drax thought the time was ripe to rival their industry and brought in the necessary infrastructure, the crushers for the cane, the enormous copper boiling vats for the sugar, and the slaves for the land. Eric Williams, who became the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, began his career as a historian with his book Slavery and Capitalism, which offered the first counter-narrative to the standardised vision of colonial slavery: ‘Here then is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial. It had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour. Slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery.’
Slavery had been dormant in English culture since the 1200s. It had a brief reprise in 1547, when Edward VI brought it back as a punishment for vagrancy, but was repealed three years later after fierce public outcry. In 1772, Judge James Mansfield declared: ‘The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it’, expressing a sentiment of blinkered moral sanctimony that pervades England to this day. The enormous hypocrisy of this sentiment was founded on geography. The 15,000 slaves living in England were freed with this single statement, but rules were different in the Caribbean. Barbados and its neighbouring islands were ‘beyond the line’, an imaginary boundary created by the Europeans that allowed them to operate outside the politics of their home continent. If you were an English businessman operating beyond the line, you could deal and wage war with your Portuguese, French, Dutch and Spanish neighbours without impacting the treaties of your home continent. Similarly, if your countries went to war back home, you were not obliged to follow suit. What goes on tour, stays on tour and the same applied to slavery.
By 1640 James Drax already had several dozen slaves working alongside the white labourers. But the massive scale of the sugar plantations that was required to generate profit required an equally vast resource of labour to ‘animate’ the estate. The estates absorbed slaves like the sugarcane drank water, and, just as new technologies allowed better irrigation of the plantations, so new trade routes allowed a constant, fast flow of imported slaves. It was finally possible to scale up the enterprise.
In 1663 the Stuart monarchy created the Company of Royal Adventurers who had a licensed monopoly over the trade of Africans for 1,000 years. The company was dissolved nine years later, but was replaced by the Royal African Company which began shipping slaves to the Caribbean at a rate of 5,000 a year. By this time, James Drax had been succeeded by his second son, Henry, who did to sugar what Henry Ford did to the car industry: he turned a small industry into a standardised mechanism of mass production. He itemised every component of sugar production and was the first to bring every element of sugar refinery, the growers, the boilers, the distillers, the refiners, onto one site. The set of instructions he wrote in 1679 for his overseer Richard Harwood came to be seen as the standard textbook for the management of slave plantations. It was a meticulous description of the mechanics of production, where slaves are listed simply as cogs in the system, parts to be repurchased when broken.
We’re sweating heavily in the thick humid air. My eyes are stinging with salt. We’ve covered the long slope of the woodland and are descending into a jungle of lush ferns and sapling trees. We are getting closer to the famous Charborough Tower, a neo-gothic folly thirty metres tall extended by John Sawbridge just before the wall was built. Built on the highest hill on the estate, it can be seen from miles around, and just like John Powell’s notice of possession, nailed to a tree in Barbados, it claims the land for itself.
The forest opens up before us, and, though there’s still little sunlight from the sky, it’s brighter, carpeted with spring-green hart’s-tongue ferns splaying out of the ground like open hands. Across the glade there is a wide lawn path cut among the trees, lined with a display of pink budding azaleas. The map says this will lead us up the hill, to the tower.
We’re a third of the way up when we see the keeper. He’s strolling with a small group of friends and hasn’t yet seen us, so we lower our voices and quickly discuss what to do. My friend is a cameraman and has come along to film and photograph the walk – as such, the equipment he’s carrying, including the five-foot tripod resting on his shoulder, automatically upgrades the charge to aggravated trespass. But it’s too late; the keeper’s seen us.
There’s a wide, awkward silence as we all make up the ground between us. ‘There’s no way through here,’ he says – it’s that old trope of property protection, that classic reframing of reality, the brash denial of the pure bleeding obvious, which in this case is the pathway that ascends behind him. He’s very polite and dazzlingly healthy, with an amazing shock of white hair that is half schoolboy, half wizard, and we instantly like him a lot more than he likes us. He’s quietly spoken, and so firm in his conviction that we are about to leave that it’s impossible to think of an alternative. We thank him for his time, turn on our heels and go back the way we came.
In 1781, the captain of a slave ship called the Zong was sailing from Africa with his cargo, hundreds of men and women trapped in a space that infamously gave them each less room than a coffin, when his ship was besieged by a storm. He needed to get rid of some ballast, so ordered his men to throw 133 Africans overboard. His flash of ingenuity worked and the crew survived the tempest, but when he returned safely to England he was hauled before the magistrates. He was tried and convicted, not for the murder of 133 people, but for an insurance claim on the property he had disposed of so wantonly.
If you bought land in the Caribbean, the slaves were almost always part of the deal. They were not defined as real property (the fixed asset of the land itself) but as chattel, the moveable items that were attached to the land, and under property law were subject to the complete dominion of the landowner. The racist epithet ‘coon’ derives from the Spanish word barracón, which was a large building or warehouse constructed to hold merchandise and, from the sixteenth century onwards, it was where slaves were stored for sale. Its meaning hadn’t changed or even broadened: it was where you kept your property.
To maintain the illusion that these people were possessions, the white Europeans persistently performed speech-acts to transform them into animals. In Richard Ligon’s diaries we see slaves defined ‘as near as beasts as may be’ and there are repeated references to the field workers as ‘dumb brutes’ and ‘black cattle’. The general slang term for female slaves was ‘breeders’, which is the dairy industry’s term for cows used to supply more stock. Female slaves were repeatedly raped by their owners, not only to sate their sexual urges, not just to stamp their manly power upon their workforce, but as a systematic means of creating new slaves for free – the children of slaves were slaves themselves, they were born owned.
