IN the Proms “row” over Rule Britannia, Boris Johnson calls for end to cringing embarrassment over British history while according to Sir Nicholas Kenyon, who directed the Proms for more than a decade, the Rule Britannia row is a “laughable irrelevance”.
The key issue over Rule Britannia is the boast that Britons never shall be slaves, yet they were instrumental in the slave trade where UK ships were the link in the Atlantic trade and when the UK had the near monopoly of that trade, supplying also under the contract of Asiente at the Peace of Utrecht (1730) slaves for Spanish dominions in America.
Beyond the trade, the practice of slavery on the Caribbean plantations – where fortunes were made, and the daily conditions of slaves was well-documented in “travelogues” of the time – is an indictment on our past history, which involves all sections of society at some point in the process.
READ MORE: Stuart Cosgrove: Give me the myth of a monster over hymns to empire and slavery any day
The most revealing aspect of that travel literature is how slavery is accepted as the natural order of things. Those enslaved are seen mostly as inferior persons, “uncivilised” and of no human value except as a commodity to be exploited.
One does not need to research in libraries today to seek evidence. Oxford World’s Classics has an anthology, Travel Writing 1700-1830, where reports of travels to the Caribbean and other areas of the globe can be read.
Daily life on a plantation as a slave was horrendous, but when you read about the punishments inflicted on slaves, it would be today a crime against humanity. It is not “cringe” when one attacks the sentiments in Rule Britannia, it is a judgement on our past. Slavery and its cruelty is not a proud heritage at all.
In the Oxford publication, Hans Sloane, on a voyage to various islands including Barbados and Jamaica, 1707 and 1725, records, amongst other scientific observations, punishments meted out to slaves in a matter-of-fact manner, totally detached. He takes slavery for granted. He dedicated his account to the monarch of the time, Queen Anne.
He details punishments which are barbaric and, even by 18th century “standards”, uncivilised.
For rebellion – and who would not rebel under slavery? – he describes the punishment: “burning them, by nailing them down on the ground with crooked sticks in every limb, and then applying the fire by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head, whereby their pains are extravagant.”
When one realises that Sloane was a founder of the nascent British Museum, one can now understand how being critical of our past history is not “cringe”, it is a necessary action to appraise our past objectively.
These cruel punishments meted out to slaves are on a par with crimes against humanity committed under the Nazi tyranny. Rule Britannia, is an indictment on our past crimes against persons on a global scale. Nothing to chant about!
John Edgar
Kilmaurs
ON September 1st 1939, W H Auden wrote a poem beginning: “I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low and dishonest decade”.
The was penned on the eve of the greatest slaughter in history, the bloodbath of World War Two. This September, 80 years later, we still sit in an obdurate and unrepentant world, while the juggernaut of death rolls relentlessly onwards towards extinction.
The wisest of humanity, the world’s top scientists, have reset the Doomsday Clock, so it now stands closer to midnight than at any time in the past. But hey, don’t let that worry you. What do these academics know? Follow our leaders, they will make us great again.
In the past, spiritual visionaries have pleaded with us to recognise our common humanity – in vain. They were reviled and mocked. Today, thanks to the wonderful advances in the technology of industrialised slaughter, what was previously merely a noble aspiration has now become an absolute imperative. As Martin Luther King said: “We must live together as brothers, or perish together as fools”.
Back at the start of our nuclear nightmare in 1955, two of the greatest minds of the century, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, wrote a manifesto calling for global nuclear disarmament. They urged: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death”.
In 2017, 122 states at the UN called for a Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons. The nine rogue nuclear states boycotted this. Either we have a nuclear-free future or we have no future at all. Scotland must decide which side it is on – the overwhelming majority of humanity, or the nuclear-obsessed British state.
But Vanguard still prowls the seas, threatening to bring the sun to Earth in an orgy of global destruction. Can we now, at the eleventh hour, not change our ways and learn to be truly human? Why can an independent Scotland not join the rest of humanity that wants a future?
May this pandemic teach us the truth of Auden’s concluding words: “We must love one another or die”.
Brian Quail
Glasgow
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