LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES

Jamaican-born Black revolutionary Robert Wedderburn, writing in ‘The Axe Laid to the Root’, his series of open agitational letters urging Caribbean slaves to revolt against their ‘owners’ in 1817, urged the slaves among who he had been born, to not only overthrow their masters, but to then keep hold of the land they worked. He pointed to the misery of the increasingly landless poor of England, as he had lived among them in London, as an example of the penury that loss of access to land and its resources could reduce them to.

“Above all, mind and keep possession of the land you now possess as slaves; for without that, freedom is not worth possessing; for if you once give up the possession of your lands, your oppressors will have power to starve you to death, through making laws for their own accommodation; which will force you to commit crimes in order to obtain subsistance; as the landholders in Europe are serving those that are disposessed of lands; for it is a fact, that thousands of families are now in a starving state; the prisons are full: humanity impells the executive power to withdraw the sentence of death on criminals, whilst the landholders, in fact, are surrounded with every necessary of life.”

Throughout ‘The Axe Laid to the Root’, Wedderburn explicitly and constantly linked between struggle against slavery & workers fight against rising and more and more triumphant power of capital in England. The misery of working. class poverty and the exploitation and abuse of the kidnapped Africans were the same struggle; the two could encourage each other towards a universal freedom.

‘By theft and Murder, They Took the Land’

Wedderburn echoes his mentor Thomas Spence,  for whom land and who controlled its use underlay every analysis of society and all proposals for making things juster.

At the time Spence and Wedderburn were writing, the Enclosure Acts were peaking; the low point of a process that took centuries, in which agricultural land was ‘enclosed’ and improved, to the benefit mostly of the wealthy and landowners, while hundreds of thousands or rural people mostly lost access to land its resources. Although 1000s resisted, through riot, campaign, petition, revolt and the courts, much of England’s rural land was enclosed. Many without land gravitated to cities and ended up as factory fodder for the Industrial Revolution.

200 years after Wedderburn tried to encourage the Axe to be Laid to the roots of slavery and oppression, the links between English land and who can access it, slavery and its legacy, wealth, power, continue to haunt the English landscape.

The owners of the large green spaces of Cirencester Park, Gloucestershire, have introduced a scheme to make anyone visiting the Park (bar some locals) pay to enter, starting from Friday 15th March. Entry has been free for centuries.

A mass trespass is planned for Sunday 17th March to protest the charges. On March 17th people will gather at the park, and won’t be paying. Instead they’ll be doing what people have always done: freely walking in a green spaces which are our common inheritance.

But how did the owners – the posh Bathurst family – get the land? Bought from cash raised by being early appetites of the transatlantic trade and sugar plantation ownership in the Caribbean. The founder of the family fortunes, Benjamin Bathurst, was a Tory Member of Parliament and statesman who made his wealth from his involvement in the slave trade through the Royal Africa Company and the East India Company.

The family later benefited hugely from the compensation scheme set up by the British government to buy slave owners off when slavery was abolished.

No slaves were compensated. UK tax payers were still patting off the compensation debt until 2015.

Like many wealthy beneficiaries of slavery, Bathurst laundered his reputation through philanthropy: in this case, by extending public access to the park in perpetuity. The park became a site of community: with myriad fêtes, festivals, dances & competitions taking place every year. Now, locals will be required to use a keycard to enter, and everyone else charged £4 to go for a walk.

The Bathursts have also raked in a fair whack from farm subsidies, a generous non-means tested benefit designed to ensure that owners of large tracts of land never go hungry.

And as more recent anti-racist protests show, the Bathursts have form for trying to prevent open space being accessed, particularly where crowds and racial justice is concerned.

Behind the Walls

We are reminded of the Drax family, also pioneers of the sugar and slave trades, whose massive estates in Dorset, and fingers in industrial development pies, owe a great deal to the spondulicks made in the slave trade, and who enclosed huge tracts of land in England while fighting to preserve the theft & exploitation of African bodies elsewhere.