Following our expulsion from the estate, we had biked north to the famous wall and found our campsite. And now we sit, sucking on bottles of West Berkshire ale. The fire crackles, and the sausages sizzle in their tin foil and cave of embers. Barbados under Drax was a sweaty nightmare of rum, yellow fever, Spanish invasion, rape, torture and slave revolts. Beyond the line of civilisation, it was a grotesque masque of the hierarchy back home, master and servant. But, unlike England, the servants could be better controlled by subdividing them by their skin colour, their collective power divided by a line of race. In the words of Eric Williams: ‘Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalise Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a plough-ox or a cart horse, to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection which alone makes slave labour possible.’
Owners were far outnumbered by the white servants and slaves, and in constant peril of being overrun. To coerce their African captives into submission they used corporal punishment, and would string up the bodies of murdered slaves around the estate to reinforce their power. They forced into reality the rumours they had heard of their captives’ cannibalism by amputating and roasting the limbs of miscreant slaves, then making them eat their own charred flesh. They lashed their slaves and rubbed salt or molasses into their wounds, so that flies and ants would gnaw at the raw flesh. It was a horrifying, physical abuse of the body that Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses in his description of racism in modern-day America: ‘But all our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serve to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.’
This emphasis of the violent degradation of the body goes beyond the judicial. To the slavers, the inhumanity of these acts was not evidence that they were monsters, but the inverse, that their African captives were beasts. Alone in the manor houses, surrounded by thousands of captive African men and women, their culture, their language and song, these slavers were doing everything they could to persuade themselves that these people were their property. Here is the essence of the property principle, jus abutendi, because when something is yours entirely, you have the right to destroy it.
To maintain this necessary illusion, they needed allies and skin colour was all they had. The principal difference between the whites and the blacks on the islands was one of hope: when the white servants had served their punishment, usually between five and ten years, they were allowed to return home. Not so for the African slaves, whose entire existence was owned. But while the owners treated the slaves much more barbarically than their servants, both groups of workers saw themselves united by a shared oppressor. For the Irish especially, who had always been treated as savages by their English colonists, the difference of race was nothing in light of the way they were treated, as a sub-species, as a class of human beneath their rulers. White and black, servant and slave, the workers of the plantation lived in close confines with each other; they co-ordinated in uprisings together; they cooked, sang and slept together.
In 1661 the Act of Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes was passed, the first of several attempts to drive a partition between the white and black workers. By banning miscegenation (sex between races) and giving the white workers privileges, it created an imbalance between the white servants and black slaves and linked the white underclass with their white superiors; it gave race a salience it never had before.
The Act didn’t work; the Irish and Africans together plotted two major slave uprisings in 1686 and 1692 and to this day there are many Murphys, McDonnoughs and McGanns in the Caribbean phone book. Twenty-five per cent of Jamaicans claim Irish heritage, not least Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey. But the Act had another effect. It was the start of a new era of slavery, one that veered from the economic principle of exploited labour to the quasi-scientific concocted hierarchy of race. The British had just legalised white supremacy.
In the morning we wake early, roll over and snooze for an hour or so. The birdsong plays like a foreign radio talk show, affable, incomprehensible voices gossiping away at each other. As we’re packing away everything into our rucksacks, my friend tells me a story. Last night was the first time he’d contravened the 1824 Vagrancy Act and slept out. He’d had that same nightmarish feeling that I’d first experienced in the woods of West Berkshire, that exposure to the cold expanse of night, the fear of what you cannot see. But after the sausages and the beer he’d fallen snugly asleep, newly inaugurated into the coven of incorrigible rogues. After several hours, in the dead of early morning, he had woken. He heard a low, throaty grunting from the bushes, something wild, and, just coming to, heard the heavy gallop of an animal pounding alongside the perimeter wall – suddenly it had veered towards us and before he could wake me it ran directly in front of our camp and disappeared into the dark. My friend hadn’t seen a thing, the woods were silent once again, but now his blood was fizzing. The darkness around us had been charged by an untamed spirit, thumping with a heart as large as our own.
When the Drax line had all but expired in Barbados, they began selling up most of their plantations to return home and play politics in England. In 1715, Charles Drax sold 1,000 acres of land to William Beckford, a member of another luminary slaving dynasty in the Caribbean, a family whose English estate is just a marathon away from Charborough House. So once we’ve removed any trace of our camp, we hop the wall, return to our bikes and head north. My friend’s bike is powered by a 100-horsepower engine and mine by a pair of skimpy thighs, so by the time I reach Fonthill he has been sitting in a pub garden for two hours, reading and lubricating the soul.
We follow a public path through a field and down a steep slope to a long glistening lake. We pass a couple of fishermen and stop to chat as one pulls a bucking carp from the water. As we turn the top of the lake, a low wooden gate blocks the path with a sign, more polite than most, saying Private Woodland, Please Keep Out. I climb it and my friend follows, handing over his heavy rucksack of camera equipment and his cumbersome tripod. The Fonthill estate, now owned by the 3rd Baron Margadale, is a 9,000-acre beauty, that comprises residential and commercial letting, industrial farming, forestry and an 80-acre stud farm. It offers pheasant and partridge shooting, angling, deer stalking, holiday retreats and a stunning location for filming. It is what the profits of slavery look like today, laundered in time and land.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Colonel Peter Beckford had 4,000 acres in Jamaica, a share in twenty separate estates and over a thousand slaves. At this time, the sugar magnates had begun to diversify their businesses, branching out into ancillary trades and revenue streams. Colonel Beckford had his fingers in many pies: he began buccaneering; he traded in slaves, alcohol and cattle; he was a moneylender, land speculator and a farmer of livestock and cereal. When Beckford’s estate passed to his son, also William, he first increased it by another 3,593 acres, then returned to England and became the Lord Mayor of London and bought the estate in Fonthill. When the Fonthill house burned down some ten years later, Beckford took the opportunity to build a truly magnificent pile in its place, which he called Splendens, a Latin word loosely translated as ‘gleaming’ or ‘distinguished’.
