Black History Month

Wendy Chamberlain Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) on securing this important debate.

I was born and brought up in Greenock, the main town of the constituency of Inverclyde. As a child it was just my home town. My main memory of the school trips to the local James Watt Museum was walking a friend, eyes closed, past the snarling stuffed bear, and certainly little of our colonial history. I never thought twice about the names of some of the streets I walked down—Jamaica Street, Antigua Street, Virginia Street—or what some of the merchants who built some of the larger houses in the town might have traded in.

Hidden in plain sight was another history of the place where I was growing up, because Greenock, like other ports, sadly played its part in the Atlantic slave trade. It was a port where traders carrying goods like iron and guns would depart to west Africa. These goods would be traded for enslaved people who were then transported to the Americas and sold in exchange for goods like sugar. As a child, the only sugar I was aware of in relation to Greenock was the Tate & Lyle refinery, and the wreck of the sugar boat MV Captayannis in the Firth of Clyde —the water was supposed to taste sweet round about it. That sugar was transported to the refineries of Greenock, and the warehouse, the Sugar Shed, still stands to this day.

That sugar, and the rum and tobacco, made some incredibly wealthy, but that wealth was not just kept in the pockets of the traders and their families: it is important that we acknowledge that it enriched all Scots and all parts of the UK. This was recently highlighted by the excellent blog and Twitter account, @WeirdScotland. Much of the philanthropy of the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland, a lot of which admirably focused on promoting access to education, which we have talked about a lot today, was in fact funded by the slave trade. For example, the Royal Academy in Tain, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), was opened in 1813 by Hugh Rose Ross of Glastullich, a slaver funded by £175,000, in today’s money, from donors in the Caribbean.

It is not just our places or our institutions but our people who have deep-rooted connections to the slave trade. The most famous Greenockian other than Victor Meldrew is James Watt. His father was a slave trader. While Watt did eventually argue for abolition, there is no doubt that he benefited from his father’s wealth, and sold steam engines to plantations in the Caribbean. I highlight Shaun Kavanagh’s excellent piece on Greenock’s role in the slave trade, where he says:

“In Greenock, we live in the shadow of slavery every day.”

How many people walk along the streets of Greenock, Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere and fail to connect the dots—to realise the wealth realised via the slave trade?

Even Scotland’s bard, Robert Burns, in dire financial straits, accepted a job as part of a team of white overseers on a plantation in Jamaica. As Clark McGinn has outlined, being a bookkeeper was as much about managing the assets as the numbers. Burns would have had a daily interface with the truth of slavery, from assisting in purchases through to recording punishments and deaths—and an ambitious young man might seek advancement by volunteering to be more hands on. The publication of Burns’s poems, to instant acclaim, prevented his emigration and that future, but his story demonstrates how slavery permeated every part of Scottish life at that time.

We have to do so much more to educate ourselves about the horrors of the past, not least when, as has been demonstrated during the pandemic, the legacy of the unequal treatment of colour is still very much with us to this day. This year, Black Lives Matter has had a huge impact. In my semi-rural constituency of North East Fife, it has been the issue that my team and I have received the most correspondence about. I received many emails and letters on the murder of George Floyd, on the tragic death of Belly Mujinga and the campaign for justice for her, and on ensuring that black history is taught in our schools.

I have written to the Scottish Government about making sure that our curriculum is inclusive. I am concerned that potentially the diverse approach of the curriculum for excellence means that for some we will not be teaching that curriculum. Like others in this debate, I absolutely support the work of the Black Curriculum campaign and say that we do need a commitment that every child learns at school about Britain’s role in the slave trade.