National Trust AGM

[PRAMtran]

I’ve received an email from the National Trust inviting me and all other members to vote in their AGM. Does anyone know if there are any things a woman’s rights advocate should vote for or against. Eg TWAW by stealth.

You know what is really interesting about this? Even in the US, in the 1970s, many schools were teaching more historically accurate information about the slave trade than kids learn now. In part because it was just taught as history, without being overtly politicized. Young people the age of my kids tend to have, not what I'd call a sanitized version of that history, but certainly one constructed to support a very narrow narrative that seems to see the history of the west as somehow outside of the rest of human history.

Oh God, don't give them any ideas. I can see this becoming the norm at restaurants in my university city.

but certainly one constructed to support a very narrow narrative that seems to see the history of the west as somehow outside of the rest of human history.

And one that collapses ‘the west’ into United States of America.

The potato soup perhaps but not the spiced tea cake. The fact that Europeans have suffered historically does not conform to the narrative.

I thought it was bad form to ‘out’ someone as homosexual if they were closeted?

Cragside and wallington's are currently closed <sobs>

Omg I MISS the fig collection at cragside 😭

On the restore trust website someone has written an article about the Capability Brown garden at Croome Court pointing out that the NTs attempt to update the guide book for ‘Colonialism’ is inaccurate and unscholarly. Referencing plant hunting expeditions that occurred after the garden was planted for example. It just sprang to mind for some reason.

Went to Cragside this summer

it knocked my ruddy socks off

then I went to Waddesdon

all I can say about that is: crikey

visit it if you can

I work in a university STEM department. We have an "EDI bookcase", 90% of which contains works about black British history or gender woo. Minimal interest in disability, and zero mention of other ethnicities (we have loads of Chinese students and staff). Amazing how narrow diversity can be.

This is the kind of limited focus in museums (rainbows and the trans Atlantic slave trade only) that people would like examined, and improved.

*then I went to Waddesdon

all I can say about that is: crikey

visit it if you can*

Going in a couple of weeks (train strikes willing, we've already had to cancel once)

I’ll have a look at the restore trust website

They (and therefore society at large) need to understand where we came from. All of us, not just the rich white men who ran the Empire.
And there goes @DatumTarum erasing all the other people who helped to run the empire: the poor white men who joined the army that propped up said empire, and all the mixed race people who provided the go-betweens between the empire and the local population, and all the non-white people who spoke English and formed the backbone of the civil service that kept the empire rolling along, and the various local nobles who decided that cooperating with the empire was a bloody good way of cementing their position while getting one over on the potentate next door.

The British Empire would not have existed without all those other people. To reduce it to 'rich white men' is crashingly simplistic.

Could you google the various candidates and see what other organisations they are attached to and what their politics are/if the are Stonewall members?

I thought we weren’t meant to have any differentiation between the rest of us and these ‘rich white men who ran the empire’. The message is that we are those men and culpable for all their actions?

I'm literally doing the opposite

It's RT who'll reduce it back to rich, white men.

I dig up and preserve the material culture and physical remains of ordinary people.

They (and therefore society at large) need to understand where we came from. All of us, not just the rich white men who ran the Empire.
And there goes @DatumTarum erasing all the other people who helped to run the empire

The Queen's Gallery at Greenwich last year had a portrait on loan from Woburn of an aristocratic woman accompanied by a small black girl. The caption commented about the exploitation of a (probably) enslaved child to be a foil to a woman of the upper classes. In the feedback I pointed out that if they were going to talk about exploitation they might also want to mention the milliner's assistant who worked all hours embroidering the subject's dress and blinding herself in the process, the servants who worked all hours for a pittance keeping her fed and clothed and entertained, the tenants paying rent to keep her and her husband's mortgages paid and the lady's maid waiting up to the wee hours to help her mistress to bed.

Was the milliners assistant in the painting?

Thomas Clarkson, who devoted most of his life to bringing about the abolition of slavery, bringing evidence and debate, and the people who worked with him were religious people too. They were all very interesting people.

Recently, I have learned more about our history from visiting cathedrals and seeing the evidence than I did from the NT. They usually have nice gardens and cake too.

Was the milliners assistant in the painting?

As she wasn't, does that mean she wasn't as exploited as the little girl who was? was someone only exploited if it was recorded and made obvious?

Sorry, but Lord Fluffyton's potted bio made me LOL.

Of course not, but surely the information provided should relate to the content of the painting?

The people who made the clothes may well have been exploited, there were some horrendous working conditions for working class people back then.

Kids were taken from workhouses and basically treated as slaves in some mills.

But some were not bad at all, the idea of a company town with schools, churches and temperance bars was one of the better things to happen.

It's not an either or, we can acknowledge the Caribbean slave trade AND the exploitation of the British working classes.

Hell, it was usually the same bloody people doing it!

That is a good point about ‘absence’. The people who are not seen. Who were considered of no value. Not worth recording.

So if there are no pictures of the white working class people who were exploited does that mean they shouldn't have information panels about them?

What makes you think there are no pictures of them?