This was par for the course. Many of the slavers were returning home to translate their bloody money into neoclassical architecture. As many as 300 new manor houses were erected in this time, each designed to ingratiate itself within the established order of greatness, the ‘old order’ designed and presided over by the English aristocracy. Their architecture quoted the Greeks and Romans; they were temples of wealth, pristine, pure and unblemished by the grim stain of the plantations. With their plantations left in the care of their managers, they became known as ‘absentee owners’, and set about the next steps of power: politics and peerage.
The path has led us through a small woodland of grand chestnuts and oaks. The lake is glinting to our left and to our right is a dense jungle of ferns and laurels that, our map tells us, should open up into the wide landscaped lawns of the manor house, almost a mile away. There is a faint track pressed through the spurge that might be what we’re looking for. It leads through nettles and thorn to a tight stone archway, which opens into a dank grove of snaking laurels and moss-laden stone, a circular hermitage sunk in the wet woodland earth. Two empty stone alcoves mark the official entrance to the grotto, its statues long gone, and a third has a large slab of stone for a seat. To its left is the archway we came through, which hides a tight stone tunnel leading to a circular chamber of smoothly cut stone, where the sunlight pours through the small circle atrium above. The stones of its roof are like dinosaur socket bones, smooth and knobbly. Two bats zip past us and, as my eyes accustom to the gloom, I notice a spider in a dark nook, with a teardrop sack of silk, twice the size of her body, hanging from her web. There is a constant, low, priest-like drone, with a slight echo, and I look up to see thick clouds of mosquitoes bouncing in the beam of sunlight. This place is pagan.
We emerge out of the stonework and find a seat away from the dank depression of mulch in the centre of the circle. I pull out my sketchbook and my friend plays with his camera. I am sitting beneath the thick trunk of a yew tree, whose roots clasp the top of a third alcove, as if it is the last thing keeping it from toppling over into the grotto. Its hairy roots are laced with silver threads of slime that lead high up the trunk into the tree’s canopy, the trails of countless slugs. There is a strange bird call sounding to my left, one I’ve never heard before; my eyes follow the sound and see a blackbird, performing a strange ritual dance, bobbing forward and back, waving its tail like a magic wand. Two brown hens watch him, like they’re sitting in front of the telly, wondering where the remote is.
This is William Beckford’s folly, his refuge from the harsh scorn of society. The great-grandson of Colonel Peter Beckford, he grew up at Fonthill and only visited his family’s plantations once or twice in his lifetime. He was nine years old when his father died, the first English commoner to die a millionaire, and when he was eighteen he inherited what was then the largest real estate in Europe at that time, more than a million pounds and a £100,000 annual income from his Caribbean plantations. He inherited paintings by Titian, Bronzino, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Rubens and Canaletto, a large table from the Borghese palace made of the largest single slab of onyx in the world and a museum’s hoard of porcelain, bronze, agate, silver and gold. In 1783 he married Lady Margaret Gordon, the daughter of the Earl of Aboyne, and a year later, aged twenty-one, he became MP for Wells. By October of that year he had been made a peer. He was on a roll. But a year later he was spied through the keyhole of a door on a neighbouring estate having sex with the Earl of Devon’s son, with whom he had been in love since the age of nineteen. For two years their affair had been kept secret, because homosexual love, or sodomy as the courts then called it, was a capital offence. But when the affair was exposed it became the most salacious scandal of the Georgian era.
William fled the country taking his pregnant wife with him. Not long after, his wife died and he moved his two daughters to boarding school in London while he went to live in Portugal. He returned to England with a young man called Gregorio Franchi, the son of an Italian court singer, and a Spanish dwarf named Perro, and set about walling himself away from England’s prying fantasies. He bought another 1,700 acres for the estate and built the largest complete wall in England at the time, eight miles long, twelve foot high and capped with iron spikes. In 1790 he wrote in a letter, ‘I have been raising towers and building grottos’, and six years later he began work on his greatest folly, in both senses of the word: an enormous abbey, designed to be larger than Salisbury Cathedral, to house his ever-growing collection of art and manuscripts. It collapsed several times over Beckford’s lifetime, yet was rebuilt again and again, becoming not only Beckford’s home but a fanatical expression of his eccentricity. William Hazlitt, the essayist and friend of John Keats, described it as ‘a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy shop, an immense museum of all that is most curious and costly and at the same time most worthless. The only proof of taste he has shown in the collection is his getting rid of it.’
He was not alone. Across England the wealth of the sugar plantations was being injected into English society, into buildings and infrastructure that, unlike Fonthill Abbey, remain to this day. Until only recently the exact nature of this wealth and its effect on British landscape and society was locked away in the National Archives. But in 2009 a team of professors from UCL, led by Dr Catherine Hall, began a vast project of mapping the Legacies of Britain’s Slave Ownership (whose enormous amounts of research can be found on their website of the same name). Their resource is not just a collected census of slave ownership, but, rather, an encyclopaedia of every owner, attorney, mortgagee and legatee involved with the trade of slaves; and, much more, it charts their wealth and how it was distributed through their descendants, their influence in Parliament, their cultural artefacts and their land.
