Ancestors to be Ashamed of

Though I'm sure it wasn't amusing to his creditors, who ended up seriously out of pocket, I

copyright National Portrait Gallery, London

found the story of Alfred Bond's bankruptcy weirdly endearing. I was pleased that he found another wealthy wife and lived out his days in luxury.  

Alfred's first wife, Georgianna Eliza Tharp, had the good sense to die shortly before his financial woes caught up with him. He'd been fortunate in that marriage too, because her family were very wealthy indeed. They lived on an estate called Chippenham Park, near Newmarket.

Unlike my other ancestors, who are sometimes only recorded in church records of their baptisms, marriages and burials, the Tharps are exceedingly well documented, and there are two reasons for this. One is that they were stinking rich -- they married into other wealthy families and made frequent appearances in the news and society pages of the papers. The second is that they were exceedingly litigious, and records of their various court cases are preserved in the Cambridgeshire County Archives in Ely. 

Because they were well-documented, it was easy to find out that Georgianna's father was Joseph Sidney Tharp (1797-1875), whose father was John Tharp (1770-1851). His father was another John Tharp (1744-1804) and that John Tharp made his fortune from sugar, grown on 10 plantations that he owned in Jamaica. It didn't take a genius to know what that meant. The links from their names are to the UCL Legacies of Slavery Site, which shows that the younger John Tharp claimed compensation for 2375 enslaved people when slavery was abolished. Although one of his smaller claims was disallowed, a total of £48,108 0s and 8d was awarded in compensation. According to the Measuring Worth datasets, this would be equivalent to about £62m today.

This was a horrifying discovery. I'd always felt that my ancestors weren't implicated in the evils of British history because they were mostly Birmingham factory workers or agricultural labourers in obscure parts of Warwickshire, Ireland and Scotland. They were, I believed, too busy scraping a living to exploit anyone else. This was, of course, horribly naive but I'll come on to that. 

After I'd got past the initial nausea, I started trying to tell myself that since one of Georgianna's children had abandoned my great grandmother, our branch of the family were sort of off the hook. Wasn't Christine another victim, after all? She certainly didn't benefit from any of the proceeds of slavery.

But, of course, that's all nonsense, and the more I read about slavery and its legacies, the harder it was to maintain the fiction that it had nothing to do with me. Every single person who lives in Britain or has British heritage has benefitted from the money generated by slavery in the Caribbean. That's not even a controversial statement. Money from slavery was invested in industrial developments and improvements to roads, canals and railways. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without it. Many hospitals, museums, art galleries and universities received donations from slave-owners of money and artifacts. Slave-owners and their descendants donated to churches and to local and national charities all around the country. The proceeds of slavery also paid for country houses and estates, many of which now have lovely tea-rooms. The slave colonies boosted shipping, increasing trade and funding the expansion of the British Empire, and the taxes that were collected on imported sugar or charged as death duties have flowed into government coffers to fund all the good and bad things that our governments have done ever since. Between 1948 and 1971, over half a million people, known as the Windrush Generation, left the Caribbean for better opportunities in the UK, where they made invaluable contributions to rebuilding the post-war economy and working in public services such as the NHS. Slavery and its consequences made Britain richer and improved the lives of all British people to the present day.

That wealth was extracted from people in Africa and the Caribbean who were kidnapped, held prisoner, tortured, raped and exploited. Slavery was a crime against humanity, and this is only now beginning to be acknowledged in any meaningful sense by the states and descendants of the perpetrators. The Caribbean Reparation Commission has set out a ten point plan for reconciliation, truth and justice for the victims of slavery and their descendants. If you think it's all about money, take a look at their website.

My current position is that no-one is responsible for the actions of their ancestors or for things that happened before they were born. However, we do share in the shame of their actions if we defend, minimise or refuse to acknowledge them. It also seems to me an inevitable result of understanding what was done would be a desire to do something about the continuing consequences, in discussion with those who are still affected by them. It's a process, not a gesture. For now -- although this whole thing isn't about making me feel better -- I do think I have a responsibility to understand  and to make known what my ancestor, John Tharp, did. Watch this space.

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