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The Queen Victoria statue in Leeds

261 replies

Sugarplumfairy65 · 10/06/2020 00:35

Her statue has been vandalised with graffiti. The BLM logo and slave trader spray painted all over it. Why?

OP posts:
loveisanopensore · 10/06/2020 14:30

@MockersGuidedByTheScience

Queen Vic was a constitutional monarch. She was not responsible for her govt's inaction and indifference during the Irish famine, and was herself never properly informed of its extent. She was the target of numerous assassination attempts by Fenian terrorists.
If she wasn't properly informed of it's extent why did she agree to donate such a large amount? £1000 is about £100,000 in today's money.

That's the problem with monarchy I suppose, they can alway say they weren't informed. Protected by the bubble.

MockersGuidedByTheScience · 10/06/2020 14:52

Nobody in England properly appreciated the extent of the Irish Famine, not least because they couldn't be bothered to find out.

As I said elsethread, The British did not starve the Irish. They sat back and let the Irish starve. Get it right.

Flaxmeadow · 10/06/2020 15:10

Nobody in England properly appreciated the extent of the Irish Famine, not least because they couldn't be bothered to find out.

The famine was widely published in British and Irish newspapers at the time

As I said elsethread, The British did not starve the Irish. They sat back and let the Irish starve. Get it right.

If they had wanted to sit back and let the Irish starve, they wouldn't have intervened by sending relief and organising famine relief projects. They wouldn't have let Irish people, fleeing poverty, disease and famine, into Britain.

Abbccc · 10/06/2020 15:15

In the modern sense most people would have been racist and sexist during Queen Victoria's reign, and before and after her too. We can't erase all,those people.

chickbaa · 10/06/2020 15:15

Thank you for your responses but I still don't understand why preserving a massive statue in a museum is essential for learning. There are other artefacts, ways to fill a museum -learn

Abbccc · 10/06/2020 15:17

@MockersGuidedByTheScience

Nobody in England properly appreciated the extent of the Irish Famine, not least because they couldn't be bothered to find out.

As I said elsethread, The British did not starve the Irish. They sat back and let the Irish starve. Get it right.

Most people in those days wouldn't have been able to find out, it's not that they "weren't bothered".
WhatATimeToBeAlive · 10/06/2020 15:18

Just waiting for all statues of the Roman emperors to be pulled down any time soon.

StCharlotte · 10/06/2020 15:20

Just waiting for all statues of the Roman emperors to be pulled down any time soon.

Apparently they regularly were and the bronze melted down for coins for subsequent emperors.

MockersGuidedByTheScience · 10/06/2020 15:23

Who remembers Septimius Serevus, Roman governor of Britannia and later emporer, Britain's only black ruler?

(Statue?)

Mittens030869 · 10/06/2020 15:28

Just waiting for all statues of the Roman emperors to be pulled down any time soon.*

We did have statues of Stalin pulled down when the truth about his atrocities was revealed. And the statue of Saddam Hussein.

So there’s plenty of historical precedent for this. I don’t actually have a problem with this form of protest.

Bewareoftheblob · 10/06/2020 15:38

It's this kind of shit that leads to some kind of hideous dystopian society. Orwell and Huxley must think their fiction was predictive as opposed to a warning.

Flaxmeadow · 10/06/2020 15:41

Who remembers Septimius Serevus, Roman governor of Britannia and later emporer, Britain's only black ruler

(Statue?)

Was he black?

He was born in a Roman province in North Africa, now Libya, but not sure there is any evidence for him being of African descent.

There are statues and busts of him, not sure how accurate the likeness is though .

CountFosco · 10/06/2020 15:43

@Flaxmeadow

The English have built a nation of the backs of others for centuries...

The very ground you walk on was made richer by the oppression of the English. It is what it is I'm afraid.

For centuries, the English ground I walk has been littered with terraced slums, coal mines, slag heaps and industrial textile mills.

I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this. Textile Mills? Milling what? Probably cotton? Picked by who? Slaves. Everyone in Britain benefit from the wealth that flowed into the country because of slavery and the industries that depended on slavery. Read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill, people moved to the mills from the countryside chasing the money, millwork was better paid than the rural alternatives.

UCL have made an interactive map of the UK individuals who received compensation when slavery was abolished. There are slave owners from Thurso to Penzance.

I think pulling down the statue of Edward Colston was a powerful image and frankly probably justified considering there had been a campaign in Bristol for 40 years to try and remove the statue or add a second plaque explaining his prominent role in the slave trade. Other sculptures marking his role in the slave trade have been put round his statue at various points.

However, that does not mean every historical figure should have their statue taken down, our standards change over time and they will change again. Adding a plaque or a second sculpture creates a dialogue between the past and present and seems the best way to add another layer of complexity to our town and cityscapes.

MockersGuidedByTheScience · 10/06/2020 15:46

No one in the Ancient Mediterranean was 'black' in the modern sense, although there are plenty of black studies courses in American universities that would have Cleopatra in cornrows.

According to the sources, Septimius Severus was of mixed heritage, Italian on his father's side and Punic on his mother's.

Maduixa · 10/06/2020 15:49

I'm in Poland. The population here is 98.6% white and most of the rest are of Asian ethnicities. BLM activity from the US (and various EU countries with large black populations) doesn't really translate, but it's in the media and there's a lot of sympathy. Since Nazi and communist times, people don't really love the police and they know what it's like not to be able to get justice in the courts. There's some police brutality even now, including a suspect recently killed in custody. There have been solidarity demos and vigils for George Floyd outside the embassy in Warsaw and various consulates.