The team at UCL offer myriad pathways into this dense jungle of information. You can search under the colonies that were held by Britain, from Antigua to Montserrat and the Virgin Islands, under the specific parish or island; you can search via the crop farmed (not just sugar, but coffee, tobacco, cocoa and indigo), the acreage, or the number of people enslaved. You can search the names of the slave owners, their gender, their occupation, their home address in Britain. You can search any commercial name you can think of for its presence in the archive (try Lloyds, or Barclays, or the Church of England) and you can search under individual names, such as Orwell or Cameron. There are four interactive maps that you can zoom into, of Jamaica, Barbados and Grenada, and of Britain, where you can now zoom into your hometown, your street and see for yourself the footprint of slavery on your doorstep.
These visualisations are hyperlinked to a treasure chest of information about the properties and their owners. You can see the physical legacies of their trade, the country estates built or remodelled, the gardens and statues these men erected in their own honour. You can trace the cultural legacies, the Constables, Gillrays, Gainsboroughs, Blakes and Canalettos they commissioned, bought or bequeathed with their slave interests. You can trace the societies and clubs, the colleges, schools and universities, the asylums, hospitals, charities and golf clubs which benefited from slave wealth and, perhaps most fascinatingly of all, you can trace the letters, pamphlets and newspaper articles associated with the slave trade, and watch the debate of the morality of slave trading sour beneath your eyes, watch as the tide of the conversation turns from the stark inhumanity and logical inconsistency of owning another person to the notion of compensation for the removal of private property.
Because these are the compensation records, the audited accounts of slave owners. They were used as evidence in Parliament for the value of the property the abolitionists were trying to steal from them. And when slavery was finally abolished in 1833, the slavers received a total of £20 million from the British taxpayer, estimated as anything between £87 billion and £500 billion in today’s money. The slaves, of course, received nothing, and as part of the deal had to stay exactly where they were and work unpaid ‘apprenticeships’ for four years after their supposed release.
We leave the grotto through its entrance, stepping over thick swathes of clumped briar. We walk out onto the lawn, dazzling green beneath the clear blue sky. We follow the lawn path along the lake until it emerges from the tree cover to an open space. Four large stone globes are raised on stone plinths, desiccated by time and sprayed with various green and yellow lichens. They are positioned ten foot apart, two on either side of a longer stone jetty, where William Beckford might have alighted from boating around the lake. We take off our clothes and sink into the cool water, watching clumps of foamy green scum float by on the rippling surface. They are a kind of lake plankton, a thick green soup of emergent life, resting on beds of tiny bubbles trapped in the netted hairs of pondweed. The two of us swim, our bare arses shining like jellyfish caught on our spines.
That these men were not indicted for the moral abomination of slavery, and instead rewarded for their losses, is an indication of the power of the anti-abolition lobby groups. They saw the writing on the wall, and, rather than be tried for their innumerable crimes of murder, rape and torture, they deflected the argument. Yet it was a potentially risky move for them, for if one form of property could be de-privatised, why not another? In one petition against compulsory manumission (the release of slaves), the authors argue that they ‘will not waste a moment in advancing arguments to establish their right of property in their slaves. To suppose it could be doubted would be to bring into question the title to all property whatsoever.’
Many of the defenders of slavery had no direct interest in the plantations, but as aristocratic landowners they were panicked by this new surge towards de-privatisation. MP and 3rd Baronet of Osmaston Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton wrote in 1830: ‘If confiscation is to be the result of guilty wealth why is not the property in England to be confiscated, as well as that of the West Indies?’ The rights of private property were so deeply entrenched in the Georgian mindset that comparisons of freed slaves to de-privatised land were being made to underline just how ridiculous the proposition was. Free the slaves, and whatever next?
The Abolition Act was a massive victory for the slavers. They continued their businesses and used their compensation to make new land purchases, build new houses and, thirty miles down south in the Drax estate, raise a new brick wall to keep out the commoners. The bleak irony was that it was only through this eventual abolition act that slaves came to be defined, in British law, as the ‘inalienable property of their masters’. Up to this moment the English common law had neither expressly condoned nor forbidden slavery. But when the argument had turned towards compensation, the law had to state explicitly: slaves were the property of their owners. The same law that freed the slaves had ratified their status as inferior humans. Racism had become institutionalised.
We have been drying in the sun: eyes shut, listening to the hum of insects and feeling our skin tighten as the scum from the lake evaporates to a light contracted crust. This is the hottest day of the year so far, but it is a work day and, apart from the fishermen, we haven’t seen or heard a single soul. This was precisely the purpose of Beckford’s Fonthill: a fortress against society. But when, in one lifetime, William Beckford had managed to drain the largest fortune of Europe, he put his fortress up for sale and headed to Bath to continue his seclusion in more meagre surroundings. The enormous profits from slavery were stemmed by the abolition act but somehow the wealth of England continued to flourish; the West Indies was not its only revenue stream. Fonthill was bought by John Farquhar, an artillery merchant newly returned from the colonies, though this time not from the West, but the East Indies.
