By now, anybody who reads this will know about the toppling of Bristol's statue of Edward Colston. Pulled down by four ropes, and rolled into the harbour. A fitting end, I suppose, though victory over a lump of stone seems like a pretty damn hollow one to me. I'm not going to say anything else about it, aside from to say Bristol must have been desperate to erect a statue to him in the first place, especially as the statue went up over a century after his death.
What I am going to talk about is the very idea of statues, and our perspective of the past. Our tendency to divide people in to goodies and baddies, with no nuance, or context to their actions. We have a bad habit of airbrushing so called heroes in order to forget any bad things they did. Churchill's entire life might as well be summed up by his actions as Prime Minister, with his myriad of failures and his racist attitudes conveniently forgotten. I can well imagine that our current Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) can only be hoping for a similar moment in his career so that we might forget that he's a lying, philandering sod who's happy to be used as a glove puppet by Dominic Cummings.
We have a similar process when we talk about the decades of history, painting across them with a gloss that colours them with a particular zeitgeist. Were the 1920s really roaring for everyone? If so, why was there a need to have a General Strike in 1926? Similarly, if you remember the 1960s they say you weren't there, but I'd wager for most people, the 1960s actually happened somewhere else, probably in London. Psychedelia and Hippy were all very well, but they were hardly that widespread.
But I digress.
The thing is that statues don't generally have any reflection on what people actually did in their lives, but what they're perceived to be. That's what makes them so tricky, because perception is very much in the eye of the beholder. The question, in my mind, isn't who's statue should we demolish next, but why have statue of people anyway? Much like awards, where naming them after actual people invites the slight problem of none of us being perfect either. Returning to Mr Colston, I'm sure that the people who lobbied, and paid for, the statue of him were impressed by his philanthropy and his hard work. The source of his wealth was presumably airbrushed out of the picture, and he was simply 'a merchant', and one of the Empire's sources of wealth and power. How many of the people we laud today will be treated the same way in the future? I imagine most of them. After all, even on the 'goodies' side there are questions about how fit some of them are to be commemorated that way.
Even putting Churchill aside, there are figures like Emmeline Pankhurst, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Pepys. Pepys, I draw attention to because was a member of the same company as Colston, the Royal African Company, and therefore, if we are seeing things in purely monochrome shades, must be tarred by the same brush. Newton, from the same period, spent more time on Alchemy than Gravity, and such arcane nonsense surely has no place in a modern Britain - we might as well erect statues to John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's sorcerer, or Aleister Crowley because he invented the V for Victory symbol. As for Pankhurst, quite apart from the fact that we have obfuscated much of the struggle for democracy in this country, and that its ahistorical to focus on the Suffragettes, the woman was a warmonger, handing out white feathers to men reluctant to join the army during the Great War (1914-1918). How can we, in good conscience, support that, or her disowning her daughters because they failed to conform to her Victorian values?
Unfortunately, all the other figures from history suffer from similar failings. Florence Nightingale was a bully, Queen Elizabeth supported piracy and signed off on the colonies that would one day become the founding states of the USA. Without that, there would have been no British slave trade in the first place. So, how we can celebrate her? Should we celebrate King Richard the Lionheart, who spoke no English, and bankrupted the country with his wars, and that's before we mention that he was fighting Muslims so could have been guilty of Islamophobia? The Victorians thought so, but they thought it appropriate to raise a statue of a slave trader.
The point I'm making is that nobody is perfect, and its hard to know where to draw the line. It reflects the values of the age that builds the statue in the first place. Our values are very different from those of our ancestors, particularly those of the Victorian eras. Where we do have something in common is that our values, as theirs' were, are unshakeable. We deal, as I said above, in the pantomime of goodies and baddies, not the muck of real life. And we have two choices. Either we grab the reality of life and accept that people are more than one thing, or we stop having statues of people at all, and just have abstract sculptures and statues of cute animals. Personally, I'd be happy with the latter compromise and look forward to seeing stone kittens and puppies looking down from every plinth.
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