I’ve already written about the statue of Colston on display in the museum, but in many ways this felt more interesting. It’s the plaque that was placed by the statue a few months before it was torn down, attempting a compromise between the great deal of good that Colston did for Bristol whilst also highlighting his links to slavery and how many people suffered because of his actions.
I have no view on whether statues stay up or not, it’s not for me to choose. I like statues as they tell a story, but it would be odd for a city like Warsaw to have a statue of a Nazi or similar, some things are just beyond the pale. Either way, it would have perhaps been a travesty for the statue to have been destroyed, so its positioning in a museum tells a story in the way that it should. The story really isn’t just about Colston, it’s about how later generations used his legacy and didn’t take all of it into account.
The element that I think is intriguing is what would Colston himself think of this? He was one of the greatest philanthropists of his age, but he declared that he didn’t want any pomp with regards to his burial. That was ignored and I’m not convinced, not that I’m an expert, that he would have even wanted a statue erected to him anyway. I rather like that the idea that Colston would be comfortable both with his contribution to charity being remembered alongside the horrors of slavery. Perhaps the defining message here is that the whole thing was a correction to how later generations used Colston and how the Victorians didn’t take the slavery links into account when putting the statue up in 1895, even though they lived in a time when slavery had, in theory, been abolished.