A country path is democracy manifested in mud. If the people elect to go one way, then that’s the way they go. Its direction is determined by its efficacy for the people, its legitimacy by use and engagement. A wall is the direct opposite of this. It is a dictatorship. A wall not only divides the common ground, but it corrals the people in the direction desired by its builder. The earliest walls in humankind were designed not to defend property, but to compel the self-willed direction of animals into hunting traps. Neolithic corrals, some as old as 7000 bc, were built of wood, stone or raised earth, and are so long that humans had to learn to fly before they saw them for what they were.
The path that runs from my woods in West Berkshire, up past the dell, through the empty woods to join the Right of Way is one such democratic path. That property law pretends it is not a public path is another brash denial of the pure bleeding obvious: the hundreds of thousands of feet that pressed it into being. The properties of the path are entirely contingent on its being the property of the public, in the Lockean sense, by virtue of the work they put into it. However, when the wall was built around Basildon Park, it severed the path, blocked the old route to the river and transformed the function of the land in between. On the will of one man alone, it corralled the commoners of my village like livestock around its newly sanctioned space. This wall was also built on the profits of colonialism.
Francis Sykes bought Basildon Park in the late eighteenth century. A company man through and through, he had started as a ‘writer’ for the East India Company, a nineteen-year-old clerk who administered the trade of silk in the company’s first point of entry, the port of Calcutta. By the time he bought up half my village, he had risen through the ranks to become the Governor of Cossimbazar, the high priest of trade in north-east India. He was on about £25,000 a year, which in today’s cash is £1.25 million, about the same amount as the CEO for John Lewis. But like every other member of the Honourable East India Company, the real profits were made on the side: through bribes, gifts, insider trading, personal monopolies, private embezzlement (all of which were actively encouraged by the climate of the company). He was bringing in five times his annual salary, £125,000, in today’s money over £6 million a year. The first time he came back, he bought Ackworth Hall in Yorkshire, a small pied-à-terre to get his foot on the ladder. When he returned the second time, he sold that, then bought Basildon Park. He levelled the existing building and raised in its place the house we have today; he then enclosed his land with walls, sealing off my route to the river. He brought back silks, gems, carpets, paintings and, in today’s money, a fortune of £35 million. He then set about phase two of the plan – the social ladder, a peerage, Parliament.
So many of the East India Company’s men had returned from their expeditions, fingers sticky from the colonial cookie jar, and settled in the South East, that at the time Berkshire was known as the ‘English Hindoostan’. It is an area cursed since the Romans by its proximity to London Society. You could frolic around in the country, riding your horses, checking Capability Brown’s plans for your garden, and use Brunel’s new railway line (built on the profits of Afro-Caribbean slavery) to get you into Paddington for a bit of parliamentary hobnobbing. It remains, to this day, an ideal location.
Another of the great elephants of colonial wealth, Warren Hastings, had bought up a little further east of Basildon, in Purley Hall, and the Benyons were due south in Englefield. With the exception of Benyon, whose hereditary wealth had given him leverage into trade, these were self-made businessmen who stormed into the English landscape like lottery winners, Indian gems hanging from their wives’ necks, swishing through the halls of Westminster in Indian silk coats, buttoned with pearls. They were not well liked. ‘Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into parliament by such a torrent of corruption as no private hereditary fortune can resist.’ So said the Earl of Chatham, the future prime minister, whose own hereditary interest came directly from his grandfather’s plundering of a diamond now worth £48 million, with which he bought a rotten borough and his rung on the ladder. The diamond was from Madras.
My lovely mum, who lives a twenty-minute walk from the gates, works shifts at Basildon Park. She is a fancy-dress 1950s housewife who bakes biscuits for the guests, filling Sykes’s great halls with the smell of my childhood, shortbread and ginger nuts. The house is now owned by the National Trust, so one morning I get the train from London and head not over the fence, but to the ticket office, so I can meet my mum without her feeling like she’s colluding in the dark art of trespass. I pay my fee and wind up the woodland path to the great house. Toddlers are playing on fallen tree trunks, young couples are walking their papooses to sleep and squadrons of active seniors with ski poles and bum bags march ever onwards.
The house shines in the sun. Designed by John Carr, it is a celebration of pure Venetian symmetry. Its four Ionic columns, capped by a shallow pediment, are a temple of silvery Bath stone, raised one storey high on a plinth of utility rooms. It is flanked on either side by two pavilions and linked to the main building with a stone wall, which conceals open-air courtyards. I walk through the archway directly beneath the temple pillars, and am led up the stairs to the grand entrance, an outdoor loggia from which you can observe the parkland of the estate – wide lawns with enormous specimen trees running up a gentle incline to the beech woodland that buffers its walls.
I pass silently through the rooms, the Great Hall, the Library, the Sutherland Room, the Great Staircase, the Octagon drawing room, and the guidebook points me to various textiles and tapestries, the crimson damask hangings, the porcelain urns, the friezes and frescoes. When the East India established their first outpost in Calcutta, India’s share in the world economy was 27 per cent, almost a third of all the wealth in the world. It was famed for its textiles, its architecture, its shipbuilding, its spices and its porcelain, which was precisely its attraction. Robert Clive, who as Commander-in-Chief of the British East India Company had one boot in trade and one in war, described his experience as he moved around their newly acquired territories: ‘An opulent city lay at my mercy … I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels. My chairman, at this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation!’