In Dorset the 3-mile wall around family seat Charborough House, stretches like a massive overblown symbol of wealth defended by barriers.

Enclosure resisted by Dorset locals, just as Caribbean slaves launched uprising after uprising to free themselves (a constant resistance that played a large part in Britain’s decision that slavery was uneconomical to maintain).

The current Drax head honcho – Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, Conservative MP for South Dorset, still owns (along with more names than most of us have rooms in our homes) a plantation in Barbados once worked by slaves. Along with owning more of Dorset than any other individual. Not all of it behind his long wall.

His foreskinfather, John Samuel Wanley Sawbridge Erle-Drax (who ordered the wall built), was awarded £4293 in compensation (worth about £3 million today) for the 189 slaves the family owned in Barbados. By contrast, the slaves were obliged to undertake another six to twelve years of further service as unpaid ‘apprentices’.

Interestingly a number of old public rights of way run through the Charborough estate that in practice we have no access to.

Charborough has been trespassed on before in protest at the massive enclosure of land.

Why don’t we make trespasses on Charboroough and Cirencester Park permanent?

The interlocking estates of the rich litter the English landscape like gated vanity lawns. Only a few miles up the road from Charborough lies Fonthill Abbey, built by William Beckford, with wealth earned from slavery & plantations; his father of the same name was once called ‘ uncrowned king of Jamaica’ for the huge plantations he owned, and acted as chief of the pro-slave sugar lobby opposing abolition of the slave trade in the City.

The current Drax continues the political tradition of the family too – generation after generation of Tory MPs. In his case hard right, fighting hard to make Brexit a big business win, whipping up hate against migrants. Ironic, really, as his ancestors did so much to enable forced migration from Africa. His institute financial affairs set up to conceal wealth & loophole around his contravention of even the farcical parliamentary rules on disclosure.

In this Drax echoes his ancestors’ colonial comrade Beckford, a Lord mayor of London and powerful political operator, whose position as magistrate gave him huge influence in the London docks, helping ensure his Caribbean goods were safely and profitably landed, and also control over the working conditions of the coalheavers who unloaded the vital commodity of the age – coal. Beckford backed the vicious gangmasters who drove down the heavers’ wages, and armed the scabs who tried to break the 1768 River Strike.

The Bathursts and the Draxes are not outlying or usual cases; they are  examples typical of processes that took place all over the UK and the world. Colonialism, slavery and genocide abroad proved very profitable for some classes, and those profits were often ploughed into grand landed estates in Britain. Estates founded on violent expropriation, enjoyed off the sweat of impoverished labourers , and then enriched by enclosures that excluded the poor from access to land and its resources & denied them self sufficiency. Profits from both sources were also often used to fund innovation and factory expansion in the Industrial Revolution. Slave owners, landowners, mineowners – not just one class but often the same person.

Yea unto the Middle Ages – but continuing today…

When millions forced into cities, as enclosure bit, fought back against capitalist working conditions, long hours, enough to win time for leisure, when cheaper transport allowed them to travel back out of cities to wander the countryside, barriers were put up to stop them. Can’t have the plebs in the hills. And so they had to fight all over again for access, trespassing and battling for the right to roam.

A tussle that is ongoing. 92 years after ramblers wrestled keepers on Kinder, after Access Acts and campaigns, we still face the fundamentals: the land is owned by the descendants of those that took it from ancestors by force (some stole some of our ancestors  from THEIR lands by force) , and the land is kept in their hands by powerful lobbying, by money, by networks of influence, by still more force, by walls and fences.

Join the Cirencester trespass on March 17th if you can! But remember – there’s a landed estate built on enclosure and slavery-profiteering near you… spread the trespass! 

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Read more past tense writings on enclosure and open space

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Tomorrow on this blog – read about another intricate tale of slave profits, land acquisition and enclosure, this time in West London…