One of the protests in Washington DC resulted in the monuments of two Polish national heros, Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski, being defaced (apparently with BLM graffiti, obscenties involving Trump, "burn this bitch down", and urinating and spitting). A Warsaw replica of Kościuszko's DC memorial was also defaced the next day. The Polish ambassador has denounced this, so that was all over the news.

Pulaski and Kościuszko were generals who fought for Polish and US independence. Kościuszko was a lifelong fighter for the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, and an abolitionist. During his lifetime, he used his fortune to buy the freedom of whole households of slaves. When he died in 1817, he left all the funds/lands granted for his services to the US to be used for the manumission and education of black slaves in the USA. His name is still associated with human rights initiatives in several countries. He's also a national hero of Lithuania and Belarus. It's not clear why he would be targeted.

I teach advanced classes in English, so my students all read English-language media and SM. They get pulling down statues - there are "statue graveyards" all over central and eastern Europe of the monuments to communism that were torn down and didn't fit in the museums. Some were routinely defaced before the end of communism - stealthily, of course. But those were statues of people who were actual oppressors, whose only reason to have a statue was that they were instrumental in subjecting Poles to an oppressive system. Almost nobody would deface a war monument here. There's very little understanding of that mentality.

Of course, worrying about a monument IS trivial in the context of long-term systemic racism + the ongoing issues of police brutality/lack of justice for black victims + the totality of the protest movement. Of course, it's privileged and nitpicking and (in this case) arguably racist to be "more concerned" about statues than lives. If it's necessary or useful to deface unrelated statues, if it does some recognisable good (for example, people not being traumatised by walking daily past the statue of someone who has harmed them), then that's not really coming across clearly internationally. I don't expect anyone to prioritise this at the moment, but I'm afraid some of the perceived "nothing can be criticised because the USA does worse" attitude is going to backfire in terms of squandering strong international support.

Clavinova · 10/06/2020 15:50

loveisanopensore
Famine Queen

A different version of the story here;

"The claim that he [Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I] had wanted to give £10,000 first appears in Taylor & Mackay's Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (1851), but the book is not referenced and no source is given. A second source, dating to 1894, is more explicit: the Irish nationalist William J. O'Neill Daunt claimed to have heard from the son of the sultan's personal physician that he "had intended to give £10,000 to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only subscribed £1000, would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum"…

I don't think the journalist in your link referred to any sources for his article.

Flaxmeadow · 10/06/2020 15:52

If you want a high status black Roman in Britain then look no further than the Ivory Bangle Lady. She was buried in a high status Roman grave in York.

MockersGuidedByTheScience · 10/06/2020 15:59

Maduixa

I hope you show your students the picture of Nick Griffin sat in front of his Battle For Britain poster complete with 303 Squadron Spitfire with Polish markings clearly visible.

Clavinova · 10/06/2020 16:06

Who remembers Septimius Serevus, Roman governor of Britannia and later emperor, Britain's only black ruler?
(Statue?)

Several on display in the British Museum.

Flaxmeadow · 10/06/2020 16:18

I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this. Textile Mills? Milling what? Probably cotton? Picked by who? Slaves.

Picked by slaves in the USA yes, but how was this of any advantage to cotton mill labourers in the UK? Also the USA was out of British control by then. Textile manufacture in the UK was not just cotton. Wool and flax were also big industries. Some of the largest industrial mills in the textile districts were wool/worsted.

Everyone in Britain benefit from the wealth that flowed into the country because of slavery and the industries that depended on slavery.

Which industries apart form cotton depended on slavery. Unless you mean the unregulated labour of British people, including children, in industries like coal, where the death rates were extremely high.

Read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill,

I already have

people moved to the mills from the countryside chasing the money, millwork was better paid than the rural alternatives.

People moved into the factory towns and cities because their labour in the fields had been replaced by agricultural machinery and because their cottage industry and wages, hand loom weaving for example, had been undercut by the factory system.

Industrialisation did not improve these peoplrs lives. In some cities it greatly reduced life expectancy. A wool comber living in an overcrowded city slum in the north of England had a life expectancy of about 14 years.

Cotton was not the only industry and industrialisation, including textile manufacture, would have happened without it.

Coal was the big game changing industry. Britain, or even just England alone, was the largest exporter of coal in the world before WW1.

HarlinRay · 10/06/2020 16:23

No one cared about that awful statue anyway until this happened and it gave the racists and thickos something to whinge about, it used to be in the city centre and they stuck it in the park on the edge of town because it was less trouble than melting it down.

Facefullofcake · 10/06/2020 16:46

I lived by the park for years and Victoria was usually wearing a traffic cone on her head; I'm sure I remember her having paint chucked on her too.
Absolutely agree that the current outrage is underpinned by racism - where was it for years when the vandalism was just attributed to student high jinks?

Sugartitss · 10/06/2020 16:51

Does anyone in England know the history of their country aside from vikings, medieval times and ww2 and the usual taught in schools.

HarlinRay · 10/06/2020 16:56

Lord Wellington on the SW corner has worn a traffic cone more often than not for years, splashed with paint, and his wellington boots painted every colour. He was a piece of shit, too, anti-semitic and against the reform act that was meant to expand voting rights to more people.

With a VERY few exceptions, they were all awful. All of them. All a product of their time, maybe, and worth learning about, but not worthy of fucking statues and veneration. Tear it all down.

HarlinRay · 10/06/2020 16:58

@Sugartitss I like to think I know quite a bit, actually, anything in particular you'd like to know about?

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