In 1930, historian Will Durant published The Case for India, in which he describes the Company’s methods as a ‘conscious and deliberate bleeding of India’. England was the tick on the udder of the world’s cash cow, sucking up all it could get, inflating itself in direct proportion to what it took. The British imposed a fast-track Tudor land regime on their new territory, standardising laws of ownership and property with no reference to local custom, geography or climate patterns. They charged rent on the land, not tithes from its produce, so when droughts hit their territory, as they often did, the farmers were broken by unpayable charges and had to forfeit their farms. Britain fenced India off from foreign trade and imposed monopolies on steel, textile and crops. They broke the back of a manufacturing nation and turned the entire country into a barracón of stock for export. The railways that Britain ‘gave’ India were not the standard history book definition of gifted infrastructure, but in fact intravenous tubes lodged deep inside the body, transfusing the blood as efficiently as possible from the heart of India to England. Francis Sykes’s own explanation of this gluttony was simple and direct: it was the basic choice of ‘whether it should go into a black man’s pocket or my own’. And today, here it all is, the opulence of Cossimbazar in my little village in West Berkshire.
I meet my mum for coffee in the tea room and we go and sit in the wisteria-lined courtyard. None of this history is particularly relevant to her day, and certainly by baking gingerbread biscuits she has no intention of supporting the fable of benevolent colonialism. She is recently retired, the place is lovely and it’s another activity, like the book group, garden society or art club that twine her tighter to the landscape of our home. Plus, she likes baking. We talk about other things, about her day, how she was buzzing around the rooms I had visited, on tea relief for the other volunteers, not quite remembering the details attached to each display piece, but winging it nevertheless.
The tea room is packing up and the grounds are about to close. We hug goodbye underneath the grand old cedar tree that was here long before the house. She walks to the car and I walk north, to what the map calls the Pheasant Park. I sit beneath a sycamore tree whose branches are hung with baby green helicopters and hear the emphysema wheeze of the Reading road in the distance. A warm breeze makes the long feathered tips of the grass nod in unison, like a parliament in complete accord, and it’s as if the day is gently yawning, stretching itself out into dusk. I watch the cars leave along the tarmac section of the old footpath and I wait, letting time trespass for me. My ticket gives me permissive access to the grounds until 5 p.m. and the moment the second hand passes the hour, I am trespassing.
I pull out my sketchbook and gaze for ages before putting pencil to paper. If you think England is beautiful, you should look behind its walls. Without doubt Sykes claimed for himself the finest view in our village. Four hundred acres of classic Chiltern pastoral: rolling valleys of beech and birch and oak that fall away to the gleaming ribbon of the River Thames, with the first billowing vales of Oxfordshire beyond.
With the mansion hidden behind the slope of the valley, with the herds of Aberdeen Angus and Belted Galloways munching in the shade of trees, it’s not hard to imagine what it must have felt like when all this was common land. This is the very image of the land of milk and honey, a phrase claimed by the Bible, but which must surely refer to the heavenly splendour of unrestricted common ground, where you grazed your cattle and kept your bees. The parish of Basildon had somehow resisted enclosure right up until the mid-eighteenth century, but then a spate of private acts was passed through government, culminating in the Enclosure Act of 1773, which is when the wall went up and the path was blocked.
The new money from the West and East Indies not only flooded the countryside, but rushed up the river to London and engulfed Westminster. Robert Clive had returned from India with the largest fortune an Englishman had ever made on the continent and now, by right of the land he had bought, he owned three votes in Parliament. Sykes, meanwhile, was made a baronet in 1781 and was MP first for Shaftesbury and then for Wallingford. Down the road, Richard Benyon of Gidea had a seat in the House of Commons and his descendant, also Richard, was, until 2019, the richest MP in Parliament. It is estimated that in 1765 there were forty MPs in Parliament with West Indian connections and, by 1784, twenty-nine MPs with direct East Indian connections. Down in Dorset at least six of Richard Drax’s ancestors were MPs and the Beckfords held posts as sheriffs, aldermen, lord mayors and MPs.
As slavery financed more walls around the commons of England, more and more country folk were corralled into the cities, into a new work regime that would spur the industrial revolution. The new money that had flooded England, brought in on the back of African and Indian labour, was the same money that partitioned English commoners from their livelihood and land. And these workers saw the link. Slavery was an extreme version of a time-honoured hierarchy in England: its impetus was profit, its disguise was race, but its mechanism was class. The Anti-Corn Law League was founded five years after slavery was abolished, in opposition to new laws that strove to keep bread prices high, and landowners in charge. They used many of the abolitionist tactics and shared their moral vision: it was the right of every labourer to receive as much recompense for their work as possible; to whatever degree, no one should be exploited.
I have been wandering in and out of the woodland, tracing my way south along the colour-coded National Trust paths. I come out of a dense thicket of wood into a low forest of fern and foxgloves, only just in bloom. There is a circle of grass in among them, under the shade of hawthorns and elder, a grove that has the sense of a druidic altar. The foxgloves are as plentiful as bluebells, and the place hums with a merry congregation of bumblebees, sliding in and out of their bell-jar petals, sipping nectar in a cool violet chamber of shade.
I take off my boots and pull out my sketchbook and crayons. The manor house is directly in front of me, in the far distance, framed by chestnut and oak; the herd of cows have moved into shot, slowly mowing the lawn; the scene is perfect. I lose myself in the sound of the grove, and the rhythmic rubbing of the crayon on paper, when the air around me seems to lighten in a slow flash. I look up and see the sun has slid to such an angle that the lawn ahead of me is glowing lime-green, its rays catching the Bath stone of the manor house, making it gleam like a jewellery box. I think of Beckford’s mansion at Fonthill: Splendens. These manor houses of England were always more than just homes: they were PR stunts. They communicated not just power, but rightful power, clean and pure. Today, they have become icons of ‘Englishness’, a tourist-board narrative of a great empire, a proud history, steam engines, top hats and globally acclaimed costume dramas. They have somehow come to represent the great English character, the virtues of freedom of speech and liberty, the nation that freed the slaves. But when the visitors go home, when their rooms are silent and their grounds are empty, this vision of global greatness hollows and implodes under its own sham weight. Without their congregation of believers to sustain the narrative, they become what the Germans call Mahnmal, monuments of deep-set national shame. These gleaming, cream-stoned treasure chests, stuffed to the eaves with violent plunder, are in fact radiant monoliths to the myth of white supremacy.
