Dib Dib Dubious

Before doing my Museum Studies course at Leicester, I spent a summer volunteering at the Museum Service in Poole. The first job I was given to do was cataloguing a box of objects that had been sitting in the office for a couple of years. They all related to a recently-deceased Poole resident who'd been, among many other things, heavily involved in the Scouting movement. I went through the programmes, tickets, badges, and other bits and pieces, and found a medal: a brass swastika in a circle stamped on the back HitlerJugend 1934. Actually I can't swear to the date, but you get the idea. It caused quite a jolt. But if you were a 1930s Boy Scout leader without that much political awareness (or just enough to make you a Conservative), the Hitler Youth looked like a parallel organisation. Young fellows went out into the woods and tracked animals and lit fires. Mr Hitler will be a breath of fresh air for the Germans. Don't go along with him on everything, of course, but they probably need a bit of that sort of thing over there. That's what the Germans are like. 

I do feel a bit bad for Baden-Powell: he was hardly the only prominent Briton to be taken in by Mr Hitler, and his dreadful hierarchical views were no worse than a lot of his contemporaries'. His Poole statue strikes me as rather a humble object, as these things go: he sits looking out at Brownsea Island and passersby look down at him. As for Mr Gladstone, his fall from grace on the grounds of the origin of his family's wealth seems more than a little unfair. Not only do few lives stand up to that kind of scrutiny (a truism we all know), but dig beneath the surface of virtually any well-off individual's background between the late 17th- and early 19th-centuries and you'll find some connection or other with the Triangular Trade. Picking individuals for public obloquy beyond those most directly involved in it is a bit invidious.

But there lies the problem. For a century and more we British have told ourselves a story that begins in Tudor maritime exploration and derring-do, and continues through the Industrial Revolution into progressive modernity. I certainly remember that from my distant childhood. In so far as slavery comes into it, as soon as the Trade was abolished we spent our time congratulating ourselves for having done so and castigating any nation that was tardier than we were; the fact that it needed abolishing was apparently easy to forget, as was the way its colossal profits underwrote the investment that went into mines, textile factories, railways, and everything else that made Britain the world's first industrial power. Racism wasn't the point of any of this, really. Notions of racial hierarchy, and the appropriateness of one category of human beings owning members of another, or ruling over another, were justificatory veneers laid over the economic and geopolitical competition of European powers. That was what it was all about.

We can't extract this from who we are: it runs through the whole post-Reformation history of this country and has brought us here, to this point. There are public monuments to the people who made this history happen, surviving from the time when we we had no suspicion of the self-serving ideology that underlay the business of Trade and Empire, and their survival amounts to a denial in stone and bronze that it happened, or that it mattered. Removing them, though, I suppose might also be a form of denial. We've only just begun facing who we really are, and that's the real task.

(Photo snipped from the Dorset Echo)