Down Off Your Pedestals
Slavery, Wealth and Statues in London – Part 1
Suddenly statues, the people they represent and the symbolic struggles they either depict or conceal are big news…
The dumping of a statue of slave-trading worthy Edward Colston into the dock in Bristol by Black Lives matter protestors has brought the issue of how historical figures are represented in public, what interests these monuments serve, and opened up discussions about whether these statues should be left where they are, removed to museums, or toppled.
Outrage has erupted at the protestors ‘erasing history’ – outrage usually expressed by people who either wilfully or ignorantly would rather obscure Britain’s central role in the horrific genocidal slave trade; for whom profits made from mass kidnapping and naked exploitation are fine (especially if some of it was later spent on charitable works), but people angrily demanding that Black people in the present not be murdered by police are transgressing the ‘ways things are done’.
Go through the ‘proper channels’, demonstrators are told (although campaigners have been trying to get Colston’s bronze moved through lobbying and debate for years, always blocked by powerful and wealthy interests).
Well, Colston is in the proper channel now…
The authorities plan to chase people they’ve identified as being involved in the toppling; it’s great to cheer as movements topple things, but lets not forget to support those who the state targets.
Local authorities, museums and institutions are hurrying to show their anti-racist credentials by removing some of these statues. Removing SYMBOLS of racism, slavery and oppression can, however, be an effective way of diverting a movement of rage and fire for justice, into a concentration on symbols, rather than reality. A smokescreen for a lack on concrete change behind the symbols. Changing the present and the future is the whole point of raising the past, exposing the history that the schoolbooks distort and the bronze and marble seeks to obscure: to paraphrase one campaigner “Destroying Racist Statues… we should be focussed on removing Racist Statutes…” (Stafford Scott)
The direct action of the Bristol protestors has pushed the question of racist monuments forward, though. Far from erasing history, it is engaging people with history and the continuing legacy of racism and Empire; on an exciting scale.
Given how much of the UK’s wealth and power derived from the slave trade, the money it generated and the seapower it helped build (leading to Empire) – there’s a lot of symbolism about. A lot of places, streets, named for slave-owners; a lot of buildings and institutions paid for by slave deaths. Many schools, galleries, museums enabled by charitable funds – funds from selling human beings. Lots of nice stonework and statuary representing the egos of these dealers in flesh.
Streets, squares, mansions, stations, all named by and for the particularly successful vampires of humanity.
Streets can be renamed; statues can be pulled down. It would be useful to have a proper conversation about commemoration in public art – who gets put up (overwhelmingly rich, powerful, white, male) – and who doesn’t.
Structural racism, continuing power in the world based on a history of colonial conquest and plunder of which slavery was not only integral but one of the founding principles – these will take longer to dismantle, and symbolic actions will no longer be enough. Nor will lip service from the institutions of power and control, from the corporations that continue to plunder the world, and from the lying cheating ruling castes that inherit the wealth created by slavery and maintain exploitation of human life for their profits (if organised more cunningly).
A world view that looks on British history with a rosy glow and dreams of empire, that tries to ignore the shiteness of its own life by identifying with the murder of ‘foreigners’, with a false sense of superiority of whiteness, will not be sustainable.
Tipping a piece of outdated bronze into a dock helps to bring these debates into focus; apart from being a brilliant grassroots response! – to the defence of Colston’s statue by racists, tory councillors, the Merchant Venturers (chaired by a CEO of a construction firm deeply implicated in blacklisting union activists). We don’t have to wait for ‘democratic’ bodies to fail to act – we can act ourselves, today.
In London too, there are lots of statues of questionable heritage; by definition most public statuary commemorates the powerful, the wealthy, the elites, the (almost all male) owners and landlords, CEOs and conquerors, politicians and warmongers.
Even if you JUST concentrate on those statues that depict slave-owners or slave-traders, there’s a few targets in the capital. (Though this station is in rapid flux; some of these may be gone or scheduled to be removed, by the time you read this!)
“A significant proportion of the individuals commemorated by public statues in London during the long eighteenth century had important links with the slave-trade or plantation slavery and that these links need to be unearthed, contextualised and made explicit.”
In London this is as true as anywhere. London’s massive part in the slave trade has often been underplayed in history.
Although Bristol and Liverpool’s connections to slavery are more well-known, London did play a huge role in the development of the slave trade, and City merchants profited hugely from trafficking in slaves and the plantations they worked.