In his opening speech in the impeachment hearings against Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke described how the management of the East India Company was responsible for: ‘cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness and insolence.’ When William Pitt the Younger put forward the first abolition bill in 1791, he said ‘Posterity looking back to the history of these enlightened times will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.’ Pitt was right – we don’t believe it, we barely talk of it, and some, from historians to politicians, actively deny it.
When the British left India they had drained its GDP from 27 per cent to 3 per cent. It is estimated that up to twenty-nine million Indians died of famine, murder and organised genocide under the colonial regime. It is estimated that 3.1 million Africans were transported to the British colonies as slaves, of which 400,000 never arrived, lost to malnutrition, disease or the sea. It is therefore not surprising when Dr Catherine Hall says: ‘it’s been much more comfortable for the British to sit with the history of abolition than the history of slavery.’
In 2014 Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a blog entitled ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’, which in its first paragraph states her reasoning: ‘You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us.’ This response is not new. Her words echo those of an unnamed slave quoted in early abolitionist Thomas Tryon’s Friendly Advice to the planters: ‘A false conceit of Interest has blinded their Eyes and stopped their Ears and rendered their Hearts harder than Rocks of Adament.’
When David Cameron refused to apologise for the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which at least 379 Indian civilians were gunned down by British troops, his reasoning was spurious: ‘So I don’t think the right thing is to reach back into history and to seek out things you can apologise for.’ ‘Reach’ implies that these episodes might be hard to find; they are not. During the 2010 election, when Richard Drax was repeatedly asked about his family’s debt to African slavery he finally snapped and said, ‘I can’t be held responsible for something that happened three hundred or four hundred years ago. They are using the old class thing and that is not what this election is about, it’s not what I stand for, and I ignore it.’ He ignores it. With a little bit of digging, the truth of Drax’s inheritance becomes ever starker. Not only does he still operate within a power and property bequeathed to him by slavery, but he still owns the original sugar plantation in Barbados, and visits his Jacobean manor house there every year. His link to slavery is not tangential, but direct, and current.
Drax’s ignorance is a wilful act. He knows the history, he lives within it, but he has hardened his eyes. For most of us, however, the colonial legacy is buried under the false narrative of emancipation; the white saviour complex is built into the architecture of Englishness, the stilts upon which national pride balances. Ignorance is taught in schools. Dean Simon is a vlogger who posts on YouTube under the name of Rants’n’Bants:
A lot of people think that being racist automatically makes them a bad person, but it doesn’t. It’s a social construct. No one’s born racist, it’s a learnt behaviour. If you went to school, watch TV, read the newspaper … if you’re white sitting through history class learning white people invented everything, pioneered everything, and discovered everything, and black people… well, we used to own them, then we freed them, and they’re still complaining. If you didn’t leave school believing in white supremacy, you must have been asleep.
The guidebook that led me round Basildon Park refers only once to Francis Sykes’s methods: ‘He had amassed a considerable fortune working for the East India Company in Bengal.’ In Sykes’s former breakfast room, which looks out into the river valley, a sign by the window goes into a little more depth: ‘his career however was not unblemished. He was censured for raising an unauthorised tax from which he was alleged to have made considerable gains.’ With a bit more digging, we find William Cobbett’s slightly fuller description in his Parliamentary History of England:
the Select Committee, in 1765, had begun to levy without any authority, an arbitrary tax called Matoot, under colour of repairing bridges, ways &c. and had diverted it from the public channel to their own private use… Mr Sykes touched of this Matoot 4,000 rupees for his table, 18,000 for his dresses and 18,000 more for other expenses.
It is in equal parts understandable and unforgivable that the guidebook wouldn’t want to mention this, or refer to any of the blood, spilt or drained by Sykes and his company. Genocide can really ruin a day out. But while the national institutions and private companies, en masse, neglect to take the responsibility of telling a more complete story of the context of their own splendour, the English are being fed a lie. Ta-Nehisi Coates calls this lie a ‘modern invention … the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe they are white’. And by white, he takes James Baldwin’s definition, that of superior monopolised power.
The superiority of the white race is a story that was shaped on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. It has neither the moral nor scientific backing that it later claimed for itself, but was invented chiefly for economic ends: to justify the exploitation of free labour. The notion of race is as contrived as the walls it financed in England and, just like the walls, it stands to this day, dividing the land. While we continue to acknowledge the legitimacy of these brick walls, we continue to support the lie of white supremacy, of class superiority, that one type of person deserves a bigger and better share of the world than another. Black people have been the slaves of this lie, but for as long as white people continue to sustain its false narrative, they are its servants.
