We need Mary Seacole as well as Queen Mary, The Times, 11th January 2013.
Apart from learning our dates, let’s also know that Henry VIII had a black trumpeter
One of the party slogans in Nineteen Eighty-Four is: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The latest skirmish over control of the past is whether black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano should be dropped from the history curriculum.
The Education Secretary wants to give children “the opportunity to hear our island story”. So in the name of traditional history, out go Seacole and Equiano. Jesse Jackson, with a host of other left-wing names, claimed in a letter to The Times this week that to remove them from the curriculum was “historically and culturally incorrect”. A more extreme voice suggested that Michael Gove’s desire to see children learning the names and dates of the kings and queens of England was as outmoded as “fagging and Latin”.
Traditional history v black history; “great men” history v social history; chronology v themes — the dividing lines have become so sterile. I love swashbuckling history — I grew up with Our Island Story, Ladybird books, and even benefited from learning Latin; and yet at university I ended up researching the place of Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain.
There does not have to be a contradiction between the two. We need Seacole, but we also need Cromwell. After all, it was during his rule that the English invaded Jamaica in 1655. Were it not for Cromwell, Seacole’s Scottish father and Jamaican mother might never have met.
The real question is: “What is British history?” Or more simply: “Who are we?” The 2011 Census showed the face of Britain is changing: white British people are now a minority in London, Leicester, Luton and Slough. However, immigration is nothing new. Hundreds of Africans lived in Tudor England and their lives were often closely entwined with the traditional figures. Henry VIII employed a black trumpeter named John Blanke. Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh had African servants. But there were also independent men such as Reasonabel Blackman, a silkweaver from Southwark. Those learning about Sir Francis Drake could hear the story of his alliance with Maroons to capture the Spanish silver train in Panama in 1573, and that there were at least four Africans on his ship during his circumnavigation of 1577-80.
By 1764 The Gentleman’s Magazine estimated there were 20,000 black servants in London. And some were fairly well-to-do. The Somerset case ruling in 1772, that it was unlawful to transport an African forcibly out of England, was celebrated at a public house in Westminster by some 200 black men and their ladies, who could afford a ticket price of five shillings.
However, for these facts to make sense you still need a strong sense of chronology. Dates are the bare bones on which we hang the juicy bits of history. So we need to know who ruled when, but we also need to retell the story of our island, taking the new perspectives of Britons of all skin colours into account. If you imagine that the first Africans came to England with the Empire Windrush in 1948, your attitude will be quite different from that of someone who knows that there were Libyans in the Roman Army stationed at Hadrian’s Wall.
To be “insular” can mean to be cut off from the rest of the world, but the histories of most islands are stories of comings and goings, of invaders and immigrants. The story of our island is one of these. Seacole’s arrival here from Jamaica via the Crimea, and Equiano’s from Africa via America, are not only part of the history of immigration, but also a consequence of the exploits of Govean great men such as Cromwell and Drake. Let’s teach children about both aspects of this history.
Dr Miranda Kaufmann researched Africans in Britain 1500-1640 at Christ Church, Oxford
One of the party slogans in Nineteen Eighty-Four is: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The latest skirmish over control of the past is whether black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano should be dropped from the history curriculum.
The Education Secretary wants to give children “the opportunity to hear our island story”. So in the name of traditional history, out go Seacole and Equiano. Jesse Jackson, with a host of other left-wing names, claimed in a letter to The Times this week that to remove them from the curriculum was “historically and culturally incorrect”. A more extreme voice suggested that Michael Gove’s desire to see children learning the names and dates of the kings and queens of England was as outmoded as “fagging and Latin”.
Traditional history v black history; “great men” history v social history; chronology v themes — the dividing lines have become so sterile. I love swashbuckling history — I grew up with Our Island Story, Ladybird books, and even benefited from learning Latin; and yet at university I ended up researching the place of Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain.
There does not have to be a contradiction between the two. We need Seacole, but we also need Cromwell. After all, it was during his rule that the English invaded Jamaica in 1655. Were it not for Cromwell, Seacole’s Scottish father and Jamaican mother might never have met.
The real question is: “What is British history?” Or more simply: “Who are we?” The 2011 Census showed the face of Britain is changing: white British people are now a minority in London, Leicester, Luton and Slough. However, immigration is nothing new. Hundreds of Africans lived in Tudor England and their lives were often closely entwined with the traditional figures. Henry VIII employed a black trumpeter named John Blanke. Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh had African servants. But there were also independent men such as Reasonabel Blackman, a silkweaver from Southwark. Those learning about Sir Francis Drake could hear the story of his alliance with Maroons to capture the Spanish silver train in Panama in 1573, and that there were at least four Africans on his ship during his circumnavigation of 1577-80.
By 1764 The Gentleman’s Magazine estimated there were 20,000 black servants in London. And some were fairly well-to-do. The Somerset case ruling in 1772, that it was unlawful to transport an African forcibly out of England, was celebrated at a public house in Westminster by some 200 black men and their ladies, who could afford a ticket price of five shillings.
However, for these facts to make sense you still need a strong sense of chronology. Dates are the bare bones on which we hang the juicy bits of history. So we need to know who ruled when, but we also need to retell the story of our island, taking the new perspectives of Britons of all skin colours into account. If you imagine that the first Africans came to England with the Empire Windrush in 1948, your attitude will be quite different from that of someone who knows that there were Libyans in the Roman Army stationed at Hadrian’s Wall.
To be “insular” can mean to be cut off from the rest of the world, but the histories of most islands are stories of comings and goings, of invaders and immigrants. The story of our island is one of these. Seacole’s arrival here from Jamaica via the Crimea, and Equiano’s from Africa via America, are not only part of the history of immigration, but also a consequence of the exploits of Govean great men such as Cromwell and Drake. Let’s teach children about both aspects of this history.
Dr Miranda Kaufmann researched Africans in Britain 1500-1640 at Christ Church, Oxford