From the earliest days city merchants invested heavily in the slave trade and in West Indies plantations, many making huge fortunes… A large proportion of London’s Lord Mayors, aldermen and sheriffs in the 17th and 18th centuries were involved, many being shareholders in the Royal African Company, which ran ships to Africa and slaves from there to the Caribbean.
City financiers also underwrote and financed much of the trade in other ports. By 1750 London merchants were handling about 75 percent of sugar imported into Europe, and much of the profits were ploughed back into plantations and slave trading. Many of today’s banks amassed huge wealth this way, including Barclays and Barings, but most of all the Bank of England. A huge and powerful West India lobby grew up in the City, forming political blocs in City government and parliament, which could pass measures favouring plantation owners economically and resisted abolition or reform of the plantation system and slave trade for decades. Profits from slavery and the sugar trade also played a substantial part in funding investment into Britain’s burgeoning industrial Revolution.
It was also the West India lobby whose pressure led to the building of East London’s West India Dock, secure, with its own police force, largely as a measure against the systematic mass theft by dockworkers and other Eastenders of sugar and other goods from ships moored in the open Thames. (A spin-off of this was the creation of the Thames River Police, who not only foreshadowed the Met, but were also involved in control and repression of the dockworkers who unloaded goods, attacking their attempts to organise for better conditions.)
“The actual buying and selling of slaves was only one of many ways to make money out of slavery. Fortunes were also reaped through shipping. Great sums grew from commission agencies supplying the growing population in the West Indies with a range of commodities from manacles to foodstuffs. Plantation owners bought their labour cheap and sold their sugar as, competitively as the market allowed. Despite fluctuations, profits were enormous. London merchants were foremost among those to profit from slavery. They were the upwardly mobile’ of the era and their lavish carriages, social gatherings, fashionable clothes and the constant attendance of their black slaves marked them out as newly rich. With titles added where possible, they became members of the landed gentry. Many bought safe seats in Parliament.”
Just some statues worth attention:
The statue of Robert Milligan – owner of 526 slaves on two Jamaica plantations – has already been removed from London’s docklands by agreement between the Canal and River Trust and Tower hamlets Council, after long local campaigning the Colston furore has already caused Milligan’s downfall.
But there’s many more. Here’s just a few statues, and other monuments:
Sir Robert Clayton (1629–1707), Merchant and banker; London Alderman and Sheriff; Knighted 1771, Lord Mayor for London (1679–80), President St. Thomas’s Hospital; depicted in the gold chain of a Chief Magistrate and dressed in magnificent robes.
This marble statue originally stood at the main gate of Old St Thomas’s; Hospital in Southwark; it’s now in a small garden south of the north wing of St Thomas’s later Lambeth Palace Rd site.
Clayton was one of London’s powerful early merchant bankers and an early governor of the Bank of England: this statue was apparently commissioned by the Governors of St Thomas’s Hospital after he gave £600 for the hospital’s rebuilding. At Christ’s Hospital a tablet still proclaims his virtues as Hospital President and Vice President of the ‘New Work House’, ‘citizen and Lord Mayor of London’, ‘a bountiful benefactor’, ‘just magistrate’ and a ‘brave defender of the Liberty and Religion’.
Clayton had longstanding connections with slavery. In 1659 he married Martha Trott, heiress of the London merchant Perient Trott, who traded in tobacco and who was a Director of the Somers Island Company, a chartered company formed for the colonisation of Bermuda. By 1667 Clayton too was listed as a director of this company. Within five years, Clayton had also obtained a place on the Court of Assistants (the management board) of the Royal African Company, which he held till 1681. During the 1680s he became well established as a factor in Bermuda at a time when the smuggling of slaves into the colony was rife. His influence in Bermuda was reportedly greater than that of the island’s Governor and in 1689 he was made a Commissioner of Customs.
Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1707) Physician, collector and writer; Member of the Royal College of Physicians, President of the Royal Society.
The original was moved from Chelsea Physic Garden (where there is now a replica) to the British Museum in 1985. Another replica stands in the centre of Sloane Square.
Author of The Natural History of Jamaica, Sloane is now best known as the founder of the British Museum and a President of the Royal Society. Yet his rise in London society was made possible by an astute marriage, in 1695, to a West Indian heiress. The daughter of the London Alderman John Langley, Elizabeth was a wealthy widow in her own right, having been previously married to the Jamaican sugar-plantation owner Fulk Rose. ‘The marriage was an advantageous one for Sloane, since his wife inherited not only her father’s estate but also one third of the income from her former husband’s properties in Jamaica.’ Sloane owned slaves and that financial dependence on slave-labour helped to underwrite his career as a ‘disinterested’ naturalist and medical man.