In 2018 Afrobeat jazz band Sons of Kemet released the album ‘Your Queen Is A Reptile’. The promo video for the album mixes clips from the tracks, with a monologue from poet Joshua Idehen. Over a single repetitive note from a breathy sax, he declaims:
WE the immigrants, we the children of immigrants, we the Diaspora, we the descendants of the colonised, we claim our right to question your obsolete systems, your racist symbols, your monuments of genocide, we who built your palaces, we who paid blood into your banks, we who died in mines so your crown jewels may have the biggest diamonds. We claim our place at the table and we say your history is not pure, your empire is not whole, your conscience is not clean.
So if we finally dig up the bare bones of this colonial guilt, and they lie like open graves on the lawns of our most magnificent estates, what then? When he was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, the historian Eric Williams forged an alignment with the prime ministers of Barbados, Guyana and Jamaica. In 1973 these leaders signed the Treaty of Chaguaramas, which created CARICOM: a community of Caribbean islands bound together in one common market and ‘functional cooperation’. Part of CARICOM’s mission was to define the crime of colonialism and outline specific reparations owed by European governments. They came up with a ten-point plan: from the cancellation of debt to the support of cultural institutions, and the eradication of illiteracy, they are practical directions to repair the damage done to their communities, both economically and psychologically. But right at the top of the list is very simply an apology. And it still hasn’t come.
An apology is an acknowledgement of responsibility, a speech-act that changes the story. And it works as much for the speaker as the listener. Instead of dragging a nation out to the stocks for a public shaming, an apology is the moment the addict first looks into the mirror and truly sees themself. It is the first step to recovery. In the twelve-step programme that applies to addicts of all drugs, from alcohol to sugar to white supremacy, item four suggests we ‘Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves’. While the UCL Legacies project is an impressive first step, still nothing of its kind has been attempted with the East Indies.
Shashi Tharoor is a Congress MP in India who worked for the UN for twenty-nine years, culminating as Under-Secretary General. He has argued that India ‘should be content with a symbolic reparation of one pound a year, payable for 200 years to atone for 200 years of imperial rule. I felt that atonement was the point – a simple “sorry” would do as well – rather than the cash.’ Atonement: at-one-ment. The apology is a spell that, once uttered, changes the story, resets the balance, and (seen in terms of land) it levels the fences, turns division into unity. Atonement, incidentally, was a word first imported into English in 1526 by none other than William Tyndale, who is, in this book at least, the patron saint of speech-acts.
While Britain sustains its false narrative of itself, while it refuses to acknowledge the source of its current status, its land remains riven by racism. Nowhere is this more evident than the countryside. A couple of years ago, Benjamin Zephaniah, Brummie poet and star of the TV series Peaky Blinders, was visiting a mate of his in the Essex countryside. They went for a jog before lunch, a jog that was interrupted by two police helicopters and a van responding to reports of ‘suspicious men’ running across the fields. Were they stopped because they were black, or, same thing but different, because no one else was?
In 2004, Trevor Phillips, the then chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, spoke of a ‘passive apartheid’ in the British countryside. Figures show that the 9 per cent of Britain’s population who are from an ethnic minority constitute only 1 per cent of the visitors to the countryside. Further to this, the stats say that while 10 per cent of the population in towns are from ethnic minorities, only 1 per cent of the rural population are Black and Minority Ethnic. In 2013, Brian True-May stepped down from producing the ITV show Midsomer Murders after declaring that ‘we just don’t have ethnic minorities involved because it wouldn’t be the English village with them … We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.’
Academics from the University of Leicester in their 2011 report Rural Racism found that minority ethnic incomers ‘were often treated with suspicion as many white rural residents felt that they belonged only in the city, with all its concomitant “negative” attributes of noise, pollution, crime and, crucially for some, multiculturalism’. In the eyes of rural England, black means urban, but the moment these communities cross the line into the countryside they challenge ‘the very idea of Englishness itself’.
The sun has set and I have been watching the cows process slowly from north to south of the grounds. The sky is deep pink, the glow is sensuous. The day is done, it will soon be dark, so I’m shortcutting through the woods out into a sloping field. Swishing through the waist-high grass I am approaching two fallow deer which, though only metres away, still haven’t noticed me. It’s as though I have spent so long outside, I have absorbed the wide calm of the day; cloaked in the softness of the setting sun, I have lost that human stomp that sends the animal world into panic. It’s only when I stop to fiddle with my phone for a photo that the human world comes crashing in, and they scarper.
The English descendants of African immigrants are finally claiming their place at the table, linking their story to the landscape. The play Black Men Walking, written by poet-rapper Testament, and based around a real-life Yorkshire walking group, is one such example. One character exclaims:
It was an African that put the York in Yorkshire! And I’m not even counting the countless others after – all sorts of Africans – black people in England. The Georgians, the Tudors … we were here before the Anglo-Saxons! You see? Generations upon generations. Right down to my dad who worked in the Sheffield steelworks. You see? We’ve left our imprint on the earth here, in nature. We are here!
Several months after my trespass, while washing up to Radio 4, I hear another voice. Vanessa Kisuule is a poet and burlesque dancer from Bristol and she is being interviewed about the dissonance that exists between the concepts of black and rural:
It speaks a lot to why perhaps we’re not as much in the conversation around all of these big issues, ecology and climate change, because supposedly we’re too busy running around getting involved in drive-bys and gun crime and living these urban fairy tales that the media seems to be so obsessed with shoehorning black and brown people into …
But it is her last words in the programme that stick in my head. They resonate with that wedded concept of freedom of speech and freedom on the land. Read her words, and then, with her permission, try swapping the word story for land: ‘For so long it felt like this story, I wasn’t entitled to it, it didn’t belong to me, it wasn’t my place, so I made a decision, a small decision in my head and heart: this story is yours too.’