“Sloane spent 15 months in Jamaica in the late 1680s, a Jamaica increasingly devoted to slavery. During Sloane’s stay in Jamaica, the island had 40,000 slaves. Sloane’s views on race were often contradictory. He stood out among natural historians of his day in that he was willing to learn from people of colour, at least a little bit. He sometimes allowed that they could be worthwhile healers, though often dismissed them as ignorant and ineffectual. But he showed little evidence of a conscience plagued by the cruelties of slavery. He accommodated intimate access to female slaves by their white male masters. Always solicitous of his white patients, even when they were self-destructive, he generally accused slaves of faking their symptoms to avoid work. He despised “cunning” slave women who tried to abort their pregnancies and save their unborn children lives of bondage. He lived comfortably in a world where European planters ate prime cuts of beef and pork while their slaves subsisted on rotten meat and worms. Some slaves became so desperate and stressed that they resorted to eating soil.
From that time forward, the slave-farmed plantation system would line Sloane’s pockets. Given how much slave-plantation infrastructure enabled his collecting — and that of the people whose collections he later acquired — it’s undeniable that his natural history expertise and his collections owed their very existence to the slave trade.”
Sloane bequeathed his collection to the nation in his will and it became the founding collection of the British Museum – itself a repository for looted wealth grabbed from many nations and colonies around the world, often by military men in the course of their imperial adventures. A number of campaigns have been launched for the Museum to return these stolen artefacts to their original cultural homes…
Sir John Cass (1660–1718). Member of Carpenters Company and Skinners Company; MP for the City and Alderman of Portsoken Ward, 1710; Sheriff of London 1711; knighted 1712, MP for City of London 1899 replica of 1751 statue by Louis François Roubiliac (1702–1762). Façade of old Cass Foundation building, London Metropolitan University (ex Guildhall Univ.), Jewry St., EC3.
John Cass was also a Tory City Alderman, Sheriff of (then Member of Parliament for) the City of London. He was heavily involved in the slave-trade, being a member of the Royal African Company’s Court of Assistants from 1705 to 1708. The Company records show him (then ‘Colonel John Cass of Hackney’) to have been on their ‘committee of correspondence’ which directly dealt with slave-agents in the African forts and in the Caribbean. We know too that Cass retained shares in the Royal African Company until his death. Cass, like Clayton, also seems to have been linked by family and friends to colonial plantation interests, in his case to Virginia. Cass is still remembered as the founder of an educational charity.
Cass is also remembered in the name of Cassland Road in Hackney (the Cass family owned land round here), Also see Sir John Cass Hall, student halls in Well Street… He’s remembered in Cass Business School – Bunhill Row, EC1: funded by the Sir John Cass Foundation – though London Metropolitan University has been announced that the Cass name will be removed from its Art, Architecture and Design faculty, formerly the Sir John Cass School of Art (a result of the Colston toppling).
Thomas Guy (1645–1774) Member of the Stationers Company; Philanthropist in livery robe. Brass statue 1731–4 by Thomas Scheemakers (1691–1781).
There are two memorials to Guy at Guy’s Hospital
In the centre of the main entrance forecourt, Guy’s Hospital, St Thomas Street, SE1.
and In the chapel, Guy’s; Hospital, St Thomas Street, SE1.
Guy, the founder of Guy’s Hospital, was never a member of the Royal African Company – but he owned over £45,000 worth of South Sea Company shares – an exceptionally large stake in a company whose main purpose was to sell slaves to the Spanish Colonies. (He cleverly sold the shares at inflated prices shortly before the Company’s bubble famously burst (link). It was from this that Guy ‘made his vast fortune’.
The earlier is a bronze statue sculpted by Thomas Scheermakers and erected in 1734. A relief at its base shows Guy offering a helping hand to a semi-naked white man, seated, who represents London’s sick poor. This motif is repeated in the later John Bacon memorial of 1774, in the chapel at Guy’s. There the pose of the sick man is revised in a way which interestingly anticipates a non-racialized variant of the ‘standing soldier and the kneeling slave’ image used in abolitionist propaganda.
William Beckford (1709–70). MP for Shaftesbury 1747–54 and for City of London 1754–1770 1755 Sheriff of London 1761 MP for City of London Lord Mayor of London 1762, 1769 and 1770. Monument by J. F. Moore, commissioned after Beckford’s; death. Stands in the Guildhall, the City of London’s ‘town hall’, Basinghall St, London , EC2V 7HH
Beckford, twice Lord Mayor, was the free-spending son of a wealthy sugar planter and owed much of his position to his ownership of some 3,000 Africans enslaved on his numerous Jamaican plantations. This celebratory monument to him was put up in London’s Guildhall soon after his death in 1770, where he was extolled for his vigorous defence of the ‘City’s traditional liberties – it shows Beckford flanked by the allegorical figures of Britannia and Commerce and evokes the virile energy of a man who, as it happens, was notorious for his rakish lifestyle. The irony implicit in portraying a slaveholder as an upholder of civic liberty seems to have escaped the notice of his Guildhall associates, though his slave-holding was criticised in other quarters.
Beckford was known as the uncrowned king of Jamaica; the most powerful figure in a ‘West India Lobby’ that grew strong enough to guarantee it could win votes in parliament to pass laws that favoured the slave trade and plantation interests, and block attempts to legislate against aspect of the trade. He was also instrumental, in his role as a City magistrate, in the setting up of labouring gangs on the London docks that acted as scab labour, especially during the 1768 river strike. Power over the London dock workers and power in the West Indies were two halves of the same coin.
Statues of slave pioneers (and imperial heroes) Francis Drake, Robert Blake and Horatio Nelson.
- Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540 – 1596) was a pioneer of the slave trade making at least three royally sponsored trips to West Africa to kidnap Africans and sell them. Elizabeth I awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581 which he received on the Golden Hind in Deptford.
- Robert Blake (1598 – 1657) was an admiral who served under Oliver Cromwell throughout the English Civil War. He fought the Dutch to secure the trade triangle between the Caribbean, West Africa and England. Cromwell was responsible for trafficking the first waves of enslaved people to and from the Caribbean; installing the plantation system in Jamaica; and the massacres in Drogheda (1649).
- Horatio Nelson (1758 – 1805), was a naval flag officer whose leadership is credited with a number of decisive British victories, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars (1803 – 1815). Nelson spent a large part of his career in the Caribbean and developed an affinity with the slave owners there, using his influence to argue against the abolitionist movement in Britain.
- All three statues stand at Goldsmiths University’s Deptford Town Hall building, SE14 6AF, despite a student campaign for their removal.
Sir Henry De la Beche – name on front of Imperial College (old Royal School of Mines)
Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, , SW7 2AZ
Sir Henry De la Beche’s name is, among others, inscribed on the front of the geology dept at Imperial College. He was a slave owner who did his “seminal” geological work surveying his plantations, and was a vocal opposer of abolition. For over a year students have been trying to get a society at the college named after him to change too.
Robert Geffrye
The Museum of the Home, Kingsland Road, E2 8EA
Robert Geffrye was an eminent East India Merchant, another Lord mayor of London. His statute is located on the Museum of the Home (until recently called The Geffrye Museum), which is housed in former Almshouses built from money left in his will
Geffrye made his fortune with the East India Company (who carried out imperial atrocities for profit in Asia for centuries) and the Royal African Company, and used this money to build the Alms Houses that became the Museum of the Home. The East India Company used military force to seize control of trading in Asia: goods like spices, silk, and tea were plundered and imported to the European market. The Company later imposed murderous regimes in India which led to genocide and mass starvation.
We could also rename Colston Road in Mortlake
Colston Road, SW14 7NX
As many people across the country now know, Edward Colston was a slave trader who was head of the Royal African Company. During his time with the company, they transported an estimated 84,000 men, women and children. The names of these individuals are largely unknown today however, Colston’s name is memorialised throughout the UK. The statue in Bristol memorialising him was torn down yet there are other remnants of him around such as Colston Road in Mortlake.
PS” There are other racists, imperialists, eugenicists set in stone, some of which had hands in the slave trade. For example
Winston Churchill
Parliament Square.
Where do you start? Racist, fan of eugenics, hater of Indians, native peoples everywhere, He said that he hated Chinese people, with “slit eyes and pig tails… the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilised nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China – I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” To him, people from India were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.” This may have influenced his thinking when he agreed policies that caused mass famine in Bengal in the 1940s.
Churchill was of the view that British domination, in particular through the British Empire, was a result of social Darwinism. He had a hierarchical perspective of race, believing white people were most superior and black people the lowest forms of human. Churchill advocated against black or indigenous self-rule in Africa, Australia, the Americas and the Caribbean. He admitted that he “did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people.”
This is without even considering the large number of British people that Churchill hated – working class people, especially trade unionists, in particular. As Home Secretary he sent troops to repress South Wales striking miners, and threatened to bring machine guns into London to turn on striking train drivers. He did think that Britain needed a eugenics program to weed out the weak and inferior (including disabled and other races…) from the glorious national gene pool. His opposition to nazism was as opportunist in many ways as much of his political life: Churchill was also an avid admirer and follower of physicist Fredrick Lindemann, who regarded colonial subjects as “helots”, or slaves, whose only reason for existence was the service of racial superiors. Lindemann also supported scientific racism and mass lobotomies of Indians so that they would have “no thought of rebellion or votes, so that one would end up with a perfectly peaceable and permanent society, led by supermen and served by helots”.
We could always permanently restore the straitjacket mental health campaigners locked Winston in in 2004.
The Jan Smuts statue
Parliament square, SW1P 3JX
Jan Smuts was the instigator of segregation and apartheid in South Africa and is commemorated by a statue in Parliament Square, just across from the statue of Nelson Mandela, who devoted his life to tearing down the racist institutions Smuts built
Christopher Columbus
Belgrave Square Garden, Belgravia, London, SW1X 8PQ
Coloniser and slave trader. Abuser and exterminator of Native American indigenous communities.
Before his voyage to ‘discover’ two continents people by millions, Combus signed a contract promising the King and Queen of Spain rule over any lands he encountered and exploitation of their resources and people. In one particular note, he promised: “as much gold as they need and as many slaves as they ask.”
With an extensive arsenal of advanced weaponry/horses, Columbus and his men arrived on the islands that were later named Cuba and Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic / Haiti). Upon arrival, the sheer magnitude of gold, which was readily available, set into motion a relentless wave of murder, rape, pillaging, and slavery that would forever alter the course of human history.
A young, Catholic priest named Bartolomé de las Casas transcribed Columbus’ journals and later wrote about the violence he had witnessed. The fact that such crimes could potentially go unnoticed by future generations was deeply troubling to him. He expanded upon the extent of Columbus’s reign of terror within his multi-volume book entitled the “History of the Indies”:
“There were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over 3,000,000 people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.”
After his second voyage, Columbus personally sent back a consignment of natives to be sold as slaves.
Several statues of Columbus in the US have bit the dust this week…
The Lendy Memorial Lion
Pantiles Court, 79 St The Walled Garden Thames, Thames St, TW16 6AB
Memorial statue to remember two colonising brothers, Captain Edward August Lendy & Captain Charles Frederick Lendy, both responsible for murdering African tribes with machine gun fire in the 1890s.
Statue of Charles James Napier
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DX
Napier was a general who led the military occupation of the Indian province of Sindh (now in Pakistan) in 1843 on behalf of the East India Company and was its colonial governor until 1847. Napier provoked a war with local leaders in order to provide a pretext for the occupation. Approximately 10,000 Indians were killed in the conquest. Napier’s view of effective colonial rule is summed up in his comment that: “if you get hold of any chap plundering your camels try what a flogging will do; but hang the next and keep his body guarded a sufficient time to hinder his people touching it: that will make the execution more effective.” He admitted that economic gain was the only purpose of the colonial violence he perpetrated: “Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties was money.”
Statue of Robert Clive, Whitehall
King Charles St, Westminster, SW1A 2AQ
Clive looted India, and even if the profits of this hadn’t lined his own pockets, what he did was grotesque. His massive statue sits by the treasury. The statue was erected well after his death, and after the behaviour of Clive’s East India Company had been criticised widely in British society – even at the time. It was apparently pushed by Lord Curzon, who also presided over famine in India.
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This is barely a beginning. These are only the most obvious memorials – London is full of buildings, streets and institutions loaded with histories of exploitation. We can’t go back and alter that – but the past can be highlighted, discussed, laid bare, and names can be changed and monuments either demolished or moved to more suitable locations.
Two good sources for locations of statues, their meaning and symbolism:
Topple the Racists which has handy maps for all of the UK!
Set In Stone, Statues and Slavery in London
There’s also an article here on when a lot of these statues were put up in the UK and US (rarely in the era the racists commemorated lived in, often much later), suggesting some thoughts on the motives in their erection, the social context of inequality at THAT time… Shoring up white supremacy and re-inforcing current imperial colonial policies decades or centuries later by celebrating historical slavers and defenders of slavery. Public monuments were ALWAYS already reflecting the dominant ideas of the era when they went up – so it’s no surprise that whether they should stay up reflects the struggles and contested views of our own time.
There’s also lots of statues and monuments that haven’t yet been flagged up – but that a bit of digging would provide some evidence of very nasty links.
It’s not erasing history to draw attention to statues, memorials and street names that honour these wealthy men, or to point out where their wealth came from, and what that money created and contributed to.
Some investigate work has been and is being done… check out one website with some research into just one area, Croydon.
More info on UK individuals and institutions who owned slaves – not just who traded them and profited from this horror-industry – can be found at Legacies of British Slave-ownership
Colonial Countryside is also a great project – connecting young people with the colonialist past of Britain’s ‘great country houses’.
A couple of campaigns for statues to be erected we would flag up and support: for feminist pioneer Mary Wolstonecraft
and gay playwright Joe Orton
… but how about some statues commemorating some of the Black, Asian, migrant radicals who have helped shape the capital’s history: William Cuffay, Robert Wedderburn, Claudia Jones, Jayaben Desai, Olaudah Equiano, spring to mind off the top of my head… or proper memorials to the more than 1500 people who have been killed by police, or in police/prison custody in recent decades?
We might have to build them ourselves; rather than going through the ‘proper channels’.
Tomorrow – Slavery, Wealth and Statues in London, Part 2: ‘Uncrowned Kings’ – one small area of South East London, its links to slave trade and the wealth that it brought to the merchants who controlled it.
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For Entertainment Purposes Only:
Some Advice from an Egyptologist:
For ANYONE who might be interested in how to pull down an obelisk (which might be masquerading as a racist monument) safely, from an Egyptologist, who never ever in a million years thought this advice might come in handy
The key to pulling one down is letting gravity work for you. Chances are good the obelisk extends into the ground a bit, so you want to get CHAINS NOT ROPE (it’s 2020 AD not BC; let metal work for you) extended tightly around the top (below pointy bit) and 1/3 down forming circles;
For every 10 ft of monument, you’ll need 40+ people. So, say, a 20 ft tall monument, probably 60 people. You want strong rope attached to the chain—rope easier to hold onto versus chain. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE WEARING GLOVES FOR SAFETY; [not to mention fingerprints. Ed]
You probably want 150+ ft of rope x 2…you’ll want to be standing 30 feet away from obelisk so it won’t topple on you (safety! first!). This gives enough slack for everyone to hold on to rope, alternating left right left right. Here’s the hard part…pulling in unison;
You have two groups, one on one side, one opposite, for the rope beneath the pointy bit and the rope 1/3 down. You will need to PULL TOGETHER BACK AND FORTH. You want to create a rocking motion back and forth to ease the obelisk from its back;
I recommend a rhythmic song. YOU WILL NEED SOMEONE WITH A LOUDSPEAKER DIRECTING. There can be only one person yelling. Everyone will be alternating on rope left right left right not everyone on the same side. No one else near the obelisk! Safety first!
Start by a few practice pulls to get into it. Think of it like a paused tug of war, pull, wait 2, 3, 4, 5 PULL wait 2, 3 4,5. PULL AS ONE, PAUSE 5 SECONDS, you’ll notice some loosening, keep up the pattern…you may need more people, get everyone to pull!
Just keep pulling till there’s good rocking, there will be more and more and more tilting, you have to wait more for the obelisk to rock back and time it to pull when it’s coming to you. Don’t worry you’re close!
WATCH THAT SUMBITCH TOPPLE GET THE %^&* OUT OF THE WAY IT WILL SMASH RUN AWAY FROM DIRECTION. Then celebrate. Because #BlackLivesMatter
and good riddance to any obelisks pretending to be ancient Egyptian obelisks when they are in fact celebrating racism and white nationalism…
Here’s a rough schematic. I note this is experimental archaeology in action! Just my professional Hot Take and you may need more people, longer rope, etc. everything depends on monument size.
thanks @indyfromspace
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Other ways of subverting the myriad of place-names in London (or anywhere) that celebrate history’s bastards: you could print out nice new street names and road signs, measured nicely to fit nicely over the existing ones, with new names… Anarchist magazine Crowbar did this in the 1980s, printing up 4000 or so street signs reading Blair Peach Street, Cherry Groce Street, Cynthia Jarrett Street, in memory of people killed or maimed by racist police…
Our own statues, plaques and memorials… It can take time to go through the proper channels to get plaques put up, statues raised; but a bit of DIY spirit goes a long way. On radical walks in the past we have erected our own plaques guerilla style; but you could also talk to owners and tenants of buildings, see what they think about giving permission to a new memorial hung on the side of their gaff